Sometimes a gal just has to do the bullet-point thang, even if I'm not quite sure how to get a bullet point on blogger and have to settle for an asterix instead. Here's a catch-up list of interesting stuff that I've been noticing around the FaceTubes:

* Fringe: As y'all know, Melbourne has donned its party hats for the Fringe. Ms TN has done her share of reviewing, with more to come, but (praise the Lord!), despite rumours to the contrary, she is not the entire Internetz! For more reviews of more shows, check out my blogger colleagues John Bailey at Capital Idea, Neandellus, Crikey's Curtain Call, The Groggy Squirrel or Drew Review. And feel free to post other links, if you know of them, in the comments.

* Did I tell you that Edward Albee is coming to Melbourne? One of the major figures of contemporary American drama, Edward Albee will be discussing his half century of working in the theatre at the Melbourne Theatre Company at 3pm on October 17. Expect sparks - Albee often delivers them. The event is free, but bookings are essential.

* The SMH's Jason Blake offers up an interesting analysis of the Sydney Fringe, which made its debut this month to a mixed reception. The comments are also worth reading.

* Don't miss George Hunka's moving tribute to one of my own favourite critics, Jan Kott, on Superfluities Redux:

There are a lot of walks in Kott’s more autobiographical essays: walks with friends, through old neighborhoods. Bearing Kott’s thoughts within my own on my walks through the streets of New York, even as I lack the resources or the status to see all of the theatre I might like to see (and as indigent dramatists do, I borrowed this book from the public library too), he accompanies me and teaches me to see, as he does, the theatre in the everyday, the everyday in theatre...

* From the sublime to... well, other critics, anyway. Those who don't start twitching at the mere whisper of "internet v print" might be interested in checking out Chris Wilkinson's latest response to the Woodhead/Croggon wrangle on the Guardian Theatre Blog. (They might be even more interested when they read the headline - "Why Sex Is Better In The Theatre"... though sadly it's not as exciting as it sounds). Meanwhile, the Thread That Will Never Die: The Sequel continues on TN... though there are far more interesting conversations elsewhere.

* Among these conversations are those sparked by a recent Blogging Unconference hosted by the Wheeler Centre (check for report and follow-up links), a follow-up to the Wheeler Centre's Critical Failure series, which started the whole damn thing. Best of all, the busy pencil of Crikey's Culture Mulcher, W.H. Chong, captured us all in glorious black and white; which, we all agreed, the interwebs most certainly are not.

* And finally, the social pages: Angela Meyer of Literary Minded reports on the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, where your humble blogger was hobnobbing as an instamatic hipster on Tuesday night.

Those who missed Tuesday's panel on theatre criticism at the Wheeler Centre will be able to catch up with it next week, when all the Critical Failure dialogues (on film, literature, theatre and visual art) will be put online at the Wheeler Centre site. Meanwhile, Crikey's anonymous theatre correspondent gave us a pretty positive review: "It turned out a wonderful little four-hander, almost like a well-made play, with secrets revealed, old conflicts revived, touching reconciliations, impassioned monologues, moments of general disorder, comedic repartee and plenty of merry-andrew buffoonery." Ha!

Although she is, in essence, the most retiring of violets, Ms TN has been gadding about town as if gads are going out of fashion. My final gad is tonight at the Wheeler Centre at 6.15pm, as people keep reminding me by brightly volunteering to help mop up the blood. I'm on a panel with playwright Stephen Sewell, director Julian Meyrick and Age critic Cameron Woodhead to discuss why theatre criticism "is failing us all". I expect I shall need a whiskey afterwards, preferably single malt, but mainly I'm hoping that my voice will be present and correct, as it's been a bit dodgy.

In fact, I lost my voice completely this weekend, which was dominated by the World Science Fiction Convention at the Exhibition Centre, my First Ever Con, where, among other things, I got to talk about Shakespeare, poetry, science fiction in the theatre and the impact of digital technologies on criticism. (Just like the rest of my life). Mere laryngitis didn't stop me, although at the end of Sunday I did have to cancel my last panel, a scholarly discussion on PL Travers and Mary Poppins. I was a wide-eyed noob, I frankly confess, and I loved being part of it.

