a confrontation with falling

parody and delerium

2012-01-28T12:48:00.003+11:00

Parody and delierium. One must be born in Husi to smell the poison of melencholy that eats into mind and soul. One must be born in Husi, where even the crows turn back, to grasp this dream of glory of the native land, to understand this nightmare. Madness is left, becuase only in madness can one overturn, if for a moment, the order of the world that gives not a damn for Husi. - Andrzej Stasiuk -(On the Road to Babadag)

31.

2012-01-27T09:01:00.002+11:00

Via here

Today I live on an Island, in a house which is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a shere rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of a prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison. - Curzio Malaparte

and here

Almost. Everything.

2012-01-07T13:08:00.003+11:00

Almost. Everything.

It is almost too beautiful

this morning. The world

has begun again.

How long has it been

since I heard the sound

of the wind or saw, dizzied

the tallest heads of grass

scuttled all at once in the sun?

I almost fainted.

It is almost as if

I have come to this place unaware

of what will happen to me.

As if someone had ushered me

through a dark doorway, and now,

having placed before me this sea

of images, turns to leave,

saying, you will lose everything.

heartbreak hotel

2012-01-06T00:37:00.004+11:00

Midnight

2011-12-29T11:44:00.002+11:00

Midnight

It is another year gone by

the last rain still clinging

to the leaves, cicadas

all of a sudden

overpowering the evening.

Entering the church you

pass the white glimpse of a priest

and a man holding, alarmingly

for a moment, the life-sized body

of a toy child. Wet your head.

Sit beside someone else –

so timid and what? young enough?

With her practical shoes, her

bare, blemished legs beneath a blue skirt.

Shake hands when it is time.

Look her in the eye. Forget

her face almost instantly.

You are dying of thirst and drunker

than you wanted to be. Before you,

in the glow of candles and weak neon

the Priest speaks like a man

drowning in air.

What he wants he cannot quite say.

What we all want we cannot say.

Leave early. Go out into the dark.

Drive home. The revolving light.

There are madmen on the streets and

police and they speak

without making any sound

on the other side of the glass.

the dynamically sublime (take me with you)

2011-12-21T23:08:00.002+11:00

summer

2011-12-16T12:59:00.006+11:00

Olafur Eliasson - Beauty

Summer

The rain dizzies us and at night

forgives even us and trembles

at the edge of the world.

A sheath of water thrown over

the darkness.

Somewhere

a rough sliding door opens

or thunder.

dear sebald (18 May 1944 - 14 December 2001)

2011-12-14T09:00:00.004+11:00

W. G. (Max) Sebald, the acclaimed German author swerved into oncoming traffic and was killed ten years ago today, in Norfolk, near his home in Norwich, East Anglia. He was fifty seven years old, and, not that it matters I suppose, a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. An excellent discussion of his work and influence can be located at the blog Vertigo and at the beautiful incongruity that is Five Dials.

sky news VI

2011-12-02T14:30:00.008+11:00

flag

2011-11-24T14:46:00.000+11:00

David Shrigley, Untitled (I washed the flag), 2011.

Ink on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm.

police "returning city square to the people"

2011-10-21T16:18:00.004+11:00

http://occupymelbourne.org/

the challenge of the resistance

2011-10-17T22:31:00.002+11:00

Video streaming by Ustream

on nature

2011-10-09T21:42:00.006+11:00

On the Nature of Beauty

Monado. Kupang. Ambon. Kungim. What were these strange names hanging ambiguously above the ocean on the televised map on the seat in front of me? Had such places ever existed?

Out the window the sunset lasted for hours - a slow orange burn along the rim of the horizon and a corrugated sea of endless purple clouds that I mistook for the sea itself and which gradually darkened to an ashy blue, to slate. It seemed incredible that we weren’t transfixed by it, that we preferred to look ahead, to read or watch television or sleep uncomfortably rather than press our faces to the cold, shaking plastic. Beauty it seems, like anything, is unendurable in large enough doses.

On the Nature of Ugliness

The Dutch are not necessarily an unattractive race, but when it does happen, theirs is a distinctive type of ugliness, which can be divided into three categories: firstly, those who look like they have been pickled; secondly, those who look like they have been boiled; thirdly, those who look like they have been first pickled, and then boiled. The old maxim about eating and being seems to apply.

On the Nature of the Ridiculous or the Sublime

By train toward a black horizon, rain ricocheting off the window. Beyond the glass, huge lime-green fields suddenly stretch, in which a crisp white goose stands alone. Later, the stumpy black bodies of Shetland ponies wait, motionless, bedraggled, slightly ridiculous.

On the Nature of Chance or Destiny

Somewhere in the Netherlands, by chance, he makes eye contact through a window, with a woman: short grey hair, her head tilted back, her mouth slightly agape, as if, he supposes, she is in some way disabled. It strikes him as poignant that they have each lived their own lives up until this point and will continue to live on opposite sides of the world, with this one brief glance to unite them. Strange, this woman, and not any other.

On the Nature of Circumstance

What is an afternoon in Amsterdam? As these men with their scarves walk their matching Labradors and the late afternoon sun dwindles between the leaves, ordinary people go home slowly along the canal and a man kisses and re-kisses the head of his baby and whistles. The sound of bells twinkle as one million bicycles go back and forth – a man with a cigarette in his mouth glides past, a box of fresh lettuce overflowing at either end of his bike, everyone dodging miraculously at the last minute, without blinking. Nearby, groups of men prowl the narrow streets around the church, and women look out from behind little glass doorways and beckon to strangers, as if they recognise them from somewhere, as if they have something to tell them.

in the netherworld

2011-10-08T05:07:00.016+11:00

I walked in numerous interlacing circles that day around Eindhoven, passing again and again a square in which an empty carousel turned, its little animals and cars waiting patiently for a child while a slightly out of tune theme echoed tinnily in the surrounding streets and a bell rang out. The wind blew piles of autumn leaves in circles at the steps of the cathedral and it rained fitfully and then broke into sharp sun that blinded me so that the cyclists coming in all directions and in no discernable pattern nearly knocked me over a number of times and threw irritable looks behind them and said something ridiculous in Dutch, which was lost on me. Sometime in the afternoon I finally decided to sit down and order a beer in a café where the walls were lined with wooden heads of replica Egyptian cats and framed photographs of motorbikes leaning into the curves of various race tracks. The radio was playing American Rock’ n Roll from the 1950’s. Four people were eating together at a table when I walked in, two men and two women but apart from them the place was completely deserted. Of these four people, the younger woman was exceptionally beautiful, and I had to struggle to keep my eyes on the page I was reading so as not to stare too incessantly at her. You can look at someone, sometimes, like you're taking gulps of something. The four people eventually finished their meal and assumed their role in the café: the boy became a dish-washer, the man become the cook. The elder of the two women became a bar tender and the young woman stepped into her position as the waitress, whose job required her to pull crates of beer across the tiled floor and stack them into a fridge in anticipation of the coming crowds of university students who, wave after wave, kept breathing the life into this strange, soggy little city, as well as making it necessary to erect four sided plastic urinals on various street corners. At some point I noticed with gratitude that it had begun to rain again in the bleak light outside and that a comforting gloom was settling over the afternoon. On the radio Big Joe Turner was singing - Flip Flop and Fly, I don’t care if I die.

abattoir blues

2011-08-26T16:22:00.010+10:00

in my father's cabin

2011-08-18T16:38:00.012+10:00

My driver’s licence photo shows the saddest person to ever pass his driving test. Despite exceeding the speed limit in Lygon St. for almost four and a half seconds (five and I would have failed), I had just inherited the right to drive my father’s old, yellow truck. My father had been dead for a year and now I was finally taking his place in the driver’s seat. I wouldn’t have put it so succinctly at the time. It seemed obvious months later on the therapist's couch, but at the time, I didn’t know why I wanted to cry so badly. We sat in the car park, reviewing the test. From the back seat the examiner was telling me how lucky I was not to have failed. Beside me my driving instructor was asking me what the hell I was thinking when I made that right hand turn into so and so street. I had just passed and he was still acting like an arsehole. I heard them both speaking in the distance, but all I felt was a strange, uncontrollable grief.

I learnt to drive that truck with one arm out the window because the indicator was broken. It was a skill that was useful even after the indicator had been fixed because I could use that spare hand to hold the cigarette. Smoking and driving, I quickly discovered was a pastime invented by God, in consultation with the Marlboro Man. I’d never felt so American, or happy. Parking was another matter, and underground car parks in the city were a further matter still, where I learnt the hard way about the value of power steering, about how I didn;t have it and about the way Porsche Drivers don’t care if your insurance doesn’t cover you. I also learnt what my father knew well, which is that if you own a ute, people will always ask you to help them move house. In such situations though, I’ve never felt so proudly like my father - so capable and useful. From a distance I gave the impression of knowing what I was doing. I had ropes and cable ties and extension cords under the back seat. I drove backwards down laneways and pulled up onto the curb. I fitted things in and I tied them down. I made trips to the tip and threw shit into the hole. I remember my father taking me to that tip as a kid, and how we stood there at the edge throwing branches into the vortex, into the great, terrifying abyss from which nothing could ever be retrieved.

It’s hard to say whether my father was a particularly good driver. He certainly thought he was, and one of his dreams was to drive in the celebrity race before the Grand Prix. Because he wasn’t a celebrity, he was always filling out coupons to go into the draw to win a chance to enter the race. He never made it, which was perhaps for the best, because in ordinary life he was always crashing. He was a fast, erratic, angry driver a lot of the time. I remember crying when we crashed into the back of some arsehole on a family holiday once. Dad had been tailgating. And once, when he was driving me to a meditation camp in the country, two lesbians jumped out of the car and started beating on our windows. I’m not sure what he’d done to piss them off so badly.

In any event I learnt to love that truck, which I also learnt to drive somewhat erratically. The back seat was always full of crap, the fuel tank was always empty and it was often breaking down or blowing smoke. But it was also sort of invincible in its way. "You can’t kill these things", the mechanic said. Turns out that’s not entirely true, because a couple days ago someone stole it, drove it to Geelong and then set it on fire.

In my dreams, this is what that truck will always look like:

something sparkles through a worn fabric

2011-07-21T10:57:00.011+10:00

Detail from: Christel Dillbohner, Itinerary for a Walking Tour Through East Anglia

via Vertigo

I have spent a good part of the last twelve months writing a thesis on W.G. Sebald. The day before I handed it in, amid the chaos of last minute revisions, a friend dropped past, and mentioned that she had met someone I knew, called Max, who sent his regards. I didn't think much of it until the following evening, when I remembered that Sebald, who died in 2001, was commonly called Max by his friends, a coincidence that might not have felt so remarkable, if it wasn't the sort of thing Sebald was constantly writing about. In his novel, Monatano's Malady, the Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas writes this, of Sebald:

“A seagull goes by and I follow it, and I am reminded of certain remarks made by W.G Sebald on mystery and the impact of eccentricity on his own fantastic genre, certain remarks also about supposed coincidences and chances that might not be so, were we to possess better means of perception, were it not because, centuries ago, we became mentally very limited after shots were heard in paradise: ‘I prefer to write about fairly eccentric people, and eccentricity is somewhat fantastical. These things happen to us as well. For example, recently I visited the museum in London to see two paintings. There was a couple behind me who I think were speaking Polish. A very strange-looking man and woman, they seemed from another age. Later, in the afternoon, I had to go to the tube station farthest from the centre of London, a city of fifteen million inhabitants. There was nobody. Except for these two from the museum. There they were.’ Sebald is a great reader of Borges, whom he always praises for understanding early on what a mistake it was to expel metaphysics from philosophy. Because in fact, Sebald claims, there are things we cannot easily explain away and because it is part of our human condition – before more than now – to maintain a certain relation, not just social, with those who came before us. The commemoration of the dead is something that distinguishes us from the animals. I am a convert and assiduous reader of Sebald, of his long walks à la Robert Walser, of his exploration of the world of the dead, of his fantastic forays into the space of eccentrics. Referring to the strange case of the Poles in the faraway station Sebald said: ‘These are not coincidences, somewhere there is a relation that from time to time sparkles through a worn fabric.’”

The other day I found this interview, via "a piece of monologue". It was the first time I had heard Sebald's actual voice, as opposed to the familiar, writerly voice that exists inside my head. The interview was recorded on December 6th, 2001, eight days before he died in a car crash.

Bolańo, who never grew up

2011-07-19T13:15:00.005+10:00

Recently I have been reading a collection of little non-fiction pieces, written for various Spanish language newspapers or as acceptance speeches, by the Chilean novelist, Roberto Bolańo, who is dead now.

If he were still alive, he might find himself with little time to write anything but acceptance speeches, so loud and so various are the acknowledgements of his achievement. Bolańo is often praised as the most influential Latin American author since Marquez and as the natural heir to Borges. According to Colm Tóibin, Bolańo’s is the “very highest level of literary achievement. For Jonathan Lethem, he “has proven that literature can do anything.” The final interview Bolańo gave before his death, (with the Mexican edition of Playboy), was conducted amid such sycophancy as to be almost unreadable.

