Ange Mlinko

Do women​ hate art? ‘I’m going to focus on making art that doesn’t look like art. Art that has the feel of women talking everyday crap, like you and me here, me solving all your problems.’ This is Anti (short for Antigone) talking to the unnamed narrator of Theory and Practice, a graduate student at the University of Melbourne. It is 1986. You can still write a fan...

When​ I first read László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, published in Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation in 2013, I thought I had discovered a sutra of a cult I had been unconsciously following for most of my life, a cult I had dimly perceived through museums and libraries but that now I could see was mystically systematised. It had no name, as the white heron...

The potential​ for drollery should be obvious: four females, confined in a luxury apartment on an upper floor of a Manhattan high-rise, moulder in rage and ennui when the head of household, Arnold, absconds to Paris with his new French girlfriend. The abandoned wife, J., swallows ‘fistfuls of Valium’ while staring bleakly out of the window. Monique, the young au pair, looking...

Now you see, Urania, where the amphitheatre was.They built it, like the ancient Greeks, all open plan.Provisioned with natural acoustics, the space betweenthe two largest outcrops accommodates a crowd

and brackets the constellations; Cancer’s clawsgrasp at heaven as the wind from Saskatchewanpours unstoppably through this pass, a scenestraight out of the fragment...

Maria Callas came to our banal climate, aged five,wearing her first pair of glasses, so that perhapsthe fizz of palms was the first thing to come into focus.

In time she might have seen the crucifix diveat Epiphany, when rain like a jeweller tapsgingerly into the crystal of a water crocus.

At five she was known as Mary Kalogeropoulos,and if I could, I would tell her how my relativeschanged their...