The UK edition of my Philosophy in the Garden is out now.

It has a gorgeous new cover designed by Allison Colpoys, part of a matching set with the UK edition of The Art of Reading (both with Scribe UK).

My sixth picture book is also out now: My Dad is a Dragon.

It's a celebration of dads and their shenanigans, part of the award-winning series that began with My Nanna is a Ninja.

I never thought I'd be a children's author, and it has been a thrill to work with Peter Carnavas and the gang at UQP (especially Kristina Schulz), and a continuing joy to meet our readers.

After our earlier Melbourne launch (more on this in a moment), we launched My Dad is a Dragon in Hobart on Sunday 25th, and had a ball. Many thanks to all the kids, parents and carers who came along, and to Fuller's for being such champions of my work.

Also in August, the whole family took a driving trip to Melbourne. Yes: driving.

After a decade on foot, we travelled the length of Tasmania for the first time. We boarded the Spirit of Tasmania to Port Melbourne, then drove to Gippsland, Mont Albert, Healesville, back to the 'burbs, then over Bass Strait once again (well, the ferry captain drove--while our daughter threw up), then to Hobart once again after two events in Launceston.

I visited a bunch of bookshops in Melbourne city and suburbs, and signed copies of My Dad is a Dragon:

I launched My Dad is a Dragon at The Little Bookroom, where each of my picture books has first been sent into the world. Thanks once again to Leesa and the Bookroom gang for their enthusiasm for children's books in general, and my humble books in particular.

I also visited two schools and a library for CBCA Book Week. While in Melbourne, I spoke to the kids at Erasmus Primary about My Nanna is a Ninja, then ran a brief philosophy workshop.

After the ferry back to Tasmania (and having cleaned up our daughter and drank far too much coffee), we stopped in Launceston.

I read My Dad is a Dragon in the morning, then later Ruth and I spoke about our nonfiction books to the National Book Council of Tasmania: The Promise of Things and The Art of Reading. This was reported in The Examiner soon after.

And back in Hobart, I dropped into Brighton Primary, and spoke about writing with about three hundred and fifty students.

Many, many thanks to all the booksellers, teachers, librarians and readers we met--and thanks also to our children for making the most of those many miles.

In 2018, I wrote and recorded a new series of philosophy programs for ABC Radio National: "Philosophy Espresso".

It aired weekly on the popular Life Matters, and covered everything from the nature of philosophy itself, to video games, to love.

You can now listen to the full series here.

Listen out for the second series next year.

After five millennia, why are swords still so enchanting?

I attempt to answer this question in the latest issue of Meanjin magazine, out now. To read the full essay, do buy Meanjin 77 4 in all good bookshops or newsagents, or subscribe here.

‘Talk is for lovers, Merlin. I need the sword to be king.’ – Uther, in Excalibur

Wednesday night in Hobart. I shave with a Wilkinson Sword razor, then say goodbye to my daughter. She’s on a beanbag watching Suicide Squad, which features a possessed samurai sword in a supporting role. My son and I take an Uber, and hanging from the Hyundai’s rear vision mirror is a Sikh symbol: a double-edged straight sword, or khanda, alongside two smaller curved swords.

Not long after, we arrive at St James Hall, named for James the Apostle, executed by King Herod: ‘and he killed James the brother of John with the sword’. Then I buckle up my padded cotton gambeson, pull on my helmet, and pick up my equipment for the class: a basket-hilted backsword.

Some five thousand years after the earliest known swords were forged in Arslantepe, Turkey, we’re still celebrating this weapon. In my ordinary Tasmanian evening are nods to blades from classical Judaea, Gupta India, Muromachi Japan, Georgian England. Media franchises showcase swords: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean. Megatron from the original Transformers is a sentient Walther pistol—he still has a sword. Modern superheroes and supervillains fight with katana: Batman, Deadpool, Wolverine, Deathstroke. This is to say nothing of historical or pseudo-historical characters like the musketeers, samurai and ninja, Robin Hood, Conan the Barbarian. And manga or video games? Blades, everywhere.

Many of these stories do not merely portray swords—they celebrate them. Swords are pulled sensually from scabbards, the camera focusing on etched steel and filigree hilts. They pause in the light to gleam or drip blood; they make sensual sounds as they cut air or flesh (‘ssssssshing’, ‘ssssssshck’). The swords are often fetishised, too: given magical powers, or personalities of their own. Frodo’s Sting knows when goblins are near, the sword of Gryffindor helps those in its house, Katana’s Soultaker in Suicide Squad speaks to her.

So, swords are a thing. Still.

We live in an age of anti-aircraft lasers, electromagnetic railguns, rifle sights with ballistic computers. American drone pilots in New Mexico kill children over seven thousand miles away, in Afghanistan. Swords have almost no place on the modern battlefield—even bayonets are becoming rare. Meanwhile, gentlemen no longer wear the épée de cour. The sword is basically obsolete, yet it continues to engross and enchant moderns. Why?

I've been working on three novels (two for kids, one for adults), and preparing for my next two nonfiction books. So, aside from my recent UK tour, I've been keeping to myself quite a bit.

But this weekend I returned from a week aboard Russ the Story Bus. Russ is an old city bus, repainted outside with illustrations and refurbished inside with shelves and benches and such. It's basically a travelling library, with one small difference: the kids get to keep the book they choose. Amazing.

We travelled to six primary schools in New South Wales' southern highlands and Canberra: Aurora, Amaroo, Miles Franklin, Ainslie, Caroline Chisolm, and Bonython.

The events began with exploration: the kids boarded the bus, and spent anything from twenty to forty minutes browsing the shelves and reading quietly. Sometimes giggling. Something yelling "THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE" or "BOOKS ARE THE BEST" or "DAMON YOUNG IS THE COOLEST".

Then I told a few jokes, held a quiz, told them about writing, showed them how to draw my magician mum, then read to them.

It was an absolute delight. The look of Russ is enough to raise smiles: bright paintings by Sophie Beer all around. But when they learn it's full of books? And then they learn they get to keep one? Much whooping and bouncing.

Russ the Buss is also one part of a much bigger project: encouraging literacy. Having books at home is a huge part of reading regularly and well, and parents can't always afford retail prices. Russ gets books into kids' hands, and makes reading part of a special day.

An excellent initiative from Sydney Writers Festival. Thanks to everyone involved, from the SWF team in the office and on the buss, to the teachers involved, to all the kids.

I recently returned from the UK, where I did a quick tour for the The Art of Reading. ('Quick' being a loose word when intercontinental travel's concerned.)

With thanks to support from the Australia Council for the Arts and Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund, I was able to perform at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as well as some bookshops and libraries around England.

My trip began as all trips to the far north begin: with far too much travel and transit. In this case, it was thirty-five hours from door to door, Hobart to London. The tube was...not pleasant.

Coffee and cake at Bloomsbury's Syrup of Soot helped, but I still crashed.

When I was lucid again, I visited the nearby British Museum for the afternoon, exhausting myself by being giddily curious. My low-light photos are dodgy, but you'll get the gist of my medieval reveries: Prince of Wales two-handed sword, reliquary, Byzantine icon (after the iconoclasm), walrus ivory chess pieces, royal gold cup.

After two days at the museum--read: overcoming jetlag--I was off to my first gig, a talk at the Bookshop Kibworth, in Leicester. I spoke at the local library, which had been saved from closing (ugh) through the labours of local volunteers.

Then I was off to Norwich, where I spoke with the brilliant novelist Sarah Perry at The Book Hive. Sarah was (of course) fantastic, and the whole evening was very chill.

Next was a longer train trip to Edinburgh, for their big book shindig. I arrived just before my first gig, with crime writer Ian Rankin, chaired by Rachel Hosker.

The event was commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Edinburgh University Library building, and we spoke at great length about libraries, and their gifts to civilisation. Ian was a pleasure to speak with, and was generous enough to read aloud a passage from The Art of Reading.

Next was my reading workshop on Conan the Barbarian. This was perhaps the most enjoyable workshop I've ever run, and the participants--from Conan neophytes to veteran Crom-lovers--were magnificent. Alas, I didn't get any photos, but you can read part of my new Conan feature here. It features the below illustration by Tania Walker.