At the Con, I met people who do nothing else except write novels. You know, I must be getting old. I suddenly can see myself wearing a floppy (or perhaps a flowery) straw hat and drifty layers of chiffon, snipping flowers and tending my herb garden and rushing back inside to write the next five hundred words, and not having six other deadlines as well... and the vision, I can tell you, is disturbingly attractive. Imagine not being constantly behind schedule, and scrambling to catch up, and just thinking about one thing!

Yet how can I give up the theatre? Even with all this extra activity, I saw two shows last week: Bell Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, directed with sublime comedy by Lee Lewis at the Victorian Arts Centre, and Stephanie Lake's first full-length dance work, Mix Tape, at Chunky Move. I was planning to write about them today, but frankly I'm a little tired: so allow me to recommend both, and perhaps I'll get down to it tomorrow. Mix Tape closes this Saturday, September 11, so hurry if you haven't booked already, and Twelfth Night a week later.

My diary is insane. The rollercoaster seems to be plunging right on until November: and then it's the end of 2010. Like, what happened? Wasn't the New Year only last month? Is it the expanding universe or something?

But to turn to some particular fluctuations in the time-space continuum: next week, the Wheeler Centre, aka the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, is running a series of panel discussions with what they cheerfully admit is the "thoroughly prejudicial" title of Critical Failure. Covering four artforms, films, books, theatre and visual art, the discussions will "review the state of critical culture in Australia and cast a critical eye over Australian reviewing".

Surprisingly enough, I'm on the Theatre panel, and will be appearing next Wednesday, September 8, with my old sparring partner, Age critic Cameron Woodhead; Julian Meyrick, a vocal critiquer of criticks, including La Croggon; and Stephen Sewell, firebrand playwright. Might make some fireworks, but even given the polar set-up I'm hoping for more light than heat, and that I don't end up as kebab. We'll see. It's a free event, 6.15 at the Wheeler Centre, bookings online here.

Meanwhile, this week I'm mainly attending AussieCon4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention. I've listed my appearances on my Books of Pellinor blog, if anyone here happens to be heading there and wants to see how my fantasy hat suits me.

I hope you've all ordered your copy of the 200th issue of Overland, due to be launched in a shower of bubbly at the Melbourne Writers Festival on September 4. I will be there, as I contributed an essay on Australian theatre and nationalism. And tomorrow, as a spin-off, I will appear with some of my fellow contributors in a shipping container on Riverside Terrace at Fed Square for a Melbourne Writers Festival event called "Magazine". Overland editor Jeff Sparrow will be wrangling Kalinda Ashton, Rjurik Davidson, Michelle Carmody and Jacinda Woodhead as well as me, nailing us into the hot-seat and asking probing questions for a magazine-style 15 minutes of fame. It goes from 10am to 1.30pm, and I'm on about 11.30. Please come!

This begins a crazy fortnight or so of heavy litting. For a lot of it I'll be hanging at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, where I have a busy program of panels. It's my first Con, and I'm as excited as any 13 year old fangirl. I'll post details later and probably elsewhere, for any closet nerds out there. But tellingly, even in the heart of SFF city, I'm doing two panels about theatre ...

The Wheeler Centre, aka the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, nicely asked me for another response to Jonathan Mills's lecture, so this time I went for something slightly more personal. It's up today on their site. And while you're there, you might want to check out the series of discussions the centre is hosting next month on arts criticism, provocatively titled Critical Failure: why arts criticism is failing us all. I'll be part of the theatre discussion, which is scheduled for September 8. Plenty to chew on there, though I'm hoping that it won't be me that's mostly being chewed.

Elsewhere in blogland, George Hunka posts some recondite statements about the dramatist's art from British playwright John Whiting, which are well worth a ponder. Once you get past the insistence on the masculine pronoun, the assumption that art is a job for "a man", there are some interesting points about the individual as opposed to the communal voice. And I hope you'e following Chris Goode's Edinburgh diary on his blog Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, as he rehearses and performs Tim Crouch's The Author at the Edinburgh Festival. And, being Goode, much other stuff. Someone said that they print out Goode's blog posts to read on the bus, which is, in fact, probably an excellent way to read them, especially given the uncertainties of Melbourne's public transport system.

Closer to home, Robin Usher reports in today's Age that the MTC could "do an STC" and appoint Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as its new artistic director. I guess they could do a lot worse: and we all know Rush is a man of the theatre. But would he be interested, I wonder? One can't help suspecting the job is a bit of a poisoned chalice... And while I'm at it, let me point you to Jeff Sparrow's excellent comment piece on The Drum, which looks at the neo-liberal commodification of politics, and the concomitant panic about "authenticity": "Pro-wrestling makes a pretty good analogy for where we're at: an election is a product designed for TV, in which the wacky antics of assorted larger than life characters disguise how little's actually at stake. Welcome to the desert of the Real, as someone once said." Indeed.