Praise like this is entirely in keeping with Bolańo’s own generosity as a critic. For Bolańo, Pezoa Veliz is "without a doubt the quintessential minor poet of the Chilean Parnassus”. Nicanor Parra "the best living poet in the Spanish language", Rodgrigo Rey Rosa “the best short story writer of his generation", Gabriel Ferater “one of the best Catalan poets of the second half of the twentieth century”, Enrique Lihn “without doubt the best writer of his generation” and Cesar Aira “one of the three of four best Spanish-language writers alive today”. This goes on, and one feels that, if one were to add them up, such claims must inevitably overlap each other, that two or more writers in Bolańo’s cannon must inevitable be the single greatest writer, and that contradicting himself is not something Bolańo cares too much about.

Bolańo’s gratuitous generosity has been adopted, in other words, by those who write about him, as if his enthusiasm was contagious. Which it is. Enthusiasm, a university lecturer once told me, is for amateurs. It is not the slightly abstract passion of the connoisseur, of the expert. This might well be true. Bolańo’s enthusiasm is childish, which is precisely why it is so infections, so endearing, and real. It is the enthusiasm of the young poet, for whom everything is a shock, alive and enormous: the great writers firstly whose dominion extends in all directions, and life itself which is calling from beyond the horizon, from the future.

Like many teenagers, I lived obsessively through the writers I was reading – Kerouac, Henry Miller, Keneth Patchen, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman; writers of exclamation rather than subtly, touched by the shock of the living. I used to walk out into traffic while reading. Not brave, but oblivious to fear. Bolańo, with a far wider range of influences, would have done the same thing. Unlike everyone else, however, Bolańo never grew up. He seemed to have maintained this energy, this obsessive curiosity, up until his death, at the age of fifty. Bolańo, whose natural territory is not the essay, (he tends towards the tangential, the chaotic) is a reader’s critic, rather than a critic’s critic. For him, the act of reading is always a matter of life and death.

into the rain

2011-07-12T16:07:00.006+10:00

I'm really proud to have been involved with the art work for Felix Riebl's fantastic album, Into The Rain, which was released yesterday. There's also a film-clip for the single, here, which was made by Dom Allen.

on the shore...

2011-07-05T14:02:00.006+10:00

Ferragosto IV, Cy Twombly, 1961

Untitled, Cy Twombly, 1968

may i never grow so tired that i forget the world

2011-06-20T13:09:00.002+10:00

Image courtesy of the awesome Guy Ben-Ner

masdok the madman in his fever

2011-06-03T11:22:00.004+10:00

A.S Patric has been so kind as to publish this

a dream of death

2011-05-15T16:35:00.005+10:00

Miles Allinson: Obituary Portrait: 2010

On Friday, I handed in my thesis: A Dream of Death: Fantasticality and Mourning in W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Thanks to all those people who helped out in one way or another, for your advice and words of confidence, and for your patience.

Pirates!

2011-04-26T07:49:00.000+10:00

13.04.11 12:08

Today on the bus a
grandfather and his
4yr old grandson got
on and in a gesture of
sovereignty and
independence the
grandfather let the
boy sit up the front,
all on his own. The
grandfather sat w his
shopping near me.
Then 8 boys got on
and dint want to pay
for a ticket, when the
driver refused them
they started spitting
and swearing and
yelling at the bus
driver. They
surrounded the little
adventurer up the
front. 6 of them
eventually jumped off
and 2 stayed on
screaming at the
driver until the nxt
stop. The driver was
under control and the
grandfather did not
take his eye off his
grandson who with big
blinking eyes sat
quietly in the centre of
angry adol-angst. The
boys got off bashing
the side of the bus
and then very calmly
but w the strength of
passive resistance the
grandfather went and
sat w his g.son. He put
his arm around him
gave him a squeeze
and said in a thick
french accent-
'pirates!'

from here

love letter

2011-04-23T22:45:00.000+10:00

a journey (nazim hikmet)

2011-04-13T23:42:00.000+10:00

the forest of things

2011-03-28T23:39:00.002+11:00

I will try to sit beside the window on the side of the carriage closest to the river. We will cross the river for four seconds and then the view will be swallowed by a series of high-rise car parks. Before the river though, the edge of the track will be lined for a few moments by a patch of trees and the land will fall away from the bridge as if we are rising into the air.

A part of me knows that this patch of trees is almost nothing, maybe three or four trees deep, behind which there is a park with a children’s playground and then a road with a long line of waiting traffic. Another part of me though, thinks of these trees as the beginning of a forest. This forest reminds me of a small painting which hangs in a restaurant where my father used to eat late at night after finishing work. That was before I was born. The painting shows a dark forest, and then, through the trees, almost hidden from view, a strange technical building, like an observatory or a factory maybe.

The painting is hung high up in the corner of the room, not so much as a decoration, but rather to conceal a small cupboard in the wall. I know this because I once saw a waiter stand on a chair and then reach up to lift the painting off and fiddle around inside the wall. Logic tells me that this cupboard is probably used to conceal a dusty switchboard which controls the air-conditioning. But I prefer to imagine that something else is kept there, hidden from view, something which must be checked on every night. Perhaps my father knew what it was.

When the train passes the forest, and as we rise into the air, the window is suddenly filled with the brown river, like a gasp, and one expects to keep moving upward and for the city in the distance to glitter and shrink and then tip out of view altogether. But then the high-rise car park snaps shut. The people around me will continue to read their newspapers, and perhaps, as happened yesterday, a woman with large headphones and a pink cardigan will begin to sing Bohemian Rhapsody for a moment, in a lilting and faultless soprano: I don’t want to die. We will pass among the corrugated asbestos rooftops of Richmond, toward the city where we will all walk out onto the platform together, and climb the stairs, elbow to elbow, in a hurry, without saying anything to anyone.

an invitation to an execution - the work of dale frank

2011-03-08T23:29:00.012+11:00

An artist must put grain in the ground before he can harvest. When the shop lifting was an excuse for a belief in a reasonable God, 2010.

I took the afternoon off, last week to visit Howard Hodgkins’ painting Night and Day, at the NGV. I went to visit it once, years ago in London, and I try to drop in on it every now and again. For some reason it makes me happy. There is a type of green, after all which belongs to Hodgkins, just as there is a type of purple, which belongs to Bonnard. To be honest, it was hard to get a good view through the forest of school girls and their iphones, so I wandered out into the street again, contentedly aimless, until I stumbled into the Anna Swartz Gallery, where a not dissimilar painter, Dale Frank, is exhibiting.

Night and Day 1997-99

Dale Franks paintings are similarly boisterous, vibrant abstractions. Like Hodgkins, Frank’s paintings invite the possibility of a narrative. Dissimilarly, however, this invitation is almost instantly retracted. Frank’s paintings are more like an invitation to an execution – the execution of any narrative coherence. His work is also much slicker than Hodgkins’, and, I’ve always thought, more superficial, better suited to the walls of a five star hotel foyer or a corporate office. There is no artistic angst to Dale Frank’s work, after all, that isn’t tempered by irony. There is something patently contrived about them, or stage-managed. You don’t feel the artist’s pulse beating behind the scenes. There is, in fact, something decidedly unemotional, despite the emotional rhetoric of the painterly gesture. And yet they are incredibly, almost shockingly, beautiful to stand in front of – hallucinogenic, but not quite kitsch, and alive in a way that has only a passing association with the artist’s hand.

The other thing about these paintings, of course, is the titles. The painting below for example is called A tear in the eye is a wound in the heart. The droning deceptive cadence of the Blow Flies, the fabulist fibrillation of the Cicadas chorus.

A tear in the eye is a wound in the heart. The droning deceptive cadence of the Blow Flies, the fabulist fibrillation of the Cicadas chorus, 2010

People who like Frank’s paintings often find such titles pretentious. Open closer inspection, they function in a number of other ways too.

Frank’s titles are by turns, casual (The idea of being a recluse appealed more and more) awkwardly poetic (you cannot dig deep enough to bury your father ) and absurd, even stupid; ( The church was made of Pork, but the dogs ate it). In my opinion however, and I only realised this the other day, they are also absolutely fundamental to Frank's larger project, whereby an anarchy of paint is matched by an anarchy of language – each as ridiculous as the other, each exploding irresolvably. And it’s by means of this absurdity that these titles confront the unreliable relationship not only between word and image, (like Magritte) but also between language and experience. In other words, they make fun of the idea that a painting can be about anything other than itself.

Frank’s work was featured, somewhat improbably I thought, as part of last year’s Biennale of Sydney: the title of which was; The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. These very bourgeois paintings, seemed at first unsuited to such a theme, with its overtly political implications. But then I thought about how these paintings are first and foremost about painting, and quite directly I think, about the precarious survival of painting in a media and image saturated world. What’s more, it’s not inappropriate to think of these works as songs, in the celebratory sense. Maybe too, this is another way of understanding the titles, which seem to ring after all, with the awkwardness that song lyrics tend to have when they are divorced of their music.

You cannot dig deep enough to bury your father. While more and more of late he recalled so long ago when he was 15, the neighbor, a lithe 12 year old, 2010

Looking at Frank’s paintings I’m reminded not only of Hodgkins, but also of Jackson Pollock (the control of paint, the unique application, the exuberance and audacity, the non referential nature of the image) - Pollock who effectively destroyed painting, if not for everyone else then at least for himself, and who died having nowhere else to go. But Frank cannot believe in himself like Pollock could (or tried to) , since the myth of the artist as singular, unimpeachable genius has been all but worn away. If Pollock painted himself into a hole, it’s not clear whether Frank is digging him out or trying to bury him, as one tries to bury one's father.

Maps of the World – The work of Eddy Carroll

2011-02-11T17:56:00.003+11:00

I do not want to presume a special knowledge about such things, but I’d like think briefly about Rembrandt’s famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholaes Tulp, (1632). Here we see the dissection of a man called Aris Kindt, who has been hanged as a criminal and whose official decomposition has been paused indefinitely by the art of portraiture. In a superficial way, Rembrandt’s painting can be understood, and was no doubt presented as such, as a celebration of progress; the triumph of science’s capacity to discern and explain the curious system of the body. Many of those watching the demonstration, it has been pointed out, look beyond the point of dissection towards a book propped in the corner of the painting, an anatomical atlas, presumably. Here they would find their rather astonishing and horrific experience in front of the corpse verified and reduced to a comprehensible and for the most part, bloodless, diagram: an image of man as a machine.

It is also possible to see Rembrandt’s painting as a critique of this obsession with progress, and to recognise the artist’s perhaps somewhat appalled gaze siding with the victim of this spectacle. According to the German author W.G Sebald, the dissected hand is not only grossly out of proportion, but is also the wrong way around. This, according to Sebald, must have been a deliberate deformation, which signifies the violence that has been done to the body of this man, a violence that is as much punitive, as it is exploratory.

For the American writer and critic Lawrence Weschler however, the centre point of the painting is not so much the dissected hand, but rather the interplay between the dissected hand with its exposed tendons and the Doctor’s left hand which he is using to demonstrate, by touching his thumb to each of his fingers, how the tendons in fact work, in a living body. For Weschler, the “meaning” of the painting, is precisely this difference between two otherwise identical realities: the inexplicably living body and the dead but comprehensible machine. In the gap between the two exists the unknown force which animates all life. To this end, Weschler reminds us of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, of God’s outstretched finger, the moment before it connects with that lethargic pre-corpse, the un-living Adam. Rembrandt’s painting can be understood in this way as a portrait of a disconnection, the failure of modern science, in other words, to explain the animating principle behind existence.

It is worth noting also that such dissections were never proof of anything, in and of themselves. For instance, the famed Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (AD 130 – 200) convinced everybody for a long time that the heart was a kind of fireplace, which produced the body’s heat and emitted an invisible “sooty vapour” in the process. Galen's theory endured in the West in fact, until 1628, (four years before Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson) when William Harvey finally established the notion of the heart as a pump, which circulates the blood; to point to something, in other words is not necessarily to explain it. And to explain it, is not necessarily the end of things.

I am reminded of Rembrandt’s painting looking at Eddy’s work, because there is so much here which has of to do with mapping – not so much the body, but rather the experience of the body. This is true, I think, in a number of ways.

Firstly, this is work which takes time to make. Its very existence is dependent upon long, repetitious hours spent threading a needle through a piece of fabric. As with all work that builds upon itself and exist by means of accumulation, (paintings being the most obvious example), part of its ‘meaning’ exists within its materiality. When the artist works, in other words, she thinks of many things and exists in many places. The work is then, in this sense, a direct, though highly abstracted, record of her physical and emotional experience – it holds these experiences within it, somehow invisibly; her desires, reminiscences and fears, and the world that surrounded her as she worked, the sirens and rain, the heat. These have been objects she held onto, while letting go of something else. Artworks such as these remind us of this invisible history, of the way that things are constituted by their own past. It is impossible, looking at them, not to imagine the hand at work. In this sense, I am reminded of the Philosopher David Abram, who noted similarly, that for certain cultures, the past is as much a spatial reality as it is a temporal one - that it exists inside things, beneath the ground, and within the bodies of plants and animals and humans.

I also think of these works as types of drawings, since Eddy is a drawer by training, and since drawing is by its nature exploratory, skeletal. Like drawings, these strange forms bare the signs of their own making, their un-doings and thought processes, the rough edges. And yet, what are they drawings of?

On one wall a spine curves to break, or to bend in prayer or gratitude. At the base of the spine, the memory of a virus will endure. A jewelled heart lies discarded on the floor, like an open purse. A row of large teeth are scattered, like dice, or victims.

