Summer is icumen in, meaning that 2008 is rushing to its close with, on my part, a feeling of inexpressible relief. Wasn't it March only yesterday? The past six months seem to have vanished. Perhaps they were gobbled up by the voracious amnesia of the internet. Who knows?

Before they plunge into the abyss of forgetting, allow me to point you to some interesting things I've read recently. The estimable Guardian critic Lyn Gardner shares some reflections on the uncertainties of reviewing, which is well worth a squiz. Chris Goode asks what the fuck am I doing?, a question which in his case is always fruitful. He describes pretty well the loneliness that goes with (so far as I can see) making any kind of art, and which he says adheres with a particular paradoxicalness (paradoxality?) to theatre:

What is that loneliness? It's the signal, I suppose: which will always be broken in transit, and the sacrifice of which is itself ineluctably and bountifully theatrical. But the impulse that begins within me, as a vision -- often tremblingly indistinct or inchoate or literally impossible to hold: but a vision, if we can say that, if that's not too histrionic....talking about which, even (or perhaps especially) among fellow practitioners, is sometimes like describing a dream: elusive in the mind, banal on the lips, boring as it arrives in the other's ears.

Meanwhile, Richard Watts begins a series of meditations on Indie theatre in Canvas Magazine, which made me wonder rather hopelessly if anybody can remember a time before 2000. Speaking tangentially of which, on Sunday ABC Radio National's Artworks broadcast a feature on Daniel Keene which examines what actually goes on in Europe with his work. They managed to spell his name two different ways on the website, but the program - which features interviews with his translator Severine Magois and a couple of French actors as well as the man himself - is worth a listen. I only mention it here because so many people have mentioned it to me.

And while I'm talking family: yesterday my 10-year-old nephew, Rory Young, won the Primary Schools section of ACMI's Screen It animation competition. We're all proud as anything, especially since he's totally self-taught and makes his charming animations on his kitchen table. Here's his prize-winning entry, stolen from Rory's MySpace page, Tin Robot Animations.