Recently I guest-edited the poetry for Cordite's Creative Commons issue. Today it goes live online, and it's well worth a browse. More, after you've read the poems, you can download them, remix and resubmit. Check out too the forum on creative commons, with meditations on pressing issues of intellectual copyright from Susan Hawthorne, Patrick Jones and others, the mini-feature on the superb British poet Peter Larkin, and Louis Armand's essay on John Kinsella.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the Australian today publishes my review of the mega-musical Mary Poppins, which opened at Her Majesty's last week.

Your long-lost blogger is circling back to the planet after a hiatus that was rather longer than planned. As you know, we moved house, which is rightly described as one of the more stressful interludes in life's rich banality; but this in itself doesn't account for my absence. Ms TN came down with a vicious bout of flu that left me bedridden for a fortnight, and on top of that I encountered the Kafkaesque world of Aapt Customer Service, a dark exercise in 21st century oxymoronic disempowerment and futility. I still don't know why it took almost a month to move my account, but it did: and at last today I am reconnected to the cyberworld. Although I'm still, physically speaking, a little shaky on my pins, I feel like a long and necessary metamorphosis is almost complete.

In the meantime, Things Have Happened: against all expectation, the VCA is back, with the School of Music being folded into the Melbourne Conservatorium and the "M" (for the "Melbourne Model") being dropped from its monicker. And Simon Phillips yesterday announced his resignation as artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company at the end of this year, opening thickets of speculation over who will take this crucial position.

I did see a couple of shows last week, which now my fevers have abated I want to write about, since both were so interesting: Benedict Andrews' Belvoir St production of Measure for Measure, and Lucy Guerin's new dance/theatre piece, Human Interest Story. I'm still taking things a bit slowly, but the neurones are beginning to flicker fitfully, and by next week, TN should be back on track, even given how the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, etc. There's been enough agley for now, I reckon. And it's nice to be back.

Rather unexpectedly, the Croggon-Keene clan is upping stakes and moving. Always, of course, the risk of renting, but over the past 11 years in Casa Williamstown we'd kind of forgotten. We are feeling upbeat about it - it's always good to reinvent yourself - but a decade in the same house means, for this hoardish family, a daunting pile of books, toys, DVDs, CDs, endless files of paper, and several hundred miscellaneous objects that now has to be sorted into some sort of sanity. (I only just realised we have a dozen bikes in the shed. I can't even ride a bike.) Ms TN will be covered in dust for at least the next fortnight, so expect things to be quiet here.

At least I managed to finish the last of a series of commissioned essays - this one on nationalism and Australian theatre for Overland - before the hurricane hit. And I'm thanking the gods for small mercies.

The Australian Literary Review (published in today's Australian) today runs my piece on the controversy about whether plays are literature. Basically it's an overview of the recent debate that was sparked by the missing play at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Speaking of which, the debate has reached the UK, where my charming colleague (and he is - he bought me dinner so I know) David Jays ponders the same question on the Guardian's Stage blog.

While you're at it, check out Andrew Haydon's post on Postcards from the Gods where he talks about the implications of casting - racially, class-wise, aesthetically. It's a huge topic that sparks a concomitantly long reflection, and is well worth the read.

And don't miss either 2010 Pascall Prize winner Mark Mordue's meditation on contemporary criticism on his blog The Basement Tapes (which I thoroughly recommend). "Great criticism is about love more than hate, construction more than destruction... in many ways what a good critic does is nearer to the task of a translator who has found a way of channeling one form of language into another... I’d be so bold as to claim a great critic can, and should be a responsive poet, balancing judgment and empathy in an art of evocation." Well, I'm bound to say amen to that...

My, it's June already. Like around 30 per cent of the Melburnian population, I've had a cold for more than three weeks. And Ms TN is again three reviews in the red: this time for two Arts House shows, The Folding Wife and Bromance, and Bell Shakespeare's King Lear, which opened on Friday night.