There is a story Eddy tells. In her memory, it happens like this. She is eighteen, and she is riding her bike through Carlton. At an intersection, she is hit by a car in such a way as to propel her headlong, skyward. She remembers looking in through the first story window of a pub, on her way down. She broke the ribs on the left side of her body and punctured her lung. There is a part of her that is still mid-air. The experience brought back – it still brings back – a similar experience as a small child in Malaysia, with a busy road and a car and a long, lonely stay in a tropical hospital, bound in plaster. When she finally tried to walk again surrounded by her nervous audience, she stepped out toward a blackboard on the other side of the room, where she was supposed to make a sort of mark, or drawing. At some neurological level, walking (which is to say re-entering the world again) and drawing are almost the same thing.

There is an ending to the story of the accident. Ten years after her flight above the road surface, Eddy visits a friend who lives above a pub. She enters the room, and realises that she has been here before. Blood rushes to her head and she recognises, in reverse, the room that she saw as she flew through the air. Stuck to the wall for whatever reason, is a crude drawing of a figure on a bike, being hit by a car.

In some way, I think of Eddy’s work as a celebration of the failure to explain that.

morning

2011-02-01T11:18:00.002+11:00

Here, in the morning heat
of another day
my heart goes
wearily recollecting nightmares.

And out of the altitude
in the blue and green glare -
through the plummeting scythe
of trucks along the beach road
the small hum of my love
grinds its wings.

the probablities of time

2011-01-27T09:30:00.002+11:00

A review of Joseph Kosuth's show at ACCA, in verse (sort of) to be muttered aloud while walking

2011-01-22T09:16:00.002+11:00

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing
Nothing.

Nothing .
Nothing. Nothing.

Nothing.
Nothing.

Nothing.

The things.

The things of this world.

The things

Of this

World.

The eradication of the things of this world

the things of this world

The eradication

The things

this

world.

some thoughts about christmas

2011-01-19T00:18:00.005+11:00

On Christmas Eve, as I do most years, I went to church with my mother and my sister. None of us are quite sure why we willingly agree to it, trudging out to dip our feet in that slowly moving and polluted river.

Perhaps there is something to be said for the procession, for the body of people who leave their ordinary lives to take uncertain part together, in this laborious recitation. Since the demise of the popular protest movement, after all, we have fewer and fewer opportunities to gather in agreement with one another. ( Football matches require a certain preordained antipathy toward at least half the crowd, while the experience of crowds at concerts and films tend to isolate us in our small, private darknesses. ) And yet, crowds of people agreeing with each other can also be a frightening reality. This year a woman at the door of the church was handing out plastic glow-in-the-dark bracelets which, when they broke, leaked a toxic smelling liquid that couldn’t be washed out. At one alarming moment a large number of people raised their cuffed hands into the air, in unison, like vigil-keepers with futuristic candles, or participants at a fascist rally.

It is a precaution of mine to take a book of poetry to church, as a defence against such displays of collective unanimity, as well as against some of the more insulting passages of scripture. The year before last, instead of listening to the "Letter to the Corinthians”, ( an inevitably dubious piece of advice, by any standard) I read a Seamus Heaney poem. The poem was called A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also, and it goes like this:

When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chukwa with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn’t want to end up lost forever
Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts
And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each morning.
Death would be like a night spent in the wood:
At first light they’d be back in the house of life.
(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu)

But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At another dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.

And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,
The toad who’d overheard in the beginning
What the dog was meant to tell. “Human beings, ‘ he said
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
“Human beings want death to last forever.’

Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds
Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset
To a place where there would be neither roosts nor trees
Nor any way back to the house of life.
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
In obliterated light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

And last year, instead of joining a second rendition of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, I read from Kenneth Patchen’s selected poems, something called There Is One Who Watches:

The heavens sway at his touch,
Dropping blue pennies
Into the hand of summer.
The ears of the lark alone hear his singing.
Those who love have his waking
When their bodies are fed.
On the edge of the world
Stands his undending house.
All who have waited in the darkness
Are there shone a flowering light.
Manifest in his pattern are the crowns of destiny,
And he has speech direct from God.
Dressed in the white hoods of his anger,
Terrible soldiers empty winter on the earth.
Beneath him the wells of hair
Cloud with the warm juice of suicides;
And the splendour of all creatures is polished
By the tinkling whom men call death.
All beside him nestle the eternal Guardians,
Whose kingdom is the shading of a leaf
Or the clanging open of a grave.

On the radio, someone spoke jokingly of Christmas as the day when we stop to remember Christ’s death. Truthfully, I think of death too each Christmas, and not only these last few years, since my father died. And though I don’t consider myself a Catholic, I do enjoy the moment when, after eating the bread, you file back to your seat in the hushed, slightly charged atmosphere, as if something might almost have changed, and which is, in a practical sense I suppose, the awareness of many people being thoughtful together, in the light from small fires.

I admire, also, the way Catholicism recognises frailty, and the way that – far from Rome and regardless of the gratuitous and geriatric splendour of the Pope – its mission is as much a pragmatic and social one as it abstract and spiritual. What struck me this Christmas just gone, was just how strange, how incredibly tender, the public and collective recognition of frailty can be.

In a lecture on poetry, Borges, recounts a Phoenician sailor’s prayer from the first century. It was spoken aloud when a storm had risen and the ship was about to be lost:

God’s, judge me not as a God
but as a man
whom the Ocean has broken.

We trudged back out, into the dusk and the world again. We were like people who come back from a river, having been reminded that they live in the middle of an ocean.

beneath trees

2011-01-06T11:14:00.004+11:00

Like the far drone
of an air-conditioning unit
the sea lands out there
in the dark.
Some trees, beside the roadhead
flame the song -
old unswaying calloused pine epitaphs
which break the view during the day
like inkblots
and go unloved.
We parked beneath them
to watch the slow lines of surf come in
pixilated by the night
and to listen, impatiently, alive
until 11.54

the word 'never'

2010-12-15T12:10:00.011+11:00

Grief at death is irrational.

When I have tried, in that alarming moment of proximity, to register death – to understand what has just happened – what strikes me is not something terrible to be grieved, but rather the curious awareness that death is, above all, something overwhelmingly strange.

Grief is not a rational response to the experience of suddenly knowing that something or someone has gone and will never come back. This fact, the fact of death, remains incomprehensible, firstly because our minds cannot make sense of the full meaning of the word ‘never’ . It is not that 'never' is a terrifying idea so much as it is an incomputable one. Death thrusts ‘time’ upon us in such a way as to short circuit our functional awareness of it.

The part of us that grieves at death ‘knows’ something that we don’t. Suddenly, we are faced with the body in which there is no more life. Something invisible, like wind, has disappeared.

Why are you crying? Someone might ask.

I am crying because, my father, or my dog has died.

What has happened in that death?

Death has made them cease to continue to exist.

What does that mean?

I have no idea.

Are you crying because you do not understand?

No, I am crying because I do understand.

I don’t understand.

The part of me that cries, understands. But I do not understand that part of myself.

sky news (monsoon spring)

2010-12-03T11:20:00.001+11:00

friends and relatives

2010-12-02T19:38:00.002+11:00

"The whales come to us, make friends with us, and interact with us," says Peter G. Allinson, a Baltimore doctor who has made several trips to Dominica, which is between the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

a discussion about tourism

2010-11-19T15:40:00.015+11:00

"To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event."
- Don Delillo from The Names

Hi there,
I read the gambit on the side of your store about tourists and find such negative comments to be offensive. Not only is it tarring many with one brush, but it is also incorrect. People travel in order to experience new cultures in an attempt to expand their mind and learning's about the planet.
It is true that a few people may not value the culture or end up inadvertently offending a local person, but this is the few - and for Australia, the tourist industry is vitally important to the country.
Who ever chose to hand write the negative comments on the side of your bookstore made a mistake as I for one will no longer be a customer.
Regards
Laura

*********************************

Dear Laura,
Thank you for your email. I’m sorry that you found the quote on our blackboard offensive, it was certainly not intended to be. It comes from a novel called The Names, by Don Delillo, and is spoken by the main character, himself an American tourist in Greece. Delillo’s intention, I think, is to dramatize and at times exaggerate certain cultural trends - and his observations are sociological rather than derogatory . You could call his works satirical, if his exaggerations didn’t have a tendency to come true. In this case, I don’t believe Delillo is commenting on any specific group of tourists, nor is he suggesting that everyone just stay home. Rather, this comment has to do with the globalised industry of tourism, with the social forces at work which determine the ways in which we experience other cultures.
I would like to stress the distinction, in my mind between the ‘tourist’ and the ‘traveller’ (although, in the passage to which we are referring, Delillo indeed conflates the two). When I go overseas I would like to think of myself as a traveller and not as a tourist, as someone who, in the words of another writer, Hakim Bey, wishes to “understand travel as an act of reciprocity rather than alienation.” I agree that people travel in order to experience new cultures and to expand their mind. But I think it’s worthwhile to consider how we go about doing this. We would all like to participate authentically, but what precisely does this require? And is it always possible to step beyond the tourist ‘industry’ entirely?
In many ways the tourist industry represents places, and replicates experiences. This is a crude example of the way tourism works: when we think of certain cities, cities that we would like to visit, we think instantly of a set of clichés – the stock images from a travel agent brochure. The meaning of these images is provided for us in advance. It remains for us merely to prove our proximity to the source of these images, by taking a guided tour, during which time the ‘meaning’ of these images, is explained to us by a ‘licensed expert.’ In order to prove that we have understood this meaning, we produce another image, a photograph, which corresponds as closely as possible to the image we first saw in the brochure.
In this way, places represent themselves to potential visitors, but in doing so, it could be argued, they also represent themselves to themselves; they become in effect, what they imagine the ‘other’ desires them to be. Real places and imagined places are always becoming confused. In itself this is a profoundly liberating notion. But the question remains: who is doing the imagining?
I remember taking a cycling tour down a particularly treacherous mountain road in Bolivia a couple years ago. An important element of that experience was the pleasure I derived by being able to claim afterwards, that I had ridden ‘the world’s most dangerous road’. The road had acquired this title, however, because Bolivian workers were forced to risk their lives, everyday driving old trucks around these hairpin curves. Inevitably, every now and again, someone would drive off the edge and plunge to his death. My ‘real’ Bolivian experience, traded on this fact, it replicated this experience. Except that I got a t-shirt, and the truck drivers had to come back the next day.
In a piece published in Best American Essays in 2005, David Foster Wallace wrote:
"My personal experience has not been that travelling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: as a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."
Many people would disagree, or would like to, because such ideas are confronting. But, if we wish to develop a consciousness about how we move through the world, then it seems important that we at least recognise these criticisms, and attempt in our own lives to prove them wrong.
The way people travel, is always changing. Assumptions that persisted in the 18th century, about the inferiority of Non-European cultures, for example, can no longer be supported. Likewise, no doubt, many of our own assumptions will be proven to be incorrect, or misplaced, in years to come. However this does not mean we should stop travelling, or stop trying to experience the world.
Like travel, literature allows us to experience different points of view and to learn about the world. According to Don Delillo, a writers job is to “hold truth to power”. As a bookstore we strongly support the right of authors to challenge and confront our assumptions. And as an active part of a community, we equally support the right of a passionate and engaged audience to disagree with them. I would like to thank you for your engagement. Should you change your mind and decide to come back to the shop for any reason, I look forward to meeting you.
Sincerely,
Miles Allinson
Readings St Kilda

***************************************

Hi Miles,
I very much enjoyed reading your reply. Perhaps I was too easily offended, not something I am usually guilty of; but I was feeling sick and tired of people taking easy pot shots at travelers and tourists.
I am actually working in Melbourne as I wanted to experience what the City is like to live in and I have enjoyed my stay very much. Beforehand I had travelled the east coast of Australia and Asia too. I have conflicting views on the travelers that I have seen and met. Some people party from one place to the next with little or no consideration of the local culture, but others search for more than that. Equally, I have become fed up with the traveler who is searching for the "true experience" and always wants something off the beaten track, where no one else has gone. I find this attitude tiresome and contradictory; on one hand they are wanting to go somewhere unspoiled, but in doing so they are then tourists in this unspoiled area themselves.
Tourism is a conflicting subject. Many of the Countries I visited rely heavily on the tourist industry and have become what people expect them to be. I guess there are arguments for and against, and neither party would be completely correct.
Thank you for your reply, and taking the time to write such an insightful piece.
Laura

the man in the alcove

2010-10-17T18:22:00.004+11:00

1.

There’s an old man I sometimes notice, who stands at night in the alcoves of buildings, playing the harmonica. I’d like to say he wears a suit and an old man’s hat, but the truth is he wears a dusty plastic sports jacket, which doesn’t suit him at all, and carries dandruff on his shoulders. He is small, kind of squashed looking and his face is almost perfectly round. He has the smile of knowing a secret that cannot really change anything. He stands in the shadows and plays, but he asks for nothing, not even money. At this time of night the street is full of drunks, even in winter. Once I went to drive away, but as I started the engine, one of them climbed up on the roof of the car and clung on, like a sea anemone. I have heard these drunks arguing with the man and laughing. I have seen him shout after them, a torrent of abuse, which was carried away on the wind before it could ever reach them. It was carried away and out to the dark sea where it meant nothing, where seagulls were still turning in the cold air, because they couldn’t sleep. On nights like this, he plays on and on, as if he’s fighting against something other than the drunks.

2.