After my second gig, I dropped into the Golden Hare bookshop, which is gorgeous, filled with excellent books and humans. I signed some copies of The Art of Reading, and sold four on the spot to some very nice Canadian festival-goers.

My third Edinburgh gig was a conversation with Shaun Bythell, author of Diary of a Bookseller. Together with host Jenny Brown, we had enormous fun grousing about book-buyers, but also celebrating readers and reading.

After the event with Shaun, I dropped into MacDonald Armouries, an Edinburgh sword and knife smith. Paul was very generous with his time, and showed me his current commissions, as well as some ridiculously well-balanced basket-hilted swords from the eighteenth-century (yes, you read that right).

I also visited the National Museum of Scotland, and looked at...uh...more swords. This is the shield and silver basket-hilted backsword that belonged to Prince Charles Edward.

This was my first time to Edinburgh, and it's tough to get across how gorgeous the city is. Or, rather: to do justice to my enjoyment of its misty, rambling handsomeness. (And, look, if you ever need cashmere, they got cashmere.) You turn an ordinary corner on an ordinary street, and: hey, there's a castle standing majestically in fog.

Also, the coffee in Edinburgh was very good. The sushi too. Sorry, London.

After my final Edinburgh gig, I took a train to North Yorkshire. The market town Thirsk, to be precise. The home of All Creatures Great and Small's James Herriot, and the White Rose Books. A spoke to locals about reading, and we had a good chat about reading aloud with children (and one another).

And with that, I was done.

I then made my way south to London, took a day off for my birthday (and picked myself up a gift at Grosvenor Prints), met my European agent and UK publishers for lunch, then spent a stupid amount of time being dehydrated in a flying box with diseased strangers.

Oh, and I bought books. Of course. (Except The Eastern Curlew, which was waiting for me in Hobart).

What is best in life?

To crush your deadlines. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of the haters.

I've a new essay in the latest edition of Island magazine (#154), on Conan the Barbarian. I explore the history and meaning of this savage modern hero, and speculate on why I'm so into him.

I'm especially chuffed by this feature, as I commissioned Hobart artist Tania Walker to illustrate it for me. By Crom, her artwork slays.

You can buy a copy Island magazine in bookshops, newsagents or online. Or just subscribe for literary goodness delivered right to your door.

Want to read the beginning of the essay? Sure, here you go.

In my first few weeks in Hobart, I took up swordfighting. Circumstances were not ideal. My hand was bandaged, after I cut my pinky with a pocket knife opening cardboard boxes. I ached from sleeping on a sofa mattress. And I had nowhere to store my equipment, keeping my leather gloves and plastic armour in yet another cardboard box. Still, it was an adventure. My introduction to the city coincided with my introduction to Elizabethan cuts, dodges and parries.

This archaic play was chiefly out of curiosity. As the editor of Philosophy and the Martial Arts, I was keen to try new violence. It also compensated for my hermetic bent, getting me out of the house in a new city. But there was one last lure, which had my hand in the sword’s basket-hilt: Conan the barbarian.

In the past year, I have read more pages of Conan that I have of Plato, Kant and Heidegger put together. This is partly because the Conan mythos includes many authors, writing over eight decades in short stories, novels and comics. It is an enormous legacy. Robert E. Howard’s archaic pulp is also a supersized snack that offers little bone or fibre to chew on—it is pure flavour, which I swallow with ease.

Still, Conan is obviously answering to some needs in me. No one shelves thirteen thick volumes of Savage Sword of Conan without some itch being scratched. Why the barbarian?

“Reading for pleasure” is a less helpful explanation than it seems. In this, pleasure is merely not utility. The university textbook, the company memorandum, the slush pile manuscript—we turn these pages because we have to. They can offer joys, but they need not. They are the means to some end, whereas the end of reading for pleasure is in the reading itself. Fair enough.

But enjoyment is as plural as taste. Witness: I have read Kant for pleasure, for the joy of exercising my intellect. In fact, this is David Hume’s very definition of love of learning: flexing mental muscles, enjoyably. My shelves are full of such varied gratifications. James Boswell’s deluded candour, Maggie Nelson’s strained silences, Melissa Harrison’s eye for the domestic wild, Ken Liu’s cuts in humanity’s edges—I get my kicks miscellaneously. Put simply, pleasure is complex, and the phrase “reading for pleasure” is falsely simple. To better understand my cleaving to Conan, I first must introduce his specific character and world.

Conan is a barbarian, a word the Greeks used for foreigners—barbaros was a gobbledegook noise. It was originally used with goodwill, but eventually grew to become a slur—perhaps after the Persian War. By the time it appeared in English during the sixteenth-century, it kept its dual Hellenic meanings: alien others, and sometimes lesser ones.

Importantly, the barbarian is not a ‘savage’; not one of the African or North American tribes seen by Howard as more beasts than human beings. He is no cannibal. But he is nonetheless outside civil life: primal, animalistic, brutal. Hardened by want, while city folk are softened by luxury, he is exactly what we are not. In “Beyond the Black River”, Howard writes that ‘barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural.’ In other words, this outsider is the original human being, with all this suggests. The real, the genuine, the most perfect. Yet almost every one of Howard’s fictional comrades, villains, and lovers is civilised—as are we readers. So the barbarian is the exotic, exciting exception and the authentic.

Conan himself is an exemplary barbarian: crude in his tastes, wild in his temper, predatory in his instincts. In his eyes are ‘pristine images and half-embodied memories, shadows from Life’s dawn’. He fumes and lusts as his mood takes him, and is known for his brooding stare and loud laughter. His credo is well put in “The Queen of the Black Coast”: ‘I live, I burn with life, I slay, and am content.’

As English Literature scholar Christopher Dowd points out in New Hibernia Review, Conan is something of an Irish stereotype—only the caricature is laudatory not derogatory. He is a liquored-up pants man, who swings between sullen silence and rage. This was part of Howard’s invented identity as an Irishman, despite the Texan having almost nothing to do with the home country or diasporas. Howard saw himself as the heir of a long, noble tradition of Irish pluck and ire, and he shaped his hero with this mould. In this, Conan is named for an ancient Old World king, but he is a New World fiction: of primitive Hibernian potency, appetite, volatility, and shrewdness.

In early May I was in my old home town Melbourne, for Jewish Book Week. It was a full house in the town hall, and I gave my extremely serious talk: 'The World According to Batman'. It began like this:

"Aristotle said death was the most frightening thing. Aristotle had not met Batman."

As you can see below, I looked very sober and sombre--until I tore open my coat to reveal my bright Batman t-shirt.

I also visited several high schools to talk about distraction, gave a workshop on My Mum is a Magician, and signed books across Melbourne's shops. (Yes, I had a beard. No, I won't again for some years.)

Back in Hobart last month, I visited Fullers to entertain the kids. We did a quiz, drawing lesson, and a reading of My Mum is a Magician. In the photo below, I'm shouting "Geronimo!" As one does.

I also spoke to ABC Hobart about My Mum is a Magician, and detailed our recent storm damage.

Aside from these events, I've been writing: two novels (one for adults, one for children), a philosophy series for ABC Radio National, proposals for three new nonfiction books, and my sixth picture book.

Next month I'm off to Edinburgh International Book Festival, and a tour of Scottish and English bookshops for The Art of Reading. Later in the year I'll be travelling nationally for a school tour and philosophy conference.

Oh, and I just added the cover of the Chinese translation of How to Think About Exercise.

Finally, I have to show off my most recent swordfighting purchase: a demi-gauntlet (a glove with wrist armour), which fits over my vambrace (forearm armour). This stops my fingers, wrist, forearm and elbow from being damaged during bouts.

So, The Art of Reading was just released in the USA, by Scribe.

There's an extract on Lithub, that glorious cache of curated literary glory.

In case you missed them, there's a review in Kirkus and a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. In fact, The Art of Reading was one of PW's Books of the Week.

You can also read an essay on Albert Camus and our hunger for reading at the famous Powell's Books in Portland.