Meanwhile, the outpouring of oil into the Gulf of Mexico continues unabated. The Israeli government is busy spinning its latest assault on international law by casting itself as victims of an innocent commando night raid during which the unarmed protesters defended themselves. And this weekend Louise Bourgeois and Randolph Stow - surely one of the most brilliant writers Australia has produced - both died.

And what has this to do with theatre reviews? Everything and nothing. Like everyone else on this planet, I live on this planet, and "no man is an island, entire of itself". This weekend, I kept thinking of a conversation overheard many years ago on the train: "Do you think the human race is worth saving?" (Pause.) "Naah..." Or Hamlet: "Man delights not me".

Yes, people - even great artists - die all the time. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is small beer besides the three-decade environmental catastrophe in Nigeria, where equivalent oil-spills occur every year. Not to mention the depradations that are the price of our global wealth: the illegal forest clearing in South-East Asia, the disastrous overfishing of our oceans, the suicidal consumerism that drives so much global injustice, the mass species extinction that is every bit as catastrophic as climate change. The Israeli state is no more dishonest than any state which decides that habeas corpus is an unnecessary legal detail.

Shall we continue fiddling as Rome burns? Or are we doing something else?

I write this blog because I think one of the few saving graces of the human race is that we make art. I also write it because it keeps me truthful, and it exercises my faculties when I'm not writing other things (and, quite often, when I am). But at the moment a shark is swimming about in my subconscious, gobbling all the thought that would normally be directed to writing criticism. The shark has always been there, and it's never dormant, but for some time it's been down in the trenches, lurking below the visible light. Over the past six months or so, it's been surfacing. It's a question, a demand, a fury. Some time soon, I'm going to have to do something about it. It's not as if there's a choice.

I'm not stupid or vain enough to think art can save the world. But those who denigrate art are even more stupid than those who proclaim its vanities: it is imagination that has created our entire human reality. If PR and the media are thought to be so powerful, it's bizarre to say art is impotent. The problem is that art's power exists only in its truthfulness, and truthfulness is not the lingua franca of power. Art's potency exists in the abdication of power that is also human love. Imagination is the necessary condition of art, yes, but also, more crucially, of love. And without love, each of us is nothing.

I don't mean, being loved. I mean our inner capacity to love, to see our realities in all their grievous beauty. "Love never stopped a bullet / Or stayed the raping hand / Of a damaged world. / But it is the only way / To remain undefeated."

The shark is asking: how serious are you?

So, to quote Les Murray, now I've said my beliefs. I'll do the reviews, probably later this week. And I'll go prepare myself to deal with the shark. That's a long-term project. But if there's some thrashing about on the surface of the waves, you'll know why.

Update: Or, in other words... Maladjusted on philosophy (and art, and love): "Time to fight. ... Time to refuse any reality principle that can only locate reality in the relentless, nihilistic pursuit of profit."

1. Ex-Melbourne and Red Stitch director Sam Strong has been appointed the new artistic director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre. Joanne Erskine has the goods at Cluster.

2. Critic Mark Mordue has won this year's Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Prize. (Those of you with long memories will recall I was last year's winner; this year I was on the judging panel and can say he was the unanimous choice.) More on Mark's work from James Bradley at City of Tongues. Another blogger/freelance critic: it suggests that the common perception that blogs are the death of criticism might be getting a few critical hits.

3. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux posts details of Howard Barker in conversation on, well, all sorts of things. Go hence.

4. The Guardian flatters me outrageously by listing me as one of five must-read critics, alongside Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Peter Campbell and James Wood. Excuse me while I lie down and recover.

I seem to be suffering from something very like flu, which is putting the kybosh on both seeing and writing about the theatre. And at such a time! This town is presently lousy with great performance. To cheer my shivering hours, I thought perhaps you could tell me (and everyone else) what you're seeing and liking (or, perhaps, not liking). Some already have: Richard Watts said this enchanting notion, Sunset Over Cardboard Mountains (sadly closed) was to kill for, and Yumi Umiamare's Trans-Mute at the Guild Theatre is another smart recommendation - her brand of cabaret/butoh/dance is really something. What else?

To the lovely readers who have kindly (and discreetly) emailed me to correct the typos in my last couple of reviews. Richard III set a typo record! I fear that general time poverty meant doing them all in one day, which has resulted in a little fraying about the edges. But all fixed now. I think.

