by NRB | 31 Jan 2014 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Some time ago, it must have been in the early 1990s, I was writing a novel using an old Toshiba laptop and the MS Dos operating system, which all sounds very primitive now. I had heard vaguely of the new technology and wrote about a character communicating by...
by NRB | 24 Jan 2014 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
One of the few books in my parents’ house – the collection was kept in a hallway cupboard – was an edition of Henry Lawson’s short stories. Its publication was somehow sponsored by the Sun newspaper. I have no idea how my parents acquired it. Neither...
by NRB | 17 Jan 2014 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
It’s a cliché that lives can be changed by chance encounters. Many people meet their life partners through chance encounters it is said. I didn’t; apparently we were set up. But I’ve never ceased to be thankful. I owe my survival beyond, say, the age of 50, to a...
by NRB | 10 Jan 2014 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Recently, I was walking up Watkin Street from Wilson towards King in Newtown on a Saturday afternoon. The street was parked solid and as one car pulled away another, whose driver must have been lurking and dwelling on the spot, slid in. The look of satisfaction on the...
by NRB | 27 Dec 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I never liked teaching and unlike the people mentioned in a previous column I was no good at it. As a young man I was shy and self-conscious. These are not good attributes for a teacher. A teacher should be confident and know when to exercise authority and when to let...
by NRB | 20 Dec 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I frequent four pubs in Newtown. There are different reasons for my visiting them and each has a different atmosphere. Known colloquially as the ‘Marly Bar’, the public bar at the Hotel Marlborough on the corner of Missenden Road and King Street is in an area I visit...
by NRB | 13 Dec 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I’m not big on painting. I was notably quite without talent at it when at school. We had to submit several watercolours on paper to pass Art at some point. I could manage a wash, so I did three blue sea washes each with a slightly different foreground – a desert...
by NRB | 6 Dec 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Again the NRB editors have invited me to nominate the best books I’ve read this year. As I explained in an early column I keep a list of books I’ve read, with a brief assessment, and I assign each book a mark out of ten. Those selected scored either 8.5 or 9...
by NRB | 29 Nov 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Many memoirs, perhaps especially by writers, acknowledge the roles played by teachers in the shaping of people’s careers. Sometimes the teacher occurs as far back as primary school but more commonly later, and occasionally the mentorship morphs into a lifelong...
by NRB | 22 Nov 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
An unusual book launch was held recently at Gleebooks, unusual in that three books were celebrated – novels by Michael Wilding and James Murray and a book of mine comprising three novellas. It was also unusual in that we had no launcher as a result of organisational...
by NRB | 15 Nov 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
After a lapse of quite a few years I’ve joined a gym again. My first gym was in Wollongong about 20 years ago. I’d broken a bone in my hand, couldn’t play golf and needed something to keep me fit. The gym was run by a West Indian with the fine name of Lincoln Webb,...
by NRB | 8 Nov 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I used to get the news from a combination of reading the broadsheets, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, listening to ABC radio and watching the 7pm ABC television news. With my eyesight now making reading papers too difficult (I maintain, without objective...
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