There’s an old man I see, dressed in a suit, who places his harmonica into a small suitcase at the end of the night. He’s tiny, almost a midget and when he walks, he keeps his back very straight, as if he is trying to seem taller than he is. His nose and fingers are puffy and his grey hair is parted on one side, and beginning to stick up in unruly spikes where the slickness has worn off in the wind. He walks through the fun-fair on the edge of the sea, as if he is holding something fragile together. He doesn’t put a foot wrong. He goes just to hear the screaming and the happiness. He would have liked to have had children once, but it’s far too late now. In a week he will be 64 or 65. He smells the water and the sugar and the cold. The machines are driven by attendants in purple uniforms, who’ve been waiting for hours to go home. There are young couples, hugging one another, as if they might not be doing it right. No one seems to notice the man. He does not stop in front of the mirror that makes you taller. The mirror would not notice him either, and perhaps if he stopped there and looked for himself, he would disappear forever.

3.

There’s an old man who stands at night in the alcoves of buildings. He is small and grey and red faced, thick featured with the way of a retired boxing trainer. He plays the harmonica. He accepts no reward. He is not a beggar. He is not even a busker. He plays Irish songs, union songs, jigs. Girls dance for a bit, drunken and sparkly on their way home and about two million invisible rainbow lorikeets screech in the palm tree above him, even at midnight. When he’s finished, he places his instrument in a small suitcase and walks carefully to the tram, without swinging his arms very much. On board, he will stand, even if there are plenty of seats. He smooths his hair. I imagine him climbing the rotting stairs to his small apartment. He puts his suitcase down and finds the key. No one is around and he breathes out. Whoever is causing trouble tonight is doing it somewhere else. He enters his one room. The moon and the dust on things, the stuffy smell. The bad carpet, with the mark of an iron, like a cliché. A bare tree at the window in the gold streetlight. I imagine he sometimes imagines, going to the bathtub, turning on both taps then returning to the centre of the room to stand and wait with his arms by his sides. He would wait like that, for however long it took, perhaps many years, for the water to creep up over his chin, over his eyes and head and bury him.

4.

There’s an old man in St Kilda, who plays his harmonica in the empty doorways of buildings at night, when no one is watching. He does not let you throw your coins to him, and in fact, he once yelled at me and made me take my money back. “Do I look like a fucking wishing well to you?” I know that he is doing something very important, which I cannot see. Imagine for a minute, a great Swedish hot air balloon hanging precariously above the Arctic Ocean, sometime in 1896. Inside the basket is a square jawed adventurer whose idea this was, his nephew – an amateur astrologist, and a third man – a meteorologist unrelated by blood to either of the first two. They are losing altitude and it’s dark. Below them a few stray ice ledges are floating in the black water, but nothing to land on, nothing that would bear their weight even if they could direct themselves to it. You could imagine the cold, but you’d be wrong. It’s much colder. No one has ever attempted before them to cross the arctic by balloon. It is an enormously expensive operation, and one that will cause much suffering, not least to the families of these men, if it fails and they die. Remember for a minute the tiny old man in the nearly empty gloom of Acland St., whose job it is to play his harmonica and by playing to keep this balloon from plunging into the frozen sea.

5.

The old man watches the seagulls in the park fighting over a few scraps of cheap, white bread. It’s dusk and cold and maybe he doesn’t want to play his harmonica tonight. Maybe he just wants to sit here, while the world moves around him. The lorikeets, or whatever they are, rattle across the sky, catching the light, but it’s the seagulls which really interest him today. He watches one particularly ugly bird grab a large square piece of bread and fly away, with a gang of others screaming in close pursuit. And since this bird cannot eat while it is flying any more than it can land and swallow in peace, it flies out low to the sea, with the anchor of bread in its mouth, until, condemned by its own nature, it collapses from exhaustion and drowns, so far out to sea that its body will never wash ashore.

6.

There’s an old man I look for, who stands at night in the alcoves of buildings, out of the wind. He is not waiting for anyone. He plays his harmonica, like Dylan in the early days I like to think, kind of crude, with two feet on the ground, pulling something up. He asks for no money and he plays for no one just as happily as for a great crowd. I have never seen a great crowd massing, mind you, in the dark, to hear him, but nevertheless, I imagine the various members of this crowd sometimes, getting ready to leave their apartments and houses, checking their watches, picking up their children from the three inches of cooling, white water in the bathtub where it would be difficult to drown. Hurriedly they would dry their children’s wet hair, thinking again, how small and fragile a child’s head is, how absurd. The children clench their faces in the blur of the towel and allow their parents to dress them in train-coloured pyjamas and carry them, wrapped up through the cold streets, to where this man has already assembled an immense audience. There’s light in everyone’s eyes, a gleam (and you’ll remember this in years to come, if you are one of these children). The world is enormous and solitary and dark, and everyone is watching and not talking, while this old man plays. He is boxy and small, his grey hair getting loose of its wax. In front of him rests a thin suitcase, which is closed. It means he does not need them. It means the crowds come for themselves, because they enjoy the beauty of a man who does not need anything and who sings about this every night, even in the misery of winter.

- The Man in the Alcove won second prize in the 2010 St kilda Word Prize

the looking glass world

2010-09-24T16:54:00.016+10:00

I was watching Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, recently, on the recommendation of Lars von Trier.

Mirror is more a dream than a story, a non-linear and, for the most part a non–narrative film, which traces the memories of a possibly dying Russian man, Alexei, as he ponders his relationships with his family, with his country, with his country’s history. Alexei, a thinly veiled version of Tarkovsky himself, is never seen, except for his arm and hand, briefly (a hand which clutches and releases a live sparrow, on one such occasion). Rather, we see his large, empty house, the light through the windows, we see his memories and his dreams of childhood.

We see the world events that have stayed with him; footage of the red Army crossing Lake Sivash in 1943, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and we hear his voice, often speaking on the telephone to the other members of his family, at a remove, estranged, troubled. As Lars von Trier pointed out however, “no one has ever been able to say what the film is about!”

Watching on the brink of sleep, I was reminded of Peter Doig's paintings, his toxic greens and oranges, his half hidden, ominous houses, buried in the the forest. And I was reminded also of a park where I sometimes force myself to go running. At night the park is almost empty, except for a few shadowy creatures, dark dog shapes loping at the corner of my vision, the contorted silhouette of two people performing complex stretching exercises. There is a large, drooping pepper-corn tree, which smells of my childhood, and which reminds me also of another tree, which lifted in slow shock at the edge of a river, fifty years ago, when my Dad, at the age of thirteen, threw a live hand-grenade into the water.

The sky is that last blue. The colours of everything are wet. A train slices the park in half, in a gorge lit with sudden neon. You can see the people inside, reading the MX. A sports field, on the other side of the tracks, glows that hallucinatory green, under the artificial light. You can hear the screaming of organised sport. A church rises up from a patch of subtropical, shadowy plants, and then you come out at the highway: the red taillights disappearing under the bridge and the Shell petrol station - a company, I'm always reminded, which is responsible for the execution of a renowned Nigerian poet.

I turn around to make another, breathless, sweep of the park. Tarkovsky's father, another dead poet, begins to read, in dubious subtitles, from the Russian:

Each moment of our dates, not many
We celebrated as an epiphany
Alone in the whole word.

More daring and lighter than a bird
Down the stairs like a dizzy apparition,
You came to take me on your road,
Through rain soaked lilacs
To your own possession.
To the looking glass world.

Upon finishing Mirror, Tarkovsky wrote: “Childhood memories, which for years had given me no peace, suddenly vanished, as if they had melted away and at last I stopped dreaming of the house where I had lived so many years before.”

storm living

2010-09-23T13:53:00.000+10:00

5 years ago

2010-09-11T17:29:00.005+10:00

Five years ago this month, I was living in Beunos Aires, in a little apartment, with someone who is now married to someone else. Back home, John Howard was the Prime Minister of Australia and Phillip Ruddock was Minister for Sedition and UnAustralian Activities. In Argentina, everyone was talking about George Bush, who was on his way, for the Summit of the Americas. The newspapers and the walls of the streets were screaming in protest. There was an election due, also, in Buenos Aires, and men on motor bikes were distributing pamphlets, by throwing them into the air as they rode past, like sudden, slowing falling explosions. Jacaranda trees were blooming all along the avenues and every night I ate steak for dinner at 1 o'clock in the morning. Before I fell asleep, I would hear the dogs take over the city, the dogs and the cartoneros, the carboard collectors. I was learning Spanish, badly, in a Moy Trashy cafe, and trying to write; a play maybe, or, failing that, a very long email home, which I knew many people would find annoying.

And so I decided to start this blog, so that people who liked me, could read the things I wrote sometimes, without feeling obliged. I remember walking through that city, trying desperately to think of a name for this thing. Eventually I remembered a poem, which I had written a couple years earlier, about bats, sort of:

Having shaken themselves
from the dark
like bits of sky,
leathery wasps; bats
sing the density of shadow,
break the air like a gasp.
That movement is
heavier than flight,
more like a sustained
confrontation with falling.

Here, the night
is in the earth too.
Smoke lifts and stretches,
makes itself small enough,
thin enough
to fit between the air.
That's what dying is
somone said once;
becoming that small.

The air in the kitchen
is tuned to violence,
too distant to make out,
precisely, the words.
It's the general, quiet drone
at the edge of things.
Something nagging
beyond appearances
like death, like many deaths.

Insects and aeroplanes
draw their tiny bodies
through the night;
the scribble and the ruled line,
each erased by the instant.

The moon
is a scattered debris of light
across the garden.
Beer, smoke,
something about time.
The blossom; a welling of tears.

This is to say, happy 5th Birthday, blog-thing. And thankyou everyone for stopping in, however often, over the years.

history images (dust storms)

2010-09-01T12:13:00.003+10:00

homemade worlds

2010-08-18T20:23:00.003+10:00

http://textcamp.nextwave.org.au/#homemade-worlds

One Hundred and Ten Percent by Nick Waddell

history images (lost and found)

2010-08-05T17:18:00.002+10:00

cry wolf

2010-08-04T15:54:00.000+10:00

some sort of breakfast view

2010-07-31T17:25:00.000+10:00

the owl you heard by frederick seidel

2010-07-23T16:30:00.006+10:00

The owl you heard hooting

In the middle of the night wasn't me.

It was an owl.

Or maybe you were

So asleep you didn't even hear it.

The sprinklers on their timer, programmed to come on

At such a strangely late hour in life

For watering a garden,

Refreshed your sleep four thousand miles away by

Hissing sweetly,

Dispensing the smell of green in Eden.

You heard the summer chirr of insects.

You heard a sky of stars.

You didn't know it, fast asleep at dawn in Paris.

You didn't hear a thing.

You heard me calling.

I am no longer human.

from Ooga-Booga

learning the sea, 1982

2010-07-17T16:11:00.004+10:00

there are no dogs in the town of munshk

2010-06-23T09:00:00.010+10:00

When the people from the little town of Munshk awoke one autumn morning, they discovered that the council had been busy without them. In the town square, or more precisely, where the town square had previously been, now stood an enormous public art. And since the public art was not just a lump of something, (as had been explicitly stated in the proposal), but was rather, a living, breathing inhabitant of the city, parts of it stuck out much further than what had previously been understood as the rightful geographical boundaries of the former town square. Parts of it had been found in Berlow’s Bakery, other bits had made their way, or so people said, into Mr Peaks illegitimate bed while he was in the middle of it, and still other associated remnants of it had awoken the drunks even before they could be kicked awake, in an alcove two miles from the epicentre.

It won’t surprise you to know, that the inhabitants of Munshk, (a quiet brewery town on the outskirts of more important places) were very much flummoxed by the imposition. The night-watchman, for one, whose job it is to do the kicking of the drunks, had been particularly put-out. I was passing through at the time, there are fiords nearby, and I witnessed some of the grave events that were to follow, with my own eyes. Other events were told to me by Barry, the brewery worker and by Gavin, also a brewery worker, in the pub on the corner of Elm and Pelican Sts.

The inauguration ceremony that first evening went smoothly enough, though the speech by the important politician went on for far too long (and became increasingly strange), and the whole event was accompanied by the dull mutterings of discontent, like the rumbling of an enormous belly. Also some kid began yelling that his dog had disappeared.

The next day three more children were complaining of missing their dogs. By the end of the week, there wasn’t a single dog – rabid, stray, deaf or otherwise, left in the entire town and it seemed clear to everyone that something should be done lest they themselves be devoured next by the big fucking dog-trap that the council had installed in their midst.

So the citizens of Munshk held a meeting, and there they came up with a plan. They gathered all the homeless people they could find and lead them by rope to the big public art. Then they fastened them to a lamp-post and ran back to their cars, to wait with the doors locked. Nights and days past. The homeless people died of exposure or thirst, of enforced homelessness basically, and the big public art was dismantled and carried away, every bit they could find, in many different boxes and put into storage with all the other public art that cannot be entirely disposed of, like radiation.

rain

2010-06-19T17:09:00.004+10:00

It’s true, I have seen things I wish I had never seen. And yet I have become accustomed, living like this, to catching those close glimpses into our neighbours lives. I knew who was home by the light in their windows, and I got used to hearing those half-phrases, or watching, not for long, but watching nevertheless, their mouths move in the kitchen as they talked, as they discussed their plans or cooked. At night when a sudden rain began, we would all, separately, come to our windows, which is to say, to our senses, as if the rain reminded us of something.