I recently had a piece in Fairfax's Domain property lift-out: 'Landlords, you provide a service and that requires minimum standards'.

I'm arguing that renting is a service, and those who make money from this service need to take their responsibilities seriously.

[B]eing a landlord is a job. It’s not a weirdly lucrative hobby or amateur sports betting pool. Landlords ought to treat it as a form of employment, which requires minimum standards of thought, effort, and ethics. Obviously there’s no ongoing tradition of vocational identity here, akin to medicine or the older disciplines of academia. To become a landlord isn’t to join a guild or association in any meaningful sense, with explicit rights and duties. Nonetheless, some basic familiarity with local laws, and reflection on one’s moral obligations, is an excellent start.

‘I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.’ So said Donald Trump, who never runs.

Trump was speaking to United States governors about the recent Florida school shooting, and criticised the deputy who refused to enter the school. No doubt the officer was terrified—those who have entered such crime scenes certainly are. And rightly so. Rifles like the AR-15 used at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are highly destructive military-style weapons. They not only have a far greater range and penetration power than the deputy’s standard pistol, but also cause far greater wounds.

In short, Deputy Scot Peterson had every reason to be afraid of the shooter, as did his colleagues. This does not excuse his inaction, or the inaction of the FBI and local sheriff’s department. Instead, it highlights the extreme danger of the scenario: even trained, armed officers are unwilling and sometimes unable to respond immediately.

What interests me here is, first, Trump’s willingness to believe he would’ve braved this danger. And second, his willingness to say this publicly, to millions of citizens.

To begin, Trump would not have ‘run in there’ to confront Nikolas Cruz, or help victims. Most obviously, because he is a corruptnarcissist, who personifies ‘selfish, unempathetic preening’. If there is a list of likely civilian first responders, Trump is not on it. This is also because, even if Trump were a generous, community-minded helper—an enormous “if”—he might still freeze up under fire. This is because, despite the popularity of the “fight or flight” idea, often we’re simply paralysed by serious threats.

So, even with goodwill, intervention in a massacre is extraordinarily difficult—and the US President has little goodwill.

So, Trump’s statement to the governors is a fantasy: a flattering version of reality, in which the President is far better than he really is. Obviously, this describes his whole presidency and official White House press. It is an administration of unusually prominent deceit.

But these kinds of fancies are actually quite common. Not simply for other American conservatives, but for ordinary citizens.

Take the martial arts, which also offer opportunities for courage or cowardice. While death is rarely a threat, these arts nonetheless cause pain and prompt fear (if done well). I’m familiar with a few empty-handed styles, as well as a couple of weapon arts. I’m well aware of my shortcomings as a fighter: over the decades, I’ve been (literally) beaten by many different people, in many different ways. Put another way, I’m competent enough to recognise my incompetence.

And yet: when I first imagine a fight, I still see myself doing exactly what I want to do. I have an illusion of my own talent and stamina. Yes, I know that many of my techniques will fail; that I’ll be exhausted more quickly than I want; that my tactics will be clumsy, and my strategies simplistic. I can use metacognition to catch my errors. But my imagination is egotistical. This is because consciousness is not a see-through screen, but, as philosopher Iris Murdoch put it, ‘a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain.’ Its default is distortion, which takes constant labour to undo.

In short, we often overestimate our own excellence, and underestimate our crapness. Not simply because we are too ignorant to know our ignorance, but because the psyche devotes a great deal of energy to protecting itself.

The point is this: Trump, with his action hero fantasies (and the rest), is an extreme version of everyday delusion. In other words, the President is the worst of us. (Well, duh, you say.)

But Trump is also a leader; an ideal of American success. And his fantasy life encourages the fantasies of others. If they want to believe in their own superiority to people of colour; in the bourgeois dream of hard work and wealth; in American exceptionalism; and, of course, in the glory of vigilantism—well, Trump is there to give the ‘cloud of…fantastic reverie’ another puff of smoke. The President gives folks permission to simply make stuff up, while telling these same folks that scientists and journalists are the ones making stuff up.

Some of these are lies, others are part of the same illusion: that Trump is always the most wealthy, the most virtuous, the most powerful man—and his overwhelmingly older, white and wealthier followers are lit by this same glow. And, surprise, surprise: many of these are gun owners, who falsely associate gun ownership with personal safety.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, telling the world that he’d run into a shooting. Ladies and gentlemen, the man knows his base. He's selling them a diluted version of the Kool-Aid he himself chugs: delusions of easy competence.

Ahead of the US release next month, there's a review of The Art of Reading in Kirkus Reviews.

Young (How to Think About Exercise, 2014, etc.) offers a useful, erudite, and often arresting survey of philosophical thought featuring both renowned figures in the discipline (Plato, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Schopenhauer) and those less well known, as well as penetrating takes on novelists Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry James, and others.

You can read the whole review here.

The former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce recently lamented his lot. In a high profile newspaper report.

He joins a long line of powerful people--usually men--complaining how hard done by they are. And using their power to do so.

I wrote something for Meanjin on this, playing the victim.

The spectacle of Barnaby Joyce draped in a tea towel, lamenting his family’s stressors, prompted charges of ‘playing the victim’. And his resignation press conference too, with its air of disgruntled injury.

Sure, if anyone has been playing the victim, it’s Joyce. The former Deputy Prime Minister gave glib housing advice, but happily took up free rental from a rich mate. Now he’s sad about moving home? (We’ve done it six times in my son’s short life.) Joyce was steadfastly against same-sex marriages, while philandering. Now he’s worried about stigma?

So, it’s safe to say that the new backbencher has indeed been playing the victim. But what exactly is so wrong with this?

There's a genre of newspaper and magazine story that's been annoying me for a while: the virtuous home buyer.

They scrimp and save and, in so doing, become a moral exemplar for the unwashed, unpropertied masses.

I've no problem with the hard work and austerity required to pay off a mortgage. My problem is the suggestion that everyone else isn't also working hard and living austerely; that there's a level playing field, in which some are just magically better at the game.

My latest for The Canberra Times:

A story is currently filling the weekend newspapers and real-estate lift-outs. A story of struggle, frugality and the entitlement that stems from these. A couple buy property. They work very hard, buy no-name groceries, never have coffee or dinner out – they're proud penny-pinchers. Perhaps avocado never touches their lips.

The problem with this portrait of virtuous acquisition isn't that the facts are false. Of course these families exist. Of course they need to scrimp and save to buy houses whose prices are appreciating faster than wages, in a market primed by tax incentives.

The problem is that this story is narrow and misleading. It uses one of our weaknesses – for a good yarn – to distort reality, and dresses up considerable privilege as morally pure hardship.

I'm on ABC RN this weekend, talking to Matthew Beard about parenting and vulnerability, which a few nods to Buddhism, Stoicism and the work of Martha Nussbaum.

You can listen here.

Watching politics, it's often difficult not to cringe.

Perhaps our most common political emotion is contempt or disgust--but embarrassment is familiar.

I wrote about this for the Canberra Times: 'Being embarrassed about Australian politics is a sign we care'.

There are many emotions that nations can evoke: pride, anger, disgust, perhaps even arousal. These happen at varying levels of abstraction, from vague stereotypes to specific policies. They can be prompted by leaders, cuisines, literature – from Putin's shirtless machismo, to Japan's twitching squid noodles, to Greece's Freedom and Death, by Nikos Kazantzakis.

I want to discuss political embarrassment at Australia. Not because this is the only, or most important, feeling my country provokes. Instead, it is because embarrassment is so rarely examined: a common but often taken-for-granted emotion.

Our political embarrassment might arise from a leader's cultural cringe – being a begging lapdog for the United States, for example – but it need not. It comes from a public transgression of custom, decorum, propriety and so on. To feel embarrassed is not be shamed – which is a moral emotion – but suffer a kind of public awkwardness.

Witness: it is shameful to become a voice of privileged xenophobic reaction; merely embarrassing to collapse a patio chair. It is shameful to back out of an emissions-trading scheme; merely embarrassing to get caught cry-ranting on video.

