MEANJIN BACK ISSUE

COSMOPOLIS: ON CITIES
V ol. 65, no. 2, 2006

Our current issue is called Cosmopolis: On Cities. It seeks to explore a range of cities in all their incarnations — past, present, future — and in all their moods, light and dark, cruel and compassionate. We tell the stories of city streets, structures and inhabitants, in Australia and throughout much of the world, in a dazzling variety of modes and genres.

Contents

Fiction by John Bryson, Pete Nicholson, Margaret Barbalet, Matthew Condon, Philip Canon, Marion Halligan

[Essays and Memoirs]
Michelle Lovric 2 Sex and the City
Venice — masculine or feminine?

John Brewer 8 The Blessing of the Bikes
On an extraordinary modern ritual just outside Florence

Helen Ferber 16 Missives from Munich
How the author, aged nineteen, had a brush with Adolf Hitler

Lyndel Rowe 34 Soap Opera International
Exploring the laundromat in London , Paris and Melbourne

Damien Kinney 59 Chinese Cosmopolis
The tension of change and tradition in Beijing today

Nicola Walker 80 From Maputo with Love
On the capital of Mozambique since the early 1990s

Graeme Davison 96 The View from the Palisade Hotel
Australia 's leading urban historian on the evolving appreciation of our cities

Ross Gibson 108 Parabolic by Design
Two different but related visions from early twentieth-century Sydney

Eve Vincent 121 Tour of Beauty
Exploring a Sydney art-collective's new enterprise in the deeply divided inner-city area of Redfern-Waterloo

Megan Hicks 139 The Eternal City
Not Rome but Sydney, and the role of a street artist in bringing it 'Eternity'

Jeremy Kruse 147 From Dogtown to SkateCity
A skateboarding odyssey from 1970s Los Angeles to contemporary Canberra

Chris Healy 167 Crowd — or Community?
Reinterpreting a photographer's visions of twenty-first-century inner Melbourne

Rodney Wetherell 174 Subtopia or Sunnyside?
How Melbourne is depicted in recent novels by A.L. McCann, Joanna Murray-Smith and Çhristos Tsiolkas

Emmett Stinson 181 Darker Pleasures
How an American author visiting Melbourne in 1853 raked the muck beneath the gold

Andrew Brown-May 195 The City as Encyclopedia
An editor's reflections on compiling an urban encyclopedia

Craig Sherborne 205 A Guide to Troublemaking in Melbourne
A Sydney devil's advocacy that all cities (including Melbourne ) are pretty much the same

[Review Essays]
Caroline Brothers 28 City of Darkness and Light
Two recent books by Australian authors Carmel Callil and Elaine Lewis present very different images of Paris

Oliver Dennis 87 City Limits
What's happened to the urban-rural divide in Australian poetic sensibilities?

Carmel Bird 210 A History of Violence
On Craig Sherborne's depiction of an urban childhood in Hoi Polloi

[Diary]
Barry Hill 51 Raven City
A poet's chronicle of his trip to Calcutta in 2005

[ Blog ]
Ali Lemer 216 Et in Urbia Ego
A New Yorker in Prague and Melbourne

[Correspondence]
Philippe Tapon 231 E-mails from Chicago
A San Francisco novelist writes back home from the windy city

[Cinema]
Brian McFarlane 240 Leaving Manhattan
On Bennett Miller's Capote and Woody Allen's Matchpoint 

Images by Colin Kruse, Emil Goh, Eva Collins, Simon Terrill, Maria Mencia, Fred Kroh 166

[Comic ]
Patrick Grant 65 Doors to Everywhere

[Zine]
Tim Wright, Vanessa Berry, Leigh Rigozzi 115 Green Grass: Notes on Sydney Park

Poetry by Kate Middleton, Paula Green, Louise Wakeling, Clive James, Kim Cheng Boey, Geoff Page, Andy Kissane, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Jill Jones, Peter Rose, David Brooks, Joel Deane, Anis Shivani, Bruce Dawe, Pam Brown