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.