Robert DiNapoli is a poet, translator, essayist and erstwhile lecturer on English language and literature. His books include A Far Light: A Reading of Beowulf (2016), Engelboc (2019) and Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost (2021).
All the received wisdoms and shibboleths of contemporary politics and economics, which have (among much else) lifted Donald Trump to his present bad eminence and left parliaments in many lands beset by extreme right-wing parties and ideologues, need reviewing in a fresh light.
Pestilence, plague, epidemic: outbreaks of contagious disease have punctuated human history for as long as humans have gathered in communities and told one another stories about how they got there. Given how much human labour has been devoted to the matter of simply not dying, spectacles of mass death arrest our attention. Whether its cause be natural disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes or storms, the human folly of war or the deeper shock of…
Robert Dinapoli reflects on the rapid spread of the coronavirus through a series of vignettes tracing his disrupted journey from upstate New York back to Melbourne.
The phenomenon of Donald Trump now qualifies as long-running spectacle, like video footage of a tsunami or an avalanche, played over and over again in the public imagination on a scale of years. It simultaneously polarises and paralyses, corralling most responses into flash mobs of right-wing cheerleading and left-wing hand-wringers that race around each other like hamsters on their cage-wheels, going nowhere, 'con fuoco' - an OCD nightmare from which none of us seems wholly…