And whether we performed for each other in some way or not (certainly not like those people in high rise city blocks who perform for each other, nakedly and each with their own telescope), we at least knew and were comforted no doubt by the knowledge that our presence, at the very least was being registered, that our music was being overheard, that the books on our shelves and the paintings we had hung on our walls were being glimpsed and guessed at from across a small divide of air, through the glass of two windows.

Occasionally we would greet each other, ambiguously, and I dreamt of them vividly sometimes, moving through the slightly altered architecture of our shared buildings, lighting cigarettes in the thick dream heat, some sub-tropical evening. There is, even awake, quite often a dreamlike quality to living so close to one another, without ever knowing one another’s names. And once, when I had woken in a storm, and was sitting in the dark on my steps, which face their steps, smoking, I heard a door open nearby. But it was only when the lightning illuminated everything for half a second, that I saw her standing on her balcony, naked, like the wooden statue at the prow of an old ship.

It’s strange that they managed to leave without me noticing. The window-sills have been cleared of their potted plants. The walls are bare and the rooms remain dark, even at night when we used to cook dinner across from one another, without looking. I catch myself peering out sometimes, still, to see what they're doing. It’s like when you open the window to hear the rain at night, only to realise that you’re mistaken – that the sound you thought you heard was the sound of a shower somewhere else in the building, or nothing at all, not even the wind.

futures

2010-06-08T16:43:00.000+10:00

"Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation – and I like that."

2010-06-02T12:55:00.005+10:00

The day she died, and without realising what had happened or was about to happen, I was watching this documentary about her.

"I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands" she said.

i don't feel well geoff

2010-05-29T15:08:00.000+10:00

the king of secrets, the duke of vertigo

2010-05-25T15:52:00.010+10:00

There is a small, goat ridden and rocky island in the Caribean called Redonda, to which one can belong, theoretically, as a member, though not, so to speak, as a citizen, given that the absence of any significant source of fresh water has made it impossible to live there.

Nevertheless, Redonda is a Kingdom, ruled over from afar by a King, or, more precisely, by a series of individuals who all claim to be the King. One such claimant is the Spanish author Javier Marias, who also runs a small publishing house called Reino de Redonda (Kingdom of Redonda) and awards a particular literary prize, which bestows upon the recipient, along with a certain sum of money, the title of Duke or Duchess of the said Kingdom. Previous winners include, Pedro Almodóvar, who became the Duke of Trémula, Francis Ford Coppola – the Duke of Megalópolis, Alice Munro – the Duchess of Ontario, and J. M. Coetzee who likewise became the Duke of Deshonra. Apparently W.G Sebald also received from Marias, the official title: Duke of Vertigo.

Strangely, the island of Redonda lies beside the Island where Herzog made his beautiful and cruel little documentary, "La Soufrière - Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster") in 1977. Sebald’s work bares many startling resemblances to that of Herzog and so it seems only natural that he have some sort of influence in those seas, where, according to Herzog, the snakes drowned themselves to get away from the volcano.

A portrait of the King from, by Jan Peter Tripp which appears W.G Sebald's, Unrecounted

It is on the vague advice of W.G Sebald, the Duke of Vertigo, that I finished reading, just this morning, Javier Marias’ remarkable novel, A Heart So White.

The novel is narrated by Juan, a recently married translator, and begins like this:

"I didn’t want to know but I have since come to know, that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra, and aimed her fathers gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests."

This woman, so it turns out, was the previous wife of Juan’s father, Ranz, before Ranz remarried the dead woman sister and had Juan. In this way, she is both almost mother and aunt to Juan, and yet, of course, she is neither, could never have been either, her death being a prerequisite for his existence.

This blurring of the boundaries between characters – where one person almost becomes another, or another, is central to Maria’s novel, as are the notions of chance and inevitability and the voyeuristic, sexualised violence.

The second scene takes place during Juan’s own honeymoon in Cuba. His new wife Louisa is ill and lies feverishly asleep in the hotel bed. Juan is standing at the balcony, when he notices a young woman waiting impatiently on the street corner below. At a certain point, the woman looks up directly at Juan, appears to recognise him and begins yelling, insulting him and rushing angrily towards his hotel window.

The woman, it turns out, has mistaken Juan for the man in the room next door, a man who we eventually hear, but never see. Juan and Louisa listen to the two people arguing through the wall, as the woman from the street threatens to kill herself, demanding instead that the man kill his dying wife.

The novel sets out a series of acts or tableau’s which remain distinct at first but gradually leach into one another, until they become all but indiscernible. Marias untangles his themes so delicately that, by the novels end he is concluding numerous sub-plots simultaneously, as a caucophony of intermingling voices, characters, quotes, thoughts, memories, times and places merge.

Much like his recently completed trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, (both titles come from Shakespeare) A heart So White is a novel which deals with the twin acts of speech and silence, with secrecy and with the corrupting power of knowledge. As Terry Pitts has pointed out “Marias uses the world of spies and spying” (or in this case listening and translating) “as a vast, flexible metaphor for literature”, and yet it would be a mistake to consider his work as mere self-reflexivity, as literature about literature first and foremost.

A heart So White raises many such questions to do with translation and deception and story telling, but these are essentially questions about the possibility and responsibilities of knowing one another in the world as men and women and families, specifically. More generally though, they are about the dubious possibilty of knowing anything for certain. Fiction is truth spoken, and the very act of speech not only falsifies but carries with it, its own unimaginable consequences. To speak or to remain silent, to act or to remain still, to know or to remain ignorant these are the questions which Marias confuses and tries to negate, since nothing can be known in its entirety. And yet even partial knowledge stains, and every act carries its own impurity, such that we cannot long remain, with a heart so innocent, so uninvolved, so white.

To be in the world unites us with others, with their horror and capacity for violence, which we have, in many cases, no choice but to accept.
And this is true to the extent that we no longer know where another’s responsibility ends and ours begins.

At the same time, Marias emphasises our separation from each other, the exclusions and secrets which even language cannot overcome and the threat which marriage poses to male identity. The central image, and the one beautifully rendered on the cover of the American edition, is of a man standing on a balcony, looking out onto the street. Behind him lies the domestic world, marriage, obligation, the necessary singularity of ones identity. This is the world to which he belongs, the world he has chosen and from which he cannot escape except by an act of violence, and yet he has his back turned on it. Before him lies the outside world, the multiplicity of selves and possibilities from which he is now excluded.

For the characters in this novel, the spectre of violence hangs behind every sexual act. Sex and violence are both secrets in this world and thus natural partners. Men cannot be trusted, either to act honestly or to act without cruelty. Even Juan’s casual silences might be small betrayals, in a certain light, especially if we consider marriage as the impossible unity of two distinct people, who cannot hope to share the same mind, the same loyalties, the same histories.

In Marias' world, (and in this sense it’s a distinctly, even unfashionably masculine book) man is caught between the one and the many; between the isolation which even speech cannot overcome, and the loss of ones own self, ones innocence, in the chaos that speech calls forth.

we repair everything

2010-05-20T14:12:00.004+10:00

volcano love

2010-04-19T13:36:00.001+10:00

a sound that calls people from afar

2010-04-15T18:40:00.003+10:00

During the last years of her life, the only conversations Udach’ Kuqax’a’ach’ was able to conduct in her own language, took place in her dreams. She was the last living speaker of Eyak, an indigenous Alaskan language that ceased to exist in 2008. In Eyak her name meant: a sound that calls people from afar, though in English she was perhaps better known as Marie Smith Jones.

There was a word in Eyak: Xuqu’liilx’aax’ch’kk’sh, that once meant: are you going to keep tickling me in the face in the same spot repeatedly? Now it means nothing, and even if someone dreamt it, they wouldn’t understand.

I have been reading Bohumil Hrabal’s curious little autobiographical interview / novel as he called it, Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp (or Kliĉky na kapesnĩku as it is known in Czech) and thinking about how much we owe to those mostly anonymous tightrope walkers, practitioners of the world’s second oldest profession; translators. and I've been thinking also, how much we miss despite their best efforts, how much will never pass through the gates they open.

The Kliĉky for example, in the above title, apparently refers to the sort of manoeuvres required of a soccer player, who must dodge and weave and dribble the ball in front of him. In English we don’t have a word to describe that. Meanwhile the “postage stamp” was a handkerchief in the Czech original. Running Around Llike a Soccer Player on a Handkerchief, apparently doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Having only read Hrbal in translation though, I, for one, have found it difficult to spot his apparently obvious debt to such writers as the moral nihilist Ladislav Klĩma, or the Czech master Jan Neruda let alone Karel Jaromĩr Erben, Božena Nĕmková, or Jacub Deml whose novel, Forgotten Light is, for Hrbal “the very acme of Twentieth Cenury prose.” Clearly my ignorance knows no depths and yet I’m entranced by these cryptic names, these strange sounds. They are like passwords to an unfolding world.

Martin Amis was similarly perplexed when he reviewed a book by the British poet and critic Martin Seymour-Smith. Smith's Who’s Who in World Literature is by all accounts a totemic book, an attempt to describe every significant literary achievement of the Twentieth Century, in every language:

"Seymour-Smith not only gives the impression that he has read everything ever written by and about everyone in every language: he also gives the impression that he has read everything ever written by and about everyone in every language twice.

A bemusing habit of Seymour-Smith’s is to make a remark of truly galactic learning – and then dwarf it by revealing a whole universe of bibliomania in the background. Daniel Fangunwa is the first important writer in Yoruba and Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale is assuredly his best book. Ah but he did not build up an account of Yaruba cosmogony as poetically as ‘Tutuola (q.v)’. The Islander Halldór Laxness’s fiction, we’re all agreed, is “not wholly integrated’. Were you aware however that he owed much to the ‘untranslated’ Thorbergur Thordarson ‘ who is perhaps the superior writer?”

As Amis points out, Seymour Smith’ book is a plea for internationalism, and yet he wonders whether its daunting nature might not force baffled readers back to a reactive parochialism.

Whilst the invention of post-colonialism has meant that cultural hierarchies have been gradually, (though of course not completely) dismantled, globalisation has at the same time helped to subsume (and ultimately destroy) definitive cultures and real difference within the dominant Euro-American tradition. This is no doubt a preferable situation to the deliberate obliteration of histories and languages which dominated many of the Twentieth Century’s cross cultural relationships. Language itself has always constituted a threat, particularly if it was a language you couldn’t understand. Which is why the Nazi’s liked burning books so much, and also why Serb bombing deliberately targeted Libraries during the Balkan War, destroying thousands of irreplaceable books, documents and manuscripts in numerous languages – a catalogue that constituted, according to the writer Nicholas Basbanes, "a common heritage that Muslims, Serbians, and Croatians had shared for more than four hundred years "

Harold Pinter wrote of this fear of the Other in his play Mountain Language, which begins with a group of traumatised women waiting in the snow at an army barracks to visit their captured men:

SERGEANT: Your husbands, your sons, your fathers, these men you have been waiting to see, are shithouses. They are enemies of the State. They are shithouses.

The OFFICER steps towards the WOMEN

OFFICER: Now hear this. You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language is dead. It is forbidden. It is not permitted to speak to speak your mountain language in this place. You cannot speak your language to your men. It is not permitted. Do you understand? You may not speak it. It is outlawed. You may only speak the language of the capital. That is the only language permitted in this place. You will be badly punished if you attempt to speak your mountain language in this place. This is a military decree. It is the law. Your language is forbidden. It is dead. No one is allowed to speak your language. Your language no longer exists. Any questions?

Today languages disappear less violently, for the most part. An 89-year-old woman dies peacefully, for example and takes an entire culture with her. Of the 6000 or so languages in active use now, around 70% are considered endangered. At the very point, so to speak, that the First World prepares to listen, the Other speaker herself falls silent.

study for figures at the base of a crucifixion

2010-04-07T16:37:00.003+10:00

On the corner of the Nepean Highway and Glenhuntly Rd, (a Godforsaken intersection if there ever was one) across the street from a Petrol Station and the MacDonald’s, where I was once almost killed by a gang of ten year olds, there’s a simple red brick Church. On the little patch of grass outside, facing the morning traffic, is a sign on which is proclaimed, every month, The Good News, so to speak. The Good News is, to be honest, generally pretty uninspired: Jesus: Celebrate His Birth, for instance being neither particularly witty nor theologically convincing. More recently, the notice: Life is Short, Take The Scenic Route With Jesus, was much improved, to mind at least, when someone changed Jesus to LSD.

Over Easter, the signboard has born the message: Jesus: His Death For Your Life, It’s an idea which has been troubling me now for weeks. I grew up as an unconvinced Catholic I suppose. I went to a Catholic school where other unconvinced Catholics were required to indoctrinate us, unconvincingly. Despite all this though, I’ve always been fascinated by what I felt to be residing, somewhere just the other side of all the doctrine, the mystery, which no one seems to have their head around, least of all the Pope. I was reminded of this, driving past the Church sign,when I realized that I have absolutely no idea what Easter means.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung spoke about his disillusionment as an eleven or twelve year old with the Church firstly, and with his own father, who was a Pastor, preparing him for confirmation:

"One day I was leafing through the catechisms, hoping to find something beside the sentimental-sounding and usually incomprehensible as well as uninteresting expatiations on Lord Jesus. I came across the paragraph on the Trinity. Here was something that challenged my interest: a oneness which was simultaneously a threeness. This was a problem that fascinated me, because of its inner contradiction. I waited longingly for the moment when we would reach this question. But when we got that far, my father said, “We now come to the Trinity, but we’ll skip that. For I really understand nothing of it myself.”