So, it turns out Barnaby Joyce is a cheat, in many ways. I wrote a little essay for Meanjin on him and his political class.

Let us not speak of Barnaby Joyce.

Let us not speak of a man who turned protection against HPV and cervical cancer into a ‘licence to be promiscuous’, demonstrating poor medical, psychological and moral reasoning. A man who defended ‘the current definition of marriage’ in parliament, ignoring not only John Howard’s recent changes to the law, but also that the de facto Australian definition is now wholly at odds with his own. A man who blundered in all these ways—and, we now know, so many more.

Let us not speak of Barnaby Joyce, then. Let us, instead, speak of hypocrites and the deluded: those who deceive others, or perhaps just themselves. Those who say one thing and do another, either because they are deceitful cynics, or because they are too foolish to see their own contradictions.

I was interviewed about my writing life by Madeleine Doré for Kill Your Darlings magazine. This is part of their new 'Extraordinary Routines' series.

Even at its best, writing is always precarious. To have the same success in almost any other field would give you a stable income and some degree of control, but in writing, even people who are doing quite well are doing badly next to other professions.

I think a lot of aspiring writers think, ‘Oh, it will be different for me.’ I think especially for young, male, white, middle class writers, there is a sense of entitlement there – they think, ‘Well that’s other people, but I’ll be the one who makes a living out of this.’

So it’s really important for anyone who aspires to being a writer to be accustomed to the fact that either they’ll need a day job – in which case they won’t be able to give their work the time they want to – or they’ll never have as much money as their friends who went into, say teaching, let alone some of the higher paid professions.

I think it’s important not to romanticise that relative poverty, because the important thing is to do good work and not be a shit – support fellow writers, give them opportunities when you can, be generous to readers, and be a generous reader yourself. That is what matters.

You can read the full interview here.

I've an essay in the latest The New Philosopher: "Thug Life".

It's about the unruly and seemingly unreasonable character of existence: how life itself is a bit thuggish.

In Phaedo and elsewhere, [Plato] argued that the body was a danger. The soul has wings, to use his metaphor, but the heavy flesh pulls it down. He was very worried about lust, and recommended celibacy for ‘self-mastery and inward peace’. But he was more generally concerned about our meat sacks, which threaten to leave our souls ‘tainted and impure’.

This is perhaps the most philosophical of conceits: the mind is clear and pure, and physicality is what muddles or muddies it. An “I” is a transparent gaze upon the world. The apex of this was René Descartes, who believed that the only certainty was his res cogitans: his thinking thing. All else might be doubted, but not the mind doubting. The impression is of a wholly see-through self, burdened with the opaque idiocy of skin and bone.

The chief problem with this idea is not that we are thinking things. The problem is that the thing part is not taken seriously. As Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, we are beings of ambiguity. We perceive, feel and think, but we are also stuff: objects alongside other objects. I am a free being, I also find myself ‘a thing crushed,’ she wrote, ‘by the dark weight of other things.’

This ambiguity continues within the psyche. The great dream of Plato was that, once the body was removed or revised, the mind would be emancipated. But the mind arises from the body, and it is shot through with fleshiness. Witness our philosophical metaphors: up, down, forward, backward, lightness, heaviness. Both Plato and Descartes used these to make sense of the world. As Lakoff and Johnson argue in Metaphors We Live By, we understand these tropes because our thinking is carnal.

This is to say nothing of minds full stop, which require physicality to exist. ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings… there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage,’ Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body.’ A clear mind is not one in which the body has been silenced or chastened. It is a body, thinking.

Put another way, to exist is not merely to be an “I”, ethereal and transcendent. As living things, each of us is also—an “it”.

Late last year, musician Kirk Pengilly lamented the loss of the "simple" nineteen sixties, when you could slap a woman's ass with impunity. My reply was just published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

"Life was simple," musician Kirk Pengilly said recently. He was speaking of the 1960s, when you could apparently smack a woman's bum without censure. It was taken as a "compliment", he explained, rather than as sexual harassment.

The media cycle has moved on, but Pengilly's sentiment is unfortunately still widely shared. It pays to examine this idea a little further. Some statements are such knots of idiocy and obliviousness, they almost become a public service: offering their fraying threads to be unravelled. Almost.

Most obviously, life was not simpler in the '60s. Looking only at Australia, domestic violence was largely ignored and sometimes encouraged. Marital rape was not a crime, but abortion was. Women were more financially dependent, and their work less secure. Those in the public service, for example, had to resign after marriage. Well into the '60s, women were banned from drinking (but not from working) in public bars.

This is to say nothing of our broader record on human rights and justice. For example, Indigenous Australians couldn't vote in federal elections until 1962 and Queensland didn't extend suffrage until 1965. Two years later, Australia finally counted Indigenous Australians in the census. During this period, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families. Abuses and deprivations worsened gender inequalities – and still do.

In April of this year, the US edition of The Art of Reading will be out. The first review is in, courtesy of Publishers Weekly. It's a starred review, which is nice.

Philosopher Young (Philosophy in the Garden) investigates the act of reading with essays on six virtues he sees exemplified by it—namely curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, and justice—in this brisk and delightful collection. Its short length belies a book heavy with insight, creativity, and wit. [...] This literary study is serious but also witty and fun—a tough balance to strike, but Young nails it.

You can read the whole review here.

(By the way, the photo is of the UK edition. The US edition will have a sexy new cover.)

Folks often insult Trump and other leaders for their stupidity. And understandably so.

But sometimes the slurs are misguided. They suggest that somehow being smart is the key to being good; that intelligence is automatically the morally superior position.

My latest Canberra Times piece takes this idea apart:

Donald Trump’s statements are routinely lambasted as stupid and ignorant. He is seen as the prince of idiocy and obliviousness. But local examples abound too—look at recent asylum seeker or marriage equality debates.

Trump is indeed unable to pursue basic arguments, and is demonstrably lacking in vital knowledge about his own brief. The New Yorker quoted one conservative advisor: ‘He seems as clueless today as he was on January 20th’. Closer to home, many leaders’ arguments are often absurdly bad. Witness Dutton’s description of pro bono representation of asylum seekers as ‘un-Australian’, or Katter’s bizarre discussion of crocodile deaths.

So, the problem with these accusations of weak rationality is not that they’re inaccurate. The problem is what we might call “the fallacy of inherent intellectual goodness”: the belief that enhanced cognition translates into improved morality. Put this way, perhaps it seems silly: a boffin’s conceit. But it is actually a common idea. In civilised debate and frothing rancour alike is the assumption that what really sets one apart from one’s opponents is intelligence and knowledge. The logic is this: if only they were as smart and informed as I am, they’d be good (like I am).

Sneaking in before the end of the year, there's a review of The Art of Reading in this weekend's Irish Times. Reviewer Andrew Gallix from 3AM magazine rightly notes some gaps in my work, then turns to the book's premise. A generous, observant analysis.

In the expository chapter Young navigates his way round the labyrinthine shelves of his own Library of Babel, travelling back and forth in time, both personal and historical. His early passion for Sherlock Holmes was shared by William Gibson, whose evocation leads – “[T]wo shelves under” him – to Orhan Pamuk’s reflections on childhood perusal and then on to Edith Wharton’s – “[T]wo rooms behind and one century before him” – and from thence to Rousseau, Sartre, de Beauvoir (close to the former “in [his] library as in life”) and so on. Taking in Batman as well as Heidegger, the breadth of reference is impressive, but never overbearing, thanks to the Australian philosopher’s lightness of touch, self-deprecating humour and endearing deployment of the word “bunkum”. Having traced a desire path through a lifetime of books, Young reflects upon six Aristotelian virtues (curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance and justice) that reading requires, exhibits or promotes.

The Art of Reading is not just another bibliomemoir; it is also a manifesto of sorts. The author shuns a utilitarian approach to his subject – regarded as “an end in itself” – summarily listing its ancillary benefits with a commendable degree of scepticism. After all, “bastards enjoy fiction too” and, as he cheekily points out, some of them are authors. His ambitious goal is to re-enchant an activity which, “cosmically speaking”, is very much “against the odds”. Reading, he laments, is grossly undervalued, its wonders all too soon forgotten.