Gad, what a weekend. Your faithful blogger has been, and continues to be, under the pump: Herakles and the Hydra ain't got nothing on me. Having dealt two major snaky deadlines the old snickersnack, I now have a very busy fortnight coming up being a journalist (if I say it involves six deadlines and two major articles, perhaps you will pity me. Or perhaps not. Up to you).

There are a couple of things I want desperately to blog, and will, somehow. The MTC's Richard III is a must-see - if you love theatre and live in Melbourne, you'd be nuts to miss it. Lots to say, and I can say very little of it in today's review in the Australian, but you get the general idea. I also saw The Rabble's Cageling - a take on Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba - at 45 Downstairs on Friday night. I had more mixed responses to this, but it's definitely worth your time - ambitious visual and physical theatre with some stunning moments.

Meantime, my helpmeet, colleague and erstwhile husband, Daniel Keene, has abandoned me for the delights of Paris. I mention this because some of you might be interested in what he's doing there. A few things: his play Scissors, Paper, Rock, which premiered in Melbourne with the Keene/Taylor Project, opens at La Colline Théâtre National in Paris next week, after an out-of-town season in Amiens that has garnered ecstatic reviews, and before a national tour. Along with La Comédie Française, L'Odéon, the Théâtre National de Chaillot and the TNS in Strasbourg, La Colline is one of the most important subsidised theatres in France, so it's quite a big deal. He's also being guest of honour at a convocation of theatre publishers in Paris (can you imagine such a thing here?), and then will spend two weeks in residence with a company in Rodez, working a new play which is programmed for later this year at the Théàtre National de Toulouse.

Meanwhile, my face still numb after a couple of delightful hours at the dentist, I'm off to the launch of Malthouse Season 2. And then on to Theatre Works to see [Title of Show]. If I'm a bit quiet here, you'll know why.

And I realise I have yet to expatiate on the Malthouse production of Dario Fo's Elizabeth: Almost By Chance A Woman (except for the brief review in the Australian). This is partly due to a seasonal cold, but mostly because I am locked in a bitter passive-aggressive struggle with The Novel. This is inducing such mortal tedium and so many complaints (from me, and soon from the family) that is getting in the way of almost everything. For the record, I really enjoyed this production, and there's a lot to discuss. This is just a holding note while I bash the daemon into submission, and the review will be up soon. Just not today. Yrs, Ms TN.

Let me remind you about John Bailey's mandatory Capital Idea blog - not least because the Hon. John, reviewer for the Sunday Age, gets to many shows I miss. In particular, check out his recommendations on Sisters Grimm's Little Mercy (which I did see, but which he explicates to a greater depth) and Nichola Gunn's At the Sans Hotel, now in its final days at Theatreworks, which I didn't.

Because I have a sadistic superego, I feel vaguely conscience-stricken by the couple of commenters making sad cheeping noises about my (relative) absence on TN. Come on, admit it - you wouldn't notice if I wasn't tweeting and thus reminding you that I am alive!

And anyway, I haven't been to the theatre this week. Yet.

So this is to remind you that I resolved late last year, since I was worn down like an old stubby smudged pencil, that 2010 was to be a year of saner blogging. I presently am finishing a novel and beginning several other projects, as well as working on a long essay (which is in fact about theatre). More generally speaking, I have always been a writer who criticked rather than a critic who wrote, and the blurring of my writing self has not been good for me or for anything else. Also, in one of those weird reversals that seem to characterise my life, I actually fund my criticism by my novelising. I'm earning my living, folks.

I'm still posting interesting links on Twitter, so join the world of the thirty-second attention span. Seeking, as ever, the elusive via media....

My feature on what arts festivals mean in our culture is in today's Australian. It gave me a chance to do some happy reminiscing:

These shows changed how I saw the world and how I think about it. And as a result, they changed the way I act. I can see the influence of these artists in countless tiny ways in the theatre that I encounter in Melbourne.

Multiply those individual experiences by millions of festivalgoers over several decades, and that's a big cumulative effect. It's also untraceable: a stimulus might bear fruit decades later, in ways that no one can foresee or quantify.

Yeah, ok, that's how I think art works in general.

Meanwhile, the year is beginning to stretch and turn its scary head me-wards, and the blog will be swinging into slow (but undeniably graceful) action very soon. From now on I'm going to use Twitter to post interesting links, brainless chatter, personal confessions and witty observations on issues of import. This is because it stems my natural loquacity, thus permitting me to direct it in more financially rewarding directions. You can find my Twits at twitter.com/alisoncroggon.

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