The church teaches that Jesus traded his suffering and brutal death, as a kind of ransom with God, who was his father. In return, Jesus managed to secure the salvation of humanity, from some sort of eternal state of sin. Why God would require someone to be tortured in order to spare the rest of us, seems, at the very least, a little troubling.

In Latin America, the crucifixion scenes I saw seemed even bloodier than those of Europe, with particular attention paid to Christ’s bleeding knees, where he is said to have fallen on the way to the Golgotha. One icon popular in Peru reduced Christ to an almost unidentifiable mess of blood and gold. Religions have always been obsessed with violence, perhaps in part because of their role as forms of popular entertainment. Ritualized violence, from the days of the Coliseum to present day Hollywood, has always, provided a powerful cathartic experience, and religions, surely have understood this. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the overwhelmingly bloody central image of Easter.

If this violence, on the other hand, is the actual point of the story, as Mel Gibson seemed to believe, then perhaps, the crucifixion, as the supreme example of cruelty is as much about our capacity for violence, as much about the Roman soldiers and cheering crowds, and detention centres as it is about Jesus the redeemer.

The artist Francis Bacon was fascinated with this history of violence and painted a number of remarkable crucifixion scenes. Identifying with the masochism inherent in the story of Christ’s death, Bacon drew his inspiration as much from the local Butcher as from the Church.

These day’s, local priest encourage us to disregard the gore, and to understand the crucifixion as a rather elaborate metaphor for the triumph of the spirit over the suffering of the body, a sort of ancient incarnation of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and Freedom, plus some eternal life after death.

In any event, we have Easter eggs now, a 17th century, Central European tradition which has been gradually transformed. It is not such a bad thing I think, that a meditation on suffering and cruelty be at the same time a celebration of fertility, of life – and yet the rows of half price Easter Eggs in the 7 eleven tend to leave me unmoved.

Looking at all these Easter eggs and at Bacon’s Crucifixions, at his slabs of meat, I think of a passage from W.G Sebald’s Campo Santo in which the narrator, traveling through Corsica during hunting season, stumbles into the path of numerous, unfriendly hunters. The general mood of violence sends him into an uneasy reminiscence of his childhood:

"I remember, for instance, how on my way to school I once passed Wohlfahrt the butcher’s yard on a frosty autumn morning, just as a dozen deer were being unloaded from a cart and tipped out on the paving stones. I could not move from the spot for a long time, so spellbound was I by the sight of the dead animals. Even then the fuss made by the hunters about sprigs of fir and the palms arranged in the butchers empty white tiled shop window on Sundays, seemed to me somehow dubious. Bakers obviously needed no such decorations.

Later, in England, I saw rows of little green plastic trees hardly an inch high surrounding cuts of meat and offal displayed in the shop windows of family butchers. The obvious fact that these evergreen plastic ornaments must be mass-produced somewhere for the sole purpose of alleviating our sense of guilt about the bloodshed seemed to me, in its very absurdity, to show how strongly we desire absolution and cheap we have always bought it."

a heart of staggering break-neck speed

2010-04-01T12:26:00.003+11:00

When I was young, I wanted to be a Superhero called Trevor, during the day at least. At night, or in times of emergency, though, I would have been Redback, a character with huge obligatory muscles and super-powers utterly indiscernible from those of Spiderman. I was a complete rip off, sadly, and I petered out by the age of about 11 or 19. Later on I become obsessed with another Superhero called The Savage Dragon, a big, green guy who woke up naked one morning in a burning field, with no memory of who he was or how he got there – a re-birth scene which was, I realize now, just an elaborate hangover metaphor.

Still later, I discovered the Existentialism of the Silver Surfer, the most morally complex of all Superheroes, who was also…like…a surfer and shit. The Silver Surfer spent the early years of his life leading a giant, planetary-force called Galactus through the universe, searching out planets (and the various beings who lived on those planets ) for his master to devour. The Surfer, as he was affectionately known, was therefore implicated in the murder of countless lives, an enduring legacy, which I realize now was all just an elaborate metaphor for corporate irresponsibility and global capitalism. He wandered, henceforth the wastes of the dark, godless universe, morosely pondering the nature of personal responsibility, shame, forgiveness, and the unavoidable, naturalness of cruelty.

Although the Halcyon days are over now – long hot summer years, spent gently plotting my gratuitous revenge against the forces of evil and school authority, I have continued nevertheless to harbor, into adulthood, a secret desire to be a Superhero. Recently I invented another job for myself, as The Enterprise of Destruction, (a moral debt collector and executor of righteous indignation) who took it upon himself, and could be appointed pro-bono, to respond to unrequested junk mail from multi-national companies, with a combination of linguistic audacity and good old fashioned death threats (though I am still waiting for the $150 apology I requested from Telstra). Unofficial franchises recently opened in Nigeria, as photographed (above) by Pieter Hugo.

All of this goes some way to explain why I was so excited the other day, when my friend, Luke (A.K.A Captain Lucian) returned from New York where he has been teaching small children how to skip and hanging out with the renowned author Dave Eggers, at the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. Luke brought home: one can of X-Ray Vision and one Can of Speed of Light, as well as some underpants, which he can probably keep.

Dave Eggers set up the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. (BSSC) in 2004, as a front and fund, for his secret activities helping kids with their homework, in the creative writing and tutoring centre, 826NYC, out the back. It models itself on Eggers’ similar initiative, 826Valencia, in San Francisco, (with pirate outfit store) and is now one of seven such centres around America, of comparable, staggering genius. I believe even Barrack Obama has been known to drop in every now and again, when he’s struggling with his speeches or his utility belt.

other voices

2010-03-27T11:55:00.004+11:00

My thanks to Miscellaneous Press for including a me in this little compilation.

second life

2010-03-22T11:58:00.002+11:00

This story belongs to a friend of a friend of a friend.

She was on a motorbike. She was crossing an intersection. And then she was caught under a truck somehow, being dragged across the asphalt with the bike sparking beside her. Two paramedic students, who happened to be passing at the time, attended to her body. The news crew arrived and filed the report of her death. The truck and carnage was in the background of the shot no doubt, just out of focus. The reporter would have been standing beside the road looking ruffled, kindly, saddened, urgent.

Except that she wasn’t dead.

The ambulance arrived eventually and she lived, against all odds. Some weeks after that, while she was recovering, she received a package. I don’t know how it arrived, perhaps through a friend of a friend of a friend. It was a DVD. She watches it at every opportunity now. And yet no one else shares the intensity of her fascination. They find it too difficult, too eerie. It’s the news report that never went to air, the story of her death.

In 2002, while the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz was preparing his Nobel Prize Lecture, he received a large brown envelope in the mail. The letter had been sent to him by the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Centre, the concentration camp where Kertesz arrived, in 1945 at the age of sixteen. Contained within the envelope was a copy of the original camp report from that day, February 18th. In one of the columns, Kertesz was able to read about the death of prisoner #64,921 – factory worker, born 1927. Kertesz had made himself two years older, so that he wouldn’t be classified as a child, and had given his occupation as “worker” rather than student in order to “appear more useful to them.” The war ended before he was able to fulfill the Nazi prophecy.

It would be too easy, as Kertesz himself realizes, to draw from these stories, some belief in an otherworldly order, in some sort of providence, or “metaphysical justice.” To do so, would be to sever “the deep and tortuous ties with the millions who perished and who never knew mercy. But if we are destined to be exceptions”, Kertesz continues, “we must make our peace with the absurd order of chance, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a death squad, exposing us to inhuman powers, monstrous tyrannies.”

Thinking of these stories, I think also, though aslant, almost inappropriately I know, of Tom Ford’s recent, somewhat overrated film, A Single Man, and how, in the face of his immanent suicide, the main character’s world acquires again the colour and smell of miracle. For less than a day, he lives like an angel, drenched in the last beauty of things, in the toxic Californian luminosity. In one particular scene, he stops a woman on the street, so that he can smell the ears of her small dog, a smell that reminds him of buttered toast.

I can understand that desire to watch and re-watch the scene of my own death. I can imagine it becoming an obsession, the desire to feel the drug of its liberation as often as possible – that uncanny trick of time, and the taste of coffee perhaps, since I would watch it over breakfast, and drink coffee that I shouldn’t be able to taste, in the wash of morning sun that I shouldn’t be able to feel washed by.

The privilege which Kertesz shares with this motorbike survivor, is the tangible evidence of his own miraculousness. While the rest of us, survivors in our own less cataclysmic manner, and without the adamancy of such proof, must find our own ways to die, our own ways, every morning, to get reborn.

the name of the father

2010-02-24T13:27:00.003+11:00

A woman came into the bookshop where I work the other day and admitted to being a Virgo. Even though she was aching to read the final installment in Steig Larsson’s absurdly successful Millennium Trilogy, the size of the current trade-paperback was putting her off. The thought of having a third book on her shelf, which didn’t match the size of the first two, was overwhelming. She’d rather starve.

My own father, also a recovering Virgo, toiled similarly under the tyrannical reign of such extreme orderliness. You could hear him the whole length of the house away, restacking the dishwasher and swearing at the recklessness of our original design – the sheer idiocy of the way in which we’d placed the special ceramic cups next to the saucepans, the single-bloody-minded blasphemy of our plate order. In the garden outside, the pegs on the clothes-line were colour-coordinated – red red, yellow yellow, blue blue etc and the cracks between the bricks were cleaned of moss and other non linear, rhizomatic forms of rebellion, no exaggeration, with a small metal implement made painstakingly in the garage for just such a purpose. It was a way he had of keeping chaos in order, a way that brings to my mind the orderly rows of human bodies we tend to line up after some shocking disaster. Lists and straight lines render the terror, at least in part, manageable.

For many years, especially the ones during which I was listening to a lot of Rage Against The Machine, my father represented an absurd order, against which I was waging chaos. (I must have been reading Lacan at the time, if I remember correctly, because I also spent inordinate periods of time looking at myself in the mirror.) We inherit the world of our parents, after all, and it takes about 15 years or so before we realize what a mess they’ve made of it, what a diabolical system of stupidities and inequalities they’ve abided, and abetted and bequeathed.

Two films reminded me recently of this enduring and universal tension between fathers and sons, between the order, which "The Father" represents, and the chaos, which his literal replacement, "The son", promises. These divisions are by nature, reversible, of course. The Father’s order weakens upon closer examination and is revealed as chaos. It is The Son, so to speak, who must teach him the new order.

Not long after Hugo Weaving was the voice of an evil robot / car, in Transformers, he became Kev, a struggling father and thug in Glendyn Ivin’s wonderful, Last Ride, a film which disappeared somehow without a trace, and without winning every single Australian film prize, for which it seemed destined. The ride in question is a desperate lurch through South Australia, undertaken by Kev and his young son Chook in a series of stolen cars, while the forces of consequence and disaster gather and close on them. Kev, charged with the job of protecting and teaching his young son, struggles against his own erratic cruelty, even repeating in one sublimely terrifying scene, the vicious methods of his own father, by abandoning Chook in the middle of a salt lake.

The Road, John Hillcoat’s rendering of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, might be viewed in this context as an auspicious companion to Last Ride, it’s strange mirror. The road tells, similarly, the story of a father and son who travel across a bleak, beautifully rendered desolation toward nothing really.

According to the historian and sociologist Theodore Zeldin, Humanity’s job has always been to produce more humanity. To begin with, this was a matter of numbers – of survival and procreation. Gradually, it has become a question of dignity, of humaneness. Amidst the chaos, these films ask by extension, how do we find ways to order our most noble impulses, to institutionalize dignity, to extend, even by a little the amount of goodness in an already broken world bequeathed to us by the previous generation?

At the end of his book, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, proposes one such possibility:

“Learn and seek to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

it's alive!

2010-02-18T19:06:00.005+11:00

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis played last night at the Astor, twice – once on the main screen and once, simultaneously, as a cropped reflection in the glass cabinet where the emergency fire hose is kept.

From its inception, cinema was obsessed with its own creation, with the miraculous production of itself, the reproduction of life. It rehearsed this infatuation, subliminally in part I think, through the character of the toiling scientist, the scientist driven half mad by his own brilliance, and by the scientist’s bastard offspring, his mirror – the monster or robot.

Cinema, of course, was one among many new technologies, which were rapidly changing the world. Amongst these early filmmakers, there is a noticeable ambivalence, towards the uncertainty of this technological future, and toward their own part in its conception. The scientist is driven mad by his God-like power; his hubris and his narcissism are his downfall.

This obsession with the scientist is, more accurately, an identification with the chemist, with his concoctions and innumerable steaming beakers, and thus naturally with alchemy. No doubt this has everything to do, also, with the original process by which photographic images were drawn out from their chemical baths in the dark room. Early cinema can be thought of, in fact, as the literal reenactment of this process – the revelation of images, by some miraculous process, to those gathered in a dark room.

Behind cinema, like its shadow, stands the anatomy lesson of history, the revelation not of life, but of death. The scientist who unveils his robot, his monster, reinterprets the scene in which the physician unveiled the inner workings of the human body.