For much of 2017 I was writing. Even more than usual.

Which is another way of saying: I was less visible. Family life juggled away, politics fumed and spat, and I arranged and rearranged glyphs.

Still, a few nice writerly things happened. Here are some of them.

The UK edition of The Art of Reading was released: in a special signed edition for Independent Bookshop Week, then generally a few months later. It's sexy and has a ribbon bookmark.

And here's The Art of Reading, under the arm of the French President, Emmanuel Macron.

My Brother is a Beastwas released: my fourth children's book. GREEN COVER. AGAIN.

My Sister is a Superhero won the ABIA children's book of the year, for small publishers.

I did some gigs at the Perth Writers Festival, including one on The Art of Reading (with Jane Smiley and Alberto Manguel). Here I am, holding forth.

The whole family tripped from Melbourne to Hobart, and Ruth and I did some gigs at Fuller's books. This was our reconnaissance mission for the big Hobart invasion (more later). Here I am, reading My Brother is a Beast to the kids.

I read my Men's Rights Activist Batman story at The Wheeler Centre. (One day it might be on video.)

My first children's novel was commissioned by UQP.

I collaborated with fashion designed Rioko Tega to create a philosopher's jacket: a functional, elegant coat (with a hood) that holds all of my writing stuff. Her works with Julie Koh are magnificent.

I also wrote two new children's picture books (one of which is coming out next year), a genre novel for adults, a couple of book chapters, and a bunch of essays for magazines and newspapers.

There were more gigs for the School of Life, Wheeler Centre, and other mobs, but that's enough. They're all here.

The really important thing: we moved to Hobart. Finally, after over a decade of procrastinating. I ADORE IT. (If you're interested, Ruth and I have written about moving for Island magazine, out now.)

Looking forward to more writing, speaking, ambling and noshing here next year.

I've a piece on the Meanjin magazine website, 'On Getting Off Screens'.

Basically, I'm weary of (perhaps well-meaning) advice to turn from screens to some magical "real world".

As the author of Distraction, you'd think I'd be dead against digital devices. That's certainly how I've been invited to be, on radio and television: the voice of curmudgeonly Ludditism. And I do have legitimate concerns.

But distraction is about value, not technology. Framing this as screens versus the "real world" is dodgy philosophically and psychologically. Screens offer bucketloads of value--in the right milieu, used in the right way.

To those condescending naysayers: mind your own minds.

I've a piece in today's Canberra Times: 'When politicians speak of 'mum and dad', they don't mean normal mums and dads'.

Obviously, this phrase has an important purpose: to remind citizens that investment and commerce are not purely corporate. It introduces a suburban, familial atmosphere into an otherwise mercantile landscape. You too, says the unspoken pitch, could become one of these petty bourgeois capitalists, enjoying modest rewards from modest investments.

But this purpose is usually cankered, because it obscures inequality, suffering and other social ills. The "mum and dad" phrase suggests benign domesticity and humble ambitions; it shifts focus to visions of well-meaning striving, where toil translates into deserved rewards. Reality is more fraught.

Rental income, for example, is usually a tool of the wealthy. Spruikers of its egalitarian effects tells us that three-quarters of landlords have incomes under $80,000.

Even if this were true, it would still be misleading. The median gross income for a single Australian is roughly $56,000, putting the average punter only a little closer to the magical $80,000 figure than they are to the full aged pension. More importantly, that $80,000 is after tax deductions, including those for negative gearing rental properties – their incomes are actually much higher.

Income itself is only part of the picture. Some landlords with low incomes are able to survive on their seemingly meagre cashflows because they have significant wealth. On paper they seem to be dinky-di battlers but actually they may have, as the ABC's Michael Janda put it, "several investment properties, and possibly have a substantial share portfolio or bank balance as well". They have the option to sell their assets at any time – an option the poor do not have.

I've an essay in the latest New Philosopher magazine, "A Commodified World".

I argue that consumerism isn't simply consuming, having too much, or being 'materialistic'. Instead, it's a very specific approach to the world.

[C]onsumerism can’t be defined simply as satisfying appetites, purchasing too much, or being fixated on junk. It’s better understood as a way of looking at the world and ourselves. In this picture, we are not citizens who happen to consume. We are consumers. Economic transactions are our way of relating to one another and the world. In other words, there is no such thing as society. There is a market, within which individuals compete and collude. Here, only exchange value makes sense: a symbolic worth, related to nothing other than other commodities. All beings ultimately exist insofar as they are saleable. And these beings, humans included, are not processes, connected in a complex universe. They are merely things: bits, specks, flecks.

You can pick up New Philosopher in bookshops and news agents, or subscribe here.

Recently some have accused the church or politicians of losing "moral authority" in the same-sex marriage debate.

But what is moral authority, and what does it mean to lack it? I explored this in today's Canberra Times:

[M]oral authority is better understood, at least in its modern sense, as a sign of seriousness; of commitment to ethical life. We listen to someone with integrity, not because they give us foolproof answers but because we know they are genuine about the debate itself. They care enough about the issue to conduct themselves conscientiously. Despite their many blind spots or fumblings, they demonstrate goodwill.

The loss of moral authority, in this light, is not an automatic loss of facts or logic. It is a loss of social standing. Specifically, those identified as hypocrites suddenly seem cynical. They do not really care about the issues they purport to champion. They are game-players, realpolitik agents, paid performers. (The word "hypocrite" comes from the classical Greek for "actor".) They may have all kinds of knowledge at their disposal – but it seems empty, because their commitment to the conversation is bent.

US police offers recently put the Punisher's skull logo on their cars. Yeah, that's right: law enforcement, openly celebrating a murderous vigilante.

I was so taken aback by this, I penned an essay for Meanjin magazine: 'The Punisher's Numb Rage'.

It looks, among other things, at the Punisher's real and fictional history, his appeal to the armed forces, and the troubling militarisation of policing.

You can buy Meanjin in bookshops or subscribe here. In the meantime, here's a short excerpt:

...the skeletal face is a warning: the Grim Reaper, Jolly Roger, Nazi Death’s Head (Totenkopf). It is a threat. In Solvay, New York and Catlettsburg, Kentucky, staff put this threat proudly on their squad cars.

Part of the Blue Lives Matter movement, which advocates for the safety of police, the stickers were supposed to celebrate law enforcement. The skulls told citizens that police ‘will stand between good and evil’. Yet this skull is the logo of a criminal. It decorates the chest of Marvel character Frank Castle, the Punisher: a vigilante, who uses his military training to terrify, torture and execute wrongdoers. In other words, the police were identifying with a murderer.

The Punisher was created in the year before I was born. He was a walk-on villain; a bit part to provide the hero with someone to overcome. Writer Gerry Conway wrote Castle for The Amazing Spider-Man #129, published in February 1974. He was simply an antagonist for the webslinger. His schtick: relentless killing.

Many mainstream Marvel superheroes merely knocked out or maimed their enemies. In fact, the death toll was surprisingly low in general, given the rampant conflict. This is part of what Ben Saunders, in Do the Gods Wear Capes?, calls ‘a comforting illusion of safety and control in a profoundly uncertain world.’ These comics were often more luchador fun than noir crime; more colourful spandex haymakers than crimson sprays.

But the Punisher was an assassin—in fact, this was his original moniker, before editor Stan Lee suggested the other. Frank Castle not only offered Spider-Man a physical challenge, he also highlighted the good guy’s virtue. Peter Parker snapped wire strong enough to hold ten men, yet stopped himself from ripping Castle to pieces. (From Spider-Man #1, 1962: ‘with great power there must also come—great responsibility!’)

The Punisher was never written to return, but his popularity with fans saw him paired with various Marvel characters over the next decade: Spider-Man again, Captain America, Daredevil, amongst others. In each case, he was the moral contrast: the maniac who killed, as against the principled hero. More importantly, he was also given a tragic backstory, which has endured over three decades. Castle was a decorated veteran, whose wife and two children were killed in a gang firefight. He dedicated himself to murdering the men responsible, then continued to slaughter all criminals: from street hustlers to Mafia dons. ‘I’ve got nothing to lose,’ he said to one target, ‘by risking what’s left of my life wiping your kind of parasite.’ (The target was Spider-Man.) Over the decades the wars shifted from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to Iraq and Afghanistan. But Castle’s brief was the same: kill all transgressors.