Watching Metropolis, you realize how dramatically the early film-makers actually defined the genre, how different film would have been without them. When Guy Madden made his brilliant silent film Brand upon the Brain! in 2006, he drew upon this history of scientific obsession, to create a portrait of his own father as a mad scientist, forever toiling underground, cooking up potions made with the brain-sap he collected from orphans. And in Victor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece, The Spirit of the Beehive, 6-year-old Ana, too young to understand the distinction between fact and fiction, becomes obsessed with Frankenstein’s Monster, believing him to be a sort of spirit. Which is what photography, and by extension cinema is after all, a second self, a sort of spirit, cut from life or risen from death.

The other day I found the photograph below, (here) one of the first ever taken. The man’s name was Robert Cornelius and the year was 1839, yet it feels like it could have been yesterday. It’s like looking at a spirit, or the atom from which cinema was born.

the best ideas we ever have, we have in our sleep

2010-02-08T22:37:00.006+11:00

PLUS the subconcious art of testing stuff in space:

from HERE

experiments at sea etc (birthday cards)

2010-02-07T00:31:00.000+11:00

declare independence!

2010-02-02T20:46:00.006+11:00

It’s been said, and for the most part I agree, that people who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have them. Australians did their best to confirm this theory last week, on National be a dickhead day. Acland Street was full of people trying to park their Cadillacs and waving things they’d just bought from the Two Dollar shop, made of Chinese plastic. Writing in the Brisbane Mail, John Birmingham identified a new shift in Australia’s attitude to being a dickhead:

“One of the things I really like about Australia, or I used to anyway, was our quiet reluctance to wave the flag in everyone's face; a reluctance which has gradually given way to an uglier, brutish readiness to paint the flag on our arses and sit on the face of anyone who looks even remotely disinclined to play along.”

As a quick glance at the primary policies of the Australian Protectionist Party will attest to, most of this Fascist flag waving stems from a fear of strangers common to humans during the rudimentary stages of their evolution, The Middle Paleolithic Era, at least 40 000 years ago. The Protectionists, (and you can blink disbelievingly at their website here) are actively working for:

“…sensible immigration programmes that will be geared towards accepting into our country only those people who will readily fit into our society, primarily from traditional sources such as Europe and Britain.”

In direct opposition to this sort of grunting, the philosopher and historian Theodore Zeldin is explicitly concerned with expanding the way in which we identify our roots, or our socio-historical origins. In his groundbreaking study of human emotions An Intimate History of Humanity, Zeldin claims:

“The mind is a refuge for ideas dating from many different centuries, just as cells of the body are of different ages, renewing themselves or decaying at varying speeds. Instead of explaining the peculiarity of individuals by pointing to their family or childhood, I take a longer view: I show how they pay attention to – or ignore – the experience of previous, more distant generations, and how they are continuing the struggles of many other communities all over the world, whether active or extinct, from the Aztecs and the Babylonians to the Zoroastrians, among whom they have more soul-mates than they might realize.”

According to Zeldin, fear has historically been overcome by one of two methods. The first is by replacing the old fear with a new, slightly more hopeful fear. The second is through curiosity to what is different or unknown.

Reading Zeldin, whilst at the same time being attacked with Australianess ads and barbeque propaganda has prompted in me the desire to perhaps declare complete and sacred independence from Australia, at least for one day a year. And since furthermore, and against the odds, I do actually enjoy waving a flag, albeit in a kind of pathetic way every night before I go to bed, I am now calling for a new day, on which we can each declare our independence, not just from Australia, but from all nations, organizations, political parties, violent gangs, scout clubs, reading groups, artist collectives, mother’s committees and trout farms. Xenization Day, which is the catchy title I’ve settled on, celebrates the process of being a stranger everywhere, holds sacred our own essential loneliness, promotes the creation of flimsy handmade individual independence flags and encourages adventure to foreign lands where, with every new encounter we might meet a new race of person who will not will readily fit into our society. As Bjork declared on her most recent album, Volta:

Start your own currency Make your own stamp Protect your language Declare independence!

29

2010-01-27T15:02:00.002+11:00

It's my birthday today and maybe i feel a little bit like this:

from here: ParkeHarrison-the architects brother

ahoy!

reasons for living happily

2010-01-20T00:11:00.004+11:00

Philip Wolfhagen - Winter Nocturne IV

It’s often said that people speak of the weather only when they have nothing else to say. This cliché is an attempt for whatever reason, to separate us from the world, to install us instead in some half furnished future where the air-conditioning works overtime to delude us. “Meteorology”, as W.G. Sebald taught, not long before his death, “is not superfluous to the story. Don't have an aversion to noticing the weather.”

Some day’s ago, in any event, suffering under the sort of malaise beneath which Sebald himself seemed invariably to be struggling, I had the idea to head out toward the coast, with a few members of the Malvern Surrealist Movement, to see the watery part of Sorrento. It’s a way many of us have, if we’re lucky, of driving off the nameless despair, which envelopes us once every while, like a smoky vapour. The purpose of these expeditions, if the truth be known, is merely to notice the weather in a little more detail.

Whenever I find myself growing weary of my own company, whenever a weedy abandoned block opens out in my heart, whenever I find myself wistfully contemplating the precarious height of bridges and window ledges; and especially when old people, far from appearing somehow holy, (by virtue of their being so close to death,) seem exceedingly stupid instead, stumbling unthinkingly as they do across the barren years towards their inevitable and unconsidered end, then I reckon it about time to get out coastward and go snorkelling.

A little while ago, during the 1920’s, the French poet Francis Ponge was a very angry young man. “Too angry”, according to Margaret Guiton, “to commit himself to much more than sporadic gestures of one sort or another. He was angry at all human institutions and arrangements, most particularly the words whereby this sordid state of things insidiously penetrates our minds.” Gradually, Ponge came around, to the point where he was able to declare, that all poems should bear the title “Reasons for Living Happily.”

“At least in my case, he said, each (poem) I write is like a note I try to hit when, during a meditation or contemplation, a rocket of words bursts from my body that refreshes it and encourages it to live a few days longer.”

This self-renewal through language is always initiated, according to Ponge, by the mind’s “return to things.” In the soupy present world, where we are surrounded as much by the absence as by the presence of things; the return to the real, to tangible objects and to the weather, by some careful recognition, almost inevitably precipitates the desire to live happily, at least for a few extra days.

Ponge writes of “things” in a way that few poets have ever been capable, or willing. He writes of “The Mollusk”, “Bread”, “Vegetation,” “The Cigarette”, “Dung”, The Pebble” and “Moss”, but by utilizing a constant process of defamiliarisation and by transforming the language of science with the urgency of an elemental philosophy, these insignificant “things” are revealed again as they might be to a child or to the first human, as essentially miraculous.

Of The Seashore, Ponge writes:

"…An elementary concert, made all the more pleasurable and thought-provoking by its discretion, has here been offered to nobody through all eternity. For the first time since it was formed by the insistent action of the wind on a boundless platitude, a wave, come smoothly from a great distance, at last finds someone to defy.

But only a single brief word is vouchsafed to the pebbles and shells, which seem quite moved, and the wave dies uttering it; and all that follow will die uttering the same word, sometimes a bit more loudly. Climbing over one another as they reach the first rows of the orchestra, each draws itself up a bit, bares its head, and gives its name to whomever it is addressing."

To my mind, there is no one who can speak so well about the weather. “If speaking of earth like this makes me a minor poet, Ponge said, “an earth tiller, that’s what I want to be! I do not know a grander subject.”

little armageddons

2010-01-06T14:54:00.002+11:00

The end of the year grants us the opportunity to look back and remember which celebrities have died. That’s the truth. We like our death filtered through the spectacle of obscene wealth and fame and obscured by the low resolution of paparazzi images. We hold death at the distance of Myth, in order to comprehend it. And then we have a party and get really messed up.

New Year’s Eve is by definition, a funeral ritual, the means by which we sublimate our fear of death. It is our little Armageddon, where we rehearse the end of time. Even the annual firework display, seems to anticipate some spectacle of devastation, enclosing whole bridges in fire and smoke. Perhaps this is why I am clinically terrified of New Year's Eve, and why I haven’t really enjoyed it since 1991, when I was allowed to stay up and watch Clive James on television talking about which celebrities died during the year. It was the only day, as far as I can remember, on which I was allowed to watch T.V., a novelty that I’m still excited about.

The other day in Portugal, thousands of octopuses enacted their own little Armageddon, by washing up dead along a stretch of beach some 5 miles long. “Authorities have warned the public not to eat them.” A volcano, in other news, is threatening villagers and chimpanzees in the Congo with ash and molten lava. In this slightly morbid mood, such news put me in mind of a strange little Werner Herzog documentary my family and I watched this Christmas Eve, instead of going to midnight mass. “Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster” is Herzog at his most mythic, trespassing through a deserted Caribbean island town in the shadow of a smoldering volcano. Donkeys and dogs have taken over the streets. The traffic lights continue to change, a television plays from an abandoned house, but the rest of the town is eerily empty, silent, like some sort of science fiction set. Every boat has left the harbour, but the water, so we are told, is full of snakes that fled the mountains and threw themselves into the sea, to drown.

In 1902 the same volcano, La Soufriere, emitted identical warning signs before it wiped out the entire population, bar one. The only survivor ironically, so Hertzog tells us, was a criminal, “the badest guy in the Town” who was protected from the blast by the walls of his solitary confinement cell. The lucky man spent the next miserable years of his life as a touring curiosity. Herzog discovers three similar characters in the present tense who have decided, out of poverty or madness or profound spiritual acceptance, to stay behind and face their inevitable death. One such man lies under a tree with a cat, at the base of the Volcano. “God takes us all to him, not just me” he tells Herzog. “Why should I be afraid?”

Profound spiritual acceptance is something I tried practicing this New Years Eve. It’s like when the plane wobbles 33 000 feet above the earth, and your heart skips its beat and you’re able to think, for the longest second, “here it is, my death, welcome.” This year I didn’t get messed up. I stood on a beach in Wilson’s Promontory and watched the sky blacken, watched the pink lightning pulse on the horizon. When it grew dark we drove home through the blackness, slowly enough to avoid wombats, but too fast to avoid the frogs, as the road steamed in the rain. Then we watched channel nine present the Sydney Fireworks, the two onscreen presenters like Emissaries from hell. Afterwards, we lit sparklers and some sort of animal made a noise like a horse breathing heavily in the bush beside us. Then we went to bed and dreamt and woke up in the new decade.

the woodcutter

2009-12-16T12:36:00.007+11:00

Last week we had our gumtree cut down. It was lifting up the house looking for water, and posing various dangers to the property and life of the neighbours. It had been around since Dad first bought the house 30 years ago. I feared for it in storms, but it was the best tree on the whole street and its death is, in some ways, a freshening of the grief we all felt when my father died. The photos of the whole process reminded me of a painting I made six months ago, of a lone man in a forest, a woodcutter perhaps.

this is an ad... or... capitalism hurts so much!!

2009-11-23T15:21:00.007+11:00

The second series of mu cards will be available at any moment. Since I am very poor, these are them (more of less) and you can buy them if you want for $3 each or as a set of 8 for $20. (plus postage if you want me to post them to you.) Or you can go to the shops and buy something like this:

which literally doesn't mean anything.

all orders (and salutations) can be sent to: mrcurly__@hotmail.com

joy and revolution -

miles

Leaving LeisureLand

2009-11-09T12:50:00.002+11:00

When they came to the door I was in the kitchen, weighing the evidence against a fly that was trapped behind part of the open window. I could use last months LeisureLand brochure and beat it to death. This sentence amused me the most. Or I could catch it using a plastic cup. That was the second option. All the cups here are plastic, so we don’t hurt ourselves, so we don’t suddenly fall into a spasm and jam a wine glass into our eye. That much I’ve surmised. Alternatively, I could stand here trying to coax the stupid thing down the little gap between the two panes of glass to freedom, and whatever natural, inauspicious death awaited it out there, in the never-ending heat. The coma of heat we’ve come to. The windows are still glass I notice. Another oversight to make note of. I keep a list and recite it whenever anyone comes to visit. Not that they come. Aeroplanes have plastic windows, if I remember correctly. Even if I manage to get it out, it’ll probably be eaten alive by a spider, in the nook of some storage facility. Are there spiders here? Come to think of it, there aren’t many flies either. I wonder what they do with them? A gentle and completely inconspicuous rain of insecticide washes the town every fortnight, making life intolerable for all insects, didn’t you know that Robert? So this, this rogue beast, is some entirely new species. I leave it to bang itself breathless and go to answer the door.

The thing which LeisureLand has to its advantage is this: no one can remember very well what came before. Children, grand children, half cousins, step nephews, all that, they’re the ones who arrive every year or two, to sit on our couches and remind us, or half remind us, of the old world. To be honest, it’s hard to say how long I’ve been here. It’s in everybody’s interest, this forgetfulness. It seems to make less and less sense out there anyway, from what I can judge.

I remember this, this futility, from a thousand years ago. My own grandfather used to make lewd jokes and smoke a pipe and drink two bottles of whiskey a day. Or three. We’d sit in the horror, (in photos we’re still sitting there) with our bad haircuts, our itchy looking clothes, out of some obligation on the sticky leather of those couches. Christmases, birthdays, Fathers days, then just Christmases, then nothing. Then nothing. Am I like that I wonder? We speak about my body. My most humiliating grievances seem to interest them very much. They even take a certain pleasure in the whole thing, I’ve decided, enquiring about my cantankerous bowels while they sip my lemonade. God. But I vowed not to become a bitter old man. Who are you again, I think as I tell them about the enormous trauma of just taking a shit.