With his own mainstream series in the ‘eighties, the Punisher became ubiquitous: The Punisher, The Punisher War Journal, The Punisher War Zone, even The Punisher Armory, which showcased his weapons. The Frank Castle mythos was developed in this era. No longer a simplistic antagonist, he became an antihero in his own right: the righteous executioner, who never hurts civilians, and has few doubts about his mission. He pauses to fly a kite in Central Park to commemorate his loved ones, and has moments of tenderness and regret. But for the most part, Castle is a killer. ‘The Nam war vet who couldn’t protect his own family,’ he reflects in The Punisher War Journal #3. ‘Been taking it out on all criminals ever since.’ Witness the psychology: ultimately, this is more therapy than justice. He is purging the streets, yes—but chiefly to purge his own guilt and rage.

During the ‘seventies and ‘eighties, vigilantes were the perfect fantasy for audiences anxious about crime. There was some justification for these fears. The US Department of Justice reports that ‘the homicide rate doubled from the early 1960s to the late 1970s,’ peaking in 1980 and 1991. The causes of these spikes are still debated, alongside their portrayal in the media, but the fear was real. Many citizens were concerned about drug-related gang violence. This terror was often racial, with ‘crime’ almost synonymous with ‘black’ or ‘Latino’. While African-Americans are the victims of pervasive minority and state violence, the stereotype of the urban thug is authoritative. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates remembers his friend Prince, shot by police. ‘Prince was not killed by a single officer,’ he writes, ‘so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.’

In this sense, the Punisher’s fury was a straightforward response to some readers’ dread. Alongside movie franchises like The Executioner, The Exterminator and Death Wish, comics took the common superhero premise—good guy citizens battling bad guys, rather than awaiting authorised aid—and raised the stakes. Instead of simply pacifying felons for arrest, judgement and jail, they murdered them: the point was extermination, not detention. Importantly, and even in the courts, fear justified actual violence by civilians. In 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four African-American men in a Manhattan train carriage. He was lauded by many as a hero for standing up to the alleged muggers. ‘If I had more bullets,’ the electronics technician later told police, ‘I would have shot ‘em all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets.’ Now we have George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin, guilty of walking home with Skittles and iced tea—while black. (‘These assholes,’ Zimmerman said, ‘they always get away.’)

While often penned by liberal authors wary of fascist ideology, the Punisher of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties exemplified this way of thinking: a solitary soldier, solving complex, communal problems by simply slaying individuals. A charismatic purifier of streets, if not of blood and soil. And he rarely ran out of bullets.

I was recently reviewed and interviewed by UK journalist Sarah Ditum for In The Moment magazine.

It was an absolute corker of a conversation--Sarah was a pleasure to chat with. (In fact, there wasn't room in print for the whole rollicking discussion.) Here's an excerpt:

Taking a cynical view, a book about how to read books could sound like the ultimate in redundancy: if you can read it, you might reason, then you don't need it, and if you can't read it then it's definitely no good to you. After all, you know how to read. You probably learned in your first years at primary school, or even before. What more to it is there? Quite a lot, actually, and Damon Young's purpose in this elegant volume is to demonstrate just what an extraordinary thing it is to be a reader - and how much power we have to be even better at it.

Young is a philosopher by trade - and an honorary fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Australia - and his approach is strongly shaped by this background. He breaks the topic down into several "virtues" that he recommends we cultivate. There's curiosity, patience, courage and justice, which are perhaps self-explanatory; but also pride (yes, pride can be a virtue, when it means coming to a book with a full sense that you are its equal), and temperance - it's a relief to anyone who's worried they're not reading enough when Young confesses that binging on Star Trek novels didn't necessarily do him any good. From Virginia Woolf's elegant experimental novels to Frank Miller's comic books, Young's approach is omnivorous and inspiring. In 2016, he undertook an experiment of reading "no white dudes" for six months, and The Art of Reading is pleasingly ready to range outside the conventional canon of "great men" .

It's an encouragement both to spread your reading wings wider, and to have the confidence in your own judgement rather than allow 'capital-L' Literature to intimidate you. After all, as Young says, writing is just "dark marks on paper" until you make it mean something. There is no book without a reader.

The Art of Reading was recently reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement.

In 'Another Heart Beating', Jenny Hendrix considers my book alongside two others: Ann Hood's Morningstar and Michelle Kuo's Reading With Patrick.

An excerpt:

...to become a good reader is not that different from developing what used to be called “character”. As Young puts it, “Reading artfully requires a fragile poise between proclivities: thought and feeling, spontaneity and habit, deference and critique, haste and slowness, boldness and caution, commitment and detachment” – in other words, it asks for a balance of reason and desire, a kind of moderation. Like Aristotle, Young calls this balance “virtue” – in classical Greek arete or excellence – and he borrows Aristotle’s ethical paradigm to make sense of the requirements of the written word. In reading and in life, it would seem, excellence is that which enables the fullest expression of human nature. Young has selected six virtues that, in his view, books demand of us, and, drawing on a number of readers and writers who illuminate them, as well as on his own experience as a reader, and a field of reference so broad so to incorporate both Heidegger and Batman, attempts something like an ethical guide to the literary life. He has the kind of well-developed inner critic that these virtues support. In turn, he considers curiosity (delight in the movement of the intellect); patience (the ability to “bear ills”); courage (“avoiding the lust for control and conclusiveness”); pride (a pleasure in one’s own achievements); temperance (the balance of appetites); and justice (the ability to be a generous critic). In the end, justice encompasses all of these, and Young, his own inner critic well developed by the cultivation of such virtues, dubs it “excellence entire”.

Although he never uses the word, Young’s concept of justice relates to contemplation: a gift of attention, granting its object a sense of worth. Books acknowledge the worthiness of their subjects – but also that of their readers, which all books require…

I wrote a feature on our hunger for reading for The Independent in Ireland: 'A guide for hungry bibliophiles'.

Starting with the voracious literary appetites of Albert Camus, I discuss how we can eat well, so to speak.

Camus consumed words, and then digested their fantasies of comedy and heroism, metabolising them until they were him. His desire for life pushed him to fight, to hammer, to kick - and crack those cloth spines, with their scent of ink and glue.

When I picture my own boyhood and youth, it is, among other things, less savoury, an endless meal of these literary courses. Like Camus, I was as starved for text as I was for salt water swimming and fried chicken and, later, a glimpse of thighs under the classroom desk. This was not simply a calculated choice or neutral preference - it was an urge.

My point is that reading is not just a cognitive pursuit. It is intellectual, of course: an achievement of high abstraction. But entangled with the cerebral is the visceral: passion, ardour, avidity, yearning. We readers are rational animals - but animals nonetheless, whose whole bodies feed on words.

You can real the full article here. The Art of Reading is out now in the UK with Scribe.

There was a generous and elegant review of The Art of Reading in Bookanista this weekend: 'A biblical paradise', by Mika Provata-Carlone.

At the very end of the book, having offered us rare instruction into the art of reading, colourful admonition against its pitfalls and resounding paeans about its vital necessity, Young bequeaths us no less than a full-sized library: in his last chapter, ‘The Lumber Room’, a title he borrows from Saki, Young feels his way across the volumes that have marked him as a reader and as a thinker, shaped his perception and his sensibility. Not only for their content, but also for their physicality and aesthetic beauty, introducing us to quartos, first editions, “jelly beans” of fussy opulence, well-thumbed paperbacks. A reader’s bookshelf, we are meant to understand, must be able to collect dust and feed the eyes and the senses as well as the spirit.... Above all, it is intended to be an invitation to a dance, to an encounter of many lives. The Art of Reading is a beautifully written essay on literature and philosophy, on the sociology of human experience through the written word. It is a book of many delights, and a world of hope that has made much wisdom of its many traumas. A rare joy, a company of pages to cherish for a long time.

No doubt I will, as I dance, step on some toes, too.

I recently had a great chat to Jeremy from Comics Watchtower about comics and general geekery. You can listen to the conversation here.

We begin with The Art of Reading, and my picture books, then learning to read with Asterix (and why I'm a better parent than my parents).

Then onto the Dark Knight: the death of Robin, which introduced me to an adult world of mortality (or so I thought), and Batman's Nietzschean beauty.

We chat about the Punishers: from the 'eighties hero of gadgets and quips, to the numb, 'naughties Punisher of Ennis. What might become of a killer like Frank Castle, this 'experiment in the psychology of hate'? And why is the less gory Punisher more 'sick'?

Then I hold forth on current Marvel and DC superhero television, and give my curmudgeonly judgement on the latter ('if the only way you can try to create some kind of dramatic tension is to have people pointlessly lie to each other...give up writing').

"My weakness is the Flash's superpower..."

Green Arrow gets a guernsey, then we're onto what I'd write if I were invited: the 'vengeful three' (Ghostrider, Punisher, Batman)--hello DC and Marvel, hit me up. And a quick discussion about my novel in progress.

I discuss Conan the Cimmerian, and how these ferocious heroes have 'something in them that's not quite them'--a sword thrust into the belly of pure, transparent rationality.

We also devote some time to comics art: something I'm increasingly fascinated by. I often praise characters and plotting, but the illustrations are vital and often exhilarating. (Lone Wolf and Cub is sublime, but has terribly written women.)

Should we introduce children to comics? A huge yes there, from me.

Jeremy asks about my great dramatic weakness: haste. "My weakness is the Flash's superpower..."

We cover much more than this--from Transformers, to Squirrel Girl, to Paul Dini's Dark Night, to the superpowers I'd like--and it's an absolute pleasure to hold forth on these figures and mythologies.

What does "virtue signalling" mean? And is it a helpful idea in conversation?

My latest essay for The New Philosopher discusses this popular concept.

Certain phrases are epitaphs for good debate. The conversation might continue, but in a deadened form: a petty spat, or series of monologues. For example: “that’s just your opinion”, “check your privilege” and “as an x, I’m offended”. They often reveal the speaker’s lack of goodwill or good faith, or they demonstrate what philosophers call ‘incommensurability’: the participants have not only competing ideas and values, but also competing standards of ideas and values. They’re talking past each other.

But there is more: they’re sometimes talking past one another—to an audience. The point is not to persuade, but to grandstand. Interestingly, one recent phrase for this behaviour can itself be a symptom of a sick conversation: “virtue signalling”.

As with the others, the problem with the concept of virtue signalling is not that it’s necessarily false. Virtue signalling undoubtedly happens, and sometimes it is rightly noted and lambasted. The problem is that, even when accurate, the concept can be unhelpful: vague, simplistic, or unenlightened.

The issue (#17) is on communication, and covers value of silence, one's "mother tongue", the dodgy idea of information overload—and much more.

You can buy The New Philosopher in bookshops and newsagents, or subscribe here.

I recently had a piece on The Art of Reading in the UK's The Big Issue magazine: .

What you are doing right now is astonishing: reading.

We often take it for granted, because the basic skills are gained so early. By the time we’re adults, the letters are transparent: we move straight from lines to universes. This is one reason why reading is so neglected as a craft. Like spectacles, it’s so close to us we can’t see it. Reading is also more private—it lacks the public kudos of authorship. So we hear a great deal about writing: festivals, ‘how to’ guides in newspapers and magazines, courses, alongside raves and rages about individual authors. Readers remain out of the spotlight, rarely lauded for their labours. Many aspire to being great authors—few to being great readers.

Yet without readers there are no texts. We take the sensations—ink on paper, liquid crystal behind glass—and turn them into sense. To paraphrase Spider-Man #1, 1962: with this literary power comes responsibility. We have to translate words into worlds well. Not simply to do justice to writers—though this is important, if we want to judge their achievements. We read well also because otherwise we are wasting an opportunity for new experiences: vivid or muted, consoling or confronting, arousing or disgusting.

You can read the whole thing . It's a brief taster of the book's main course, which gives you the flavour without the (philosophically important) gristle.

Check out more from The Big Issue here: bigissue.com.

How do writers live?

We're familiar with festival performances or Hollywood tropes. But how do actual authors negotiate money, career, marriage, parenthood and identity?

A little while ago, Ruth Quibell and I spoke to a number of writers from Australia and abroad (chiefly the UK & US) about their daily lives. The result was "Public Writers, Private Lives", a feature for Island 135. You can read the whole essay here. And here's a sample:

The public face of writing is an edited, commercial one. Beyond book signings, blurbs and bullish advances are two stubborn tropes: writers are idiots, and writers are butterflies.

Idiot, from the ancient Greek idiotes, is someone who refuses community; a recluse or exile. A butterfly, while charming, never sits still for long. She flits and tastes, sits then flies – a creature of caprice. This is the author as a hermit or party animal; dying of tuberculosis and ennui in an attic, or playing with bon mots over cocktails. Whatever it is that the artist achieves – and this is often left absurdly ambiguous – this endeavour is otherworldly, and foreign to ordinary labour and polite society. Writing is not, in a word, bourgeois.

There are some good reasons for these tropes. First, the caricature of the mysterious exile or party animal works nicely with the romantic ideal. The artist is liberated, not only from ordinary labour, but from the etiquette of middle class respectability. She is often in touch with ‘higher truths’ invisible to anyone concerned with material concerns like net price, rent and groceries.

Since Plato, artistic reverie has often been put in the same ornate box as love and madness, and this makes sense: the craft of writing can indeed involve something like epiphany or inspiration. Discoveries can be made, seemingly without conscious effort, as if ‘from above’. The author, in other words, seems to avoid dull labour or common sociability: she is more prophet than drudge. This specialness also provides some consolation – at least in the minds of the monied – for the financial insecurity of a writing career.

Second, some very successful modern authors have seemed to live this way, and their aura of hermetic austerity (Orwell) or public pickling (Hemingway, Dylan Thomas) provides tropes for the next generation. Plenty of brilliant writers have suffered madness (Woolf, Plath), chosen solitude (Proust) or both (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein). Virginia Nicholson’s excellent Among the Bohemians (2002) exemplifies this outlook, with its tales of poverty, adultery and filth. Put another way, many great authors provide not only a wealth of aesthetic experiences, but also a stock of identities.

In film or on television, these become (ironically) simple caricatures for mediocre narrative. Need a poor loser to transform, or as a foil for the authentic hero? Make him a failed writer, preferably with something called ‘writer’s block’. Need someone who lives a ‘fabulous’ life of cocktails and cock, without a day job to confuse things? Make her a writer. The idiot and the butterfly keep screenwriters from having to think about other, more complicated animals.

As writers, we want a better-stocked menagerie. We are curious, not only about others’ literary ideals, but also about the strife between these ideals and the reality of professional writing. To this end, we interviewed twenty authors from Australia and abroad, from a columnist in her first year of full-time writing, to a bestselling global author and television personality. What we gleaned was more nuanced, and often more banal, than romantic poverty or champagne soirées – and more compelling for this.

If you want more articles like this, do subscribe to Islandhere.

Not long ago I wrote a short essay for Island magazine #145: 'Stupid Idiots'. It's on Australia's political slurs, and how maddeningly unambitious they are. I'm suggesting we try harder to insult one another, starting with these two recommendations: 'stupid' and 'idiot'. A sample:

Of all the disappointments falling from the low-hanging piñata of Australian politics, the most banal are the insults. From the snarling sexism of ‘ditch the witch’—it rhymes, so it must be true and clever—to the clumsy class analysis of ‘spiv’, we are making a graveyard of slurs. Mark Latham offered the occasional zinger-like ‘conga line of suckholes’, but his recent diatribes are less like witty ripostes and more like midnight texts from a jilted lover after major surgery.

Putting aside the political professionals and pundits, more disillusioning are the average fusillades from social media and casual conversation. Not sad because they are mean (see what I did there?), but because their standards are so low. Wanker, moron, fuckwit, loser – the epithets often express contempt and little else.

The point is not that contempt is inappropriate – it takes a cruel bastard, for example, to endorse indefinite detention of children – but that it is inarticulate. It turns political debate into a stalemated contest of equally intense and unpersuasive smears. Perhaps this is apt, working well with a democracy that is becoming, as philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis put it, ‘a society of lobbies and hobbies’: competing special interest consortiums, and privative individuals.

Nonetheless, the misery of things is no mandate for giving up. My humble contribution here is to offer a couple of choice political insults, together with an explanation of their worth. If not for immediate circulation as slights, then at least as a small investment in an ongoing debate between people who are not manic ideologues or venal parasites.

You can pick up Island in all good bookshops, or subscribe here.

Long before I heard a clerk spelling out 'C-A-R-L M-A-R-K-S' in a Borders many years ago, I had my doubts about the big chain bookstores. When I'm seeking new spoils--from novels to philosophy, poetry to comics--I try to support independent bookshops.

But why? Prompted by the recent Independent Bookshop Week, I wrote a brief celebration of these excellent establishments for Meanjin magazine (another fine old literary institution). A sample:

‘Now I know what I’ve been faking all these years.’ So says Private Benjamin in the film of the same name, after a tryst with her lover. I felt this way about my first independent bookshop. I had been making all the right noises for years, but suddenly I realised what I was missing.

Growing up in a provincial town, literary choices were thin: the mall bookshop in the next, bigger town, the newsagent's, or my parents. I picked up The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes in the first, and Eric van Lustbader’s The Ninja in the second. (Learning about sex from a straight man’s depiction of queer women was, in hindsight, not so helpful.) If I wanted something unusual, my folks were always liberal with their literature: from Gödel, Escher, Bach to Akira. I was lucky in this. But my curiosity still moved within narrow limits, the blinkers of schooling and home life.

It was not until I started university that I realised the extraordinary universe of reading out there. This was partly my studies: the badly photocopied extracts with lecturers’ scribblings, the library aisles with wholly new names.

But it was also independent bookshops. They stocked the latest from overseas publishing houses, and rare editions of ancient classics. They had sections packed with surprises from many eras and regions: virtue ethics from feudal China, socialist verse from Greece. The shops of my youth ran on safety. The same editions of the same bestsellers, by the same handful of authors. This is still how the big chains work. Like advertising, it is basically conservative, devoted to what is already popular. The independent bookshops took risks with authors, styles, schools of thought.

You can read the whole essay here.

Dear bibliophiles of the UK: to celebrate Independent Bookshop Week (#IBW2017), The Art of Reading is now out in a limited signed and numbered edition. It's only available at independent bookshops, until the general release in August.

The Art of Reading is not a 'how to' or another book about books. It's a companion to reading itself; an invitation to reflect on the reader's freedom, and on the rewards of reading more carefully. From the cover:

We are not born readers, we learn to turn words into worlds. But why is fine writing lauded while excellent reading is ignored? In The Art of Reading, philosopher Damon Young reveals the pleasures of this intimate pursuit through a rich sample of literature: from Virginia Woolf's diaries to Batman comics. He writes with honesty and humour about the blunders and revelations of his own bookish life. Devoting each chapter to a literary virtue—curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, justice—The Art of Reading celebrates the reader's power: to turn shapes on a page into a lifelong adventure.

The book itself is gorgeous: a cadet blue cloth cover designed by Allison Colpoys, with burgundy endpapers and a ribbon bookmark.

If you're still curious about The Art of Reading, here are some reviews and interviews:

Radio National interview

The Australian review

Sydney Morning Heraldreview

If you'd like to be in the running to win a signed copy of The Art of Reading, tweet a photo of yourself with the book to Scribe UK.

I recently collaborated with Audible Australia to record a new essay on the philosophy of love.

Prompted by recent (and sometimes absurd) debates about marriage equality, Audible have partnered with the Equality Campaign to record a free audiobook on love, romance, partnership and intimacy. A sample from my piece:

I rarely gab at the cinema. But these words had me groaning aloud: ‘I'm not a smart man...but I know what love is.’

When Forrest Gump professed his adoration for Jenny over two decades ago, I got it. Honestly. Forrest was devoted: loyal, kind, brave. But his wisdom was maddening, a flat thumbtack of moral certainty with a story spun loosely around it. Come, audience –witness uncomplicated goodness, with all its Hollywood complacency.

But love is complicated. It’s Mr Darcy’s declaration, Marcel Proust’s frustration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s masturbation; Paris and Helen, Achilles and Patroclus, Narcissus and Narcissus; Slim telling Steve how to whistle in To Have and Have Not, and Mia’s ambiguous smile in La La Land as she leaves Sebastian’s jazz club.

It’s Batwoman and Maggie Sawyer, Captain America and Bucky, Midnighter and Apollo; Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ and 2 Live Crew’s ‘Me So Horny’; oxygen and poison, battlefield and roller-coaster, addiction and bad medicine, god and devil – and always more, in rhymes, marble and pirouettes; in lips and fists and loins; in light fantasy and dense fact.

You can download "Listen to Love" here.

I've an essay in the New Philosopher magazine: 'The Thief of Time'. Something of a companion to my book Distraction, this piece explores procrastination, and what it says about human time and value:

If procrastination is the thief of time, then William James knew this criminal intimately—as a detective, not as an accessory to burglary. The philosopher and psychologist described one dilly-dallier doing everything but his job: stoking the fire, dusting specks, nudging around furniture, skimming pages from the library. He will ‘waste the morning anyhow… simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noon-day lesson in formal logic which he detests.’ James argued that what marks off the idler from the doer is not force of will, but inventiveness and curiosity. The genius will find ways to make tedium more novel, but the slacker will seek relief in trivia. The result: the first sticks with his labours, the second avoids them.

This is a noteworthy observation about concentration, but it also illuminates our relationship to time. To procrastinate is not simply to lack verve or potency. It is also to put todays’ pleasure—or, just as often, avoidance of pain—ahead of tomorrow’s. William James’ lecturer who turns up to the hall without notes will fail to teach well, and this will be far worse than the dullness of writing. In this, he knows exactly what to do, and how to do it—but the threat of misery to come is faint and fleeting next to the ennui of his study. To paraphrase Augustine of Hippo: please give me curiosity and industry—but not yet.

The essay features thinkers including William James, David Hume, David Harvey and Martin Heidegger. You can subscribe to New Philosopherhere, or grab a copy from good bookshops and newsagents.

I've an essay in the latest New Philosopher magazine: "Even simple food is not simple". Beginning with the English travels of Italian author Giuseppe Lampedusa, I'm taking issue with the idea of "pure" food: food that is simple, authentic, somehow more real than other meals.

A sample:

Ninety years have passed since Lampedusa tripped to England’s north, but the sentiment is thoroughly familiar. He was eating what many today call “real food”. It comes with a list of adjectives: proper, authentic, pure, honest, simple. Obviously this changes by country: real food in York will not be that of Amsterdam or Taipei.

The point is that some meals are more “true” than others, often those associated with the working or lower-middle classes, against the high bourgeoisie or aristocracy.

As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observes in Distinction, eating reflects economic and social reality: for manual labourers, meals are supposed to be ‘substance’, as opposed to the ‘form’ of posh decorum. For workers, food ‘sustains the body and gives strength…hence the emphasis on heavy, fatty, strong foods, of which the paradigm is pork’. Whether or not simple foods actually encourage muscle and grit is another thing entirely, and modern Anglophone countries are not France. Still, Lampedusa’s ham reveries were no coincidence: he was dining on the fare of ‘plain-speaking, plain-eating’ folks, as Bourdieu puts it.

What sociology makes clear here is that pure food is not pure. Like the most fussy minimalist cuisine from a three-star restaurant, simple meals are cultural too. They suggest somewhere outside the universe of symbols, but they do this by—suggesting. They connote, imply, signify.

In honour of famed Batman actor Adam West, here's my Meanjin essay on Batman '66 and the failure of DC's cinematic gloom universe: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/get-your-kicks-in-batman-66/.