They pull up in their golf buggies, every now and again, laughing and sweating and calming down as they approach the door. Visitors are obliged to swap their car for a golf buggy at the gate, they can do less damage that way. Every idiot can drive a golf buggy. The streets are full of them. Full of young, bright faced, slightly dreary people up close, saving money for a year or two by driving golf buggies in endless circles around LeisureLand. They get out and inspect things. They feed the dolphins with microphones attached to their heads, they pick us up when we fall over and take photos for the record so we don’t sue them. They delegate to the not so young people, the Porto Ricans mostly, or some similar Spanish speaking demographic, who come to do the real work, the cleaning up of things. The courteous business of spraying things down, of carrying things away.

We need certain assistances, but we are actively encouraged to retain our dignity and our sense of independence. I don’t know what would happen if they stopped coming. The food people, the ones who take us to the waters edge to gape at the trained animals. The gym team. The pain easement specialists. The appliers of sunscreen.

The resentment fades. No. The resentment changes. Its learns to resist. It becomes some new species of mood, circling in the nook of my heart.

I can gaze out the window, from here, toward the twenty metre wide environmental buffer zone and listen to the water being turned on and off, the gas being employed, the coronary system of secret energies hidden inside the walls of the buildings. The fridge throbs, but you cannot hear the highway. Not from here anyway. We live in a blaze of greenery. The neighbours can be called-to, if need be and that’s encouraged. Helping one anther fosters a sense of community. For more urgent requirements we carry an alarm system around our necks at all times, in case we cannot get up. For the moment this is my preferred method, since the apartments on both sides now are empty, have been empty for days. As in most villages, pre-loved homes become available from time to time.

But that was then. If I still speak like all is well in LeisureLand, it’s because I don’t remember much else now, and I want to hold onto it. At some point, you realise, you’re all alone in here, just you and your mind playing tricks. Your conjurers mind – pulling rabbits, chopping ladies in half, throwing knives while you wait in the empty auditorium for your heart to give way. An octopus has three hearts. I just remembered. And some sharks eat one another in the womb, before they’re even born. I don’t know why these statistics come into my head. The conjurer, as I’ve said, is more or less running the show.

The heat was 36, at least. I was in the kitchen, looking out through the buffer zone toward the highway. In five billion years, I thought, the earth will be swept by a tsunami of darkness. A stellar tide will pick it up and carry it for however long into the mouth of the sun, like an offering to some monster, where it will be swallowed up. Was it too early to have drink? A fly was caught between the two window panes and was going mad because the world looked so real. I didn’t hear them arrive. They arrived with the silence of two vipers, I might later say.

When they came to the door, the heat was 36. I could hear water gushing somewhere. Secretly. I opened the door. Two men were standing very close to one another, there on my doorstep wearing, I can’t remember exactly what they were wearing actually, but looking, let’s be honest, a little tattered. Things in leisure land don’t get tatty around the edges but blossom and grow, and the gentle ambience becomes all pervading. Would you like ice tea or lemonade, I offered, thinking quickly, but it won’t be necessary, they said, are you ready? What group is today again, I asked, a little anxiously, because the days must have begun to slip. You’ll see about that, and it seemed as if they were talking together, at exactly the same moment. You’ll need some good shoes though they said all at once, and, slipping past me into the apartment they began to look around for my shoes, to peer under my bed.

They sat me on the couch, so to speak. In any case I found myself sitting on the couch while these two men knelt and did up my shoelaces. The swift, economical gestures of men trained in such things.. Out on the street they had me by the arm, and they led me toward a golf buggy and gently touched my head like policemen do, in films I remember. All’s well now that we’re in the buggy I thought, though upon closer inspection this thought didn’t seem to hold much water. The two men were in the front, bouncing up and down a little on the pebbly track, and every now and again one of them would turn over his shoulder to look at me and smile brightly, flashing his teeth.

We came to a stop at the gate. The man in the booth smiled and said something I didn’t catch, to which I smiled back and we climbed out of the buggy with our ticket and walked over toward where the cars were parked, slowly because I am old and I have osteoporosis and high blood pressure and the two men understood this, were paid, no doubt, to understand this. It was bakingly hot. Teams of visitors were getting in and out of cars – troops of bright coloured children trailing after their parents through the maze of vehicles, playfully inflicting their obscure little cruelties on one another. And I half thought, well, this is a little adventure, as I let myself fall into the back seat of their car, some sort of Ford, I think, but new or newish and had the door closed gently on me by the two men.

How wide open the world was as we drove out of LeisureLand. We passed service stations and takeaway food places and the occasional small block of scrub, where a few horses were picking at the grass. How long had it been, since I’d seen all this stuff? We passed strange warehouses, and two-story office complexes with demarcated staff parking attached and a place called SexyLand in big pink letters. How brightly the coloured flags flapped above the car yards. And how insane it all seemed, how purposeful and exhausted and terrifying – these buildings and signs and roads and people driving, like us, through the bleak midst of it. I felt a rising wave of nausea pass, and a little tumour of fear put its spurs into the tissue of my stomach and clung. Recklessly I pressed the window down, and took in a burst of the world’s air. What the hell’s going on, I yelled out. Who approved this stupid exercise? One of the men turned to look at me. You have a long way to go, I thought I heard him say above the sound of wind, you should get some rest, and it was true, I felt exhausted all of a sudden, laying my head back against the upholstery in resignation and closing my eyes. The window rose of its own accord and I could hear the two men saying something to one another in the front. I couldn’t make anything out, but then, I remember, I was on my hands and knees, listening to a scratching sound, which seemed to be coming from beneath my bed, from a long corridor of darkness, where something was moving. In the dream I was pressing the emergency alarm around my neck again and again, uselessly, and then I began to crawl in after whatever it was. Too much darkness beneath ones bed, a faulty alarm, these were other things to put on the list of oversights I thought. A person could get trapped under their bed looking for their shoes, with no recourse to help. The scratching was getting louder.

When I woke we were driving through the night down a road lined by trees that continued further than you could discern into the darkness. The sound which the tyres made on the road was smooth, even soothing, it was a decent road though we were far from anywhere it seemed, but above this noise was a constant ticking, the staccato sound of insects – moths and little fruit flies (and something else like rain), hitting the windscreen in their thousands. It was discernibly colder than before. I rubbed the window clear and looked out into a whiteness that struck me like a page from an old encyclopaedia I had loved as a child. The world beyond the road was being gently and unrelentingly buried by a drifting hail of ice. Snow, of all things, I thought, realising that I had prepared, in my way, to never see such a thing again. I felt something in me weaken its grip. One of the men turned from the front and handed me a plastic cup, with a red plastic straw sticking out of it and a small packet of something, biscuits. Then the man produced a rough woollen blanket and, twisting in his seat, began pulling it up over my knees.

Maybe I dozed off again. The world doesn’t hold your attention like it does when you’re young. They’ve come to show me snow, I thought, these two bastards, and it made about as much sense as anything then, I supposed, as I watched the world falling softly through the foggy glass.

When I woke again, the car had stopped and the men were shaking me. A weak morning sun was coming up coldly behind them and snow was drifting into the car through the open door. They helped me climb free of the back seat, slowly, and I heard myself complaining about my bones, though I barely had time to stand there shivering, wrapped in the blanket before I felt them take me by the arms and lead me out into what I supposed had once been a field. Now everything was dazzlingly white. The ground sunk and crunched beneath our feet and steam came pouring out of us. A wind was rising and we bent into it, the three of us, squinting and breathing.

They led me through the haze for a long time and then we stopped. This is where we leave you, they said. I turned to them, standing behind me and it seemed then, through the squall, as if they were joined somehow, like Siamese twins, or like a snake born with two heads.

That’s your direction they said, pointing toward more nothingness, keep going that way. They smiled at me and turned and I saw them disappear into the sleet-mist just like that. I stood there like an idiot for a minute, getting frostbite no doubt and not knowing what to do. I looked again at the direction they had indicated, and then, since what choice did I have, I tightened the blanket around my face and stepped forward. The snow was being blown about in circles now and even if I’d chosen to turn back I wouldn’t have known which way to take. That’s how I began to walk, slowly, through every pain. Sometimes a man doesn’t come out of a snowstorm.

a heart that beats

2009-10-31T11:37:00.002+11:00

Absence, as David Hare noted, tends these days to trump presence. The rise of the internet, (as banal as that sentence is), really has seen to it that our friends are further and further away. We have web dating, instead of bush dances in the town hall, Skype instead of talking to the old lady next door who wants to tell me how wicked men are, and can I help her reach a twisted tree branch which has come loose and will surely fall and kill all her dogs at once.

We have the pixels, which are little dots of bio-chemicals made in Africa by slaves I think, instead of ink which we used to make, not personally perhaps but nevertheless, by pounding hawthorn branches in the spring against a wine soaked river bank. We have emails instead of letters sent by ship across three months of nauseating sea. When we open an email, there is no longer the wafting smell or half-smell of salt and vomit and sunrise across more nothingness and water.

I know what every single girl I ever had a crush on in primary school is doing in 2 hour updates. I know when a vague thought floats across their Facebook, like a dreary cloud. I can see pictures of them passing out in bars on the other side of the world, before they’ve even woken up to it. I know the intimate habits of their pets. But none of us would actually recognise each other in the supermarket line.

Today, in the dying months of the decade, a general bodylessness prevails. Last night I spent hours examining pictures on the Internet of a family, who claimed that their six year old son was trapped inside the big silver hot air balloon that was hurtling perilously across America, live on television. The kid was never in there, of course. It was just a hoax intended to promote a reality television program that didn’t exist yet. Of course. The most overwhelming element to the whole story was just how deeply unsurprising it all was. How weary.

Don Delillo knows this weariness exactly, this tired treadmill of replication and disembodied hysteria disguised as news or culture. Ten years ago he wrote a beautiful little play called Valparaiso about a businessman named Michael Majeski who, headed for a town in Indiana called Valparaiso, boards the wrong plane, and ends up in a city of the same name, in Chile. The usual news outfits pounce, sensing the “human interest”, and soon Michael is forced to quit his job in order to dedicate himself more wholeheartedly to his new career as a full time celebrity, to the endless interviews, the reality programs, the feature film.

INTERVIEWER: But once you realised. You must have felt.

MICHAEL: What?

INTERVIEWER: I don’t know.

MICHAEL: Out of place, I guess. Displaced or misplaced. Somewhere else.

INTERVIEWER: But you were somewhere else. This is the point.

MICHAEL: I don’t mean in body only. Somewhere else in a deeper way. Somebody somewhere else… I felt remote. I felt a tremendous separation… From what. From everything. Physically safe. Physically fine. But cut off from everything around me. And from myself as well.

INTERVIEWER: As if what?

MICHAEL: Some stranger had crept inside, like surreptitiously, to eat my airline food. Or someone had been superimposed on me, a person with my outline and shoe size but slyly and fundamentally different.

Delillo can also be credited with inventing Big Brother host Gretel Killleen, two years before whatever demon executive decided to patent her in Australia. In Valparaiso she’s called Delfina Treadwell, a talkshow / reality program host whose sadistic purpose is to coax every last sweat-drop of confession from her studio guest. “Tell us how you suffer”, she says repeatedly, “we deeply need to know”. The general conviction being that life, if it isn’t registered by the mass media, doesn’t happen.

The absent or the virtual body is, so to speak, a 21st Century phenomenon, and it has always been Delillo’s natural territory. The previous century belonged more particularly to the tortured body, the body rendered as the field upon which dictatorial power expresses its will. This is the body to which the British writer Martin Amis has dedicated himself, with comparative vigour in a succession of calmly vicious novels and short stories.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Amis, a writer whose exquisite prose style has been fashioned lovingly after Nabakov, yet who also has an evident and unnerving taste for cruelty. There are few serious writers capable of such humour, but his eloquence is, to my mind, often marred, especially in his essays by a kind of toxic meanness. One can perhaps discern a trace of the authors sympathy for cruelty in his nevertheless brilliant novel The House of Meetings. The narrator of this book is, after all, a murderer and a rapist. But these descriptions are complicated by the reality of the 20th century, since his crimes were committed as a Soviet War hero whilst fighting the Nazi’s, since he spent twenty years unfairly fighting for his life in a gulag, and since, after all, he is remorseful.

Against the barbaric winter of a Stalinist prison camp, the disease and cold and hunger, and the constant threat of violent attack, Amis renderers the body as a tremendous, exposed weight, which survival is forced to drag through the muddy snow. The body gives us away, it betrays us. His narrator wakes at night to the terrible sound of a room of starving men, chewing in their sleep. But the body is also an instrument, blunt and crude though it may be, of definite and substantial cruelty.
In another fantastic story, In the Palace of The End, Amis imagines the torture rooms of a certain unspecified Middle Eastern dictatorship. His narrator this time is one of the dictators many near-identical doubles. For the sake of verisimilitude of course, the doubles are obliged to suffer the replicated injuries of the King, buckled into chairs to have their one eye blown out, poisoned and kneecapped and variously shredded until, standing in the communal showers together, they resemble, “all red and raw, …a convocation of colossal penises.” They live in constant fear of the next assassination attempt, the dreaded toilet bomb in particular.

In this country, all bodies belong to the Dictator, either as objects on which power writes fear through torture, as sexual objects who must carry the rumour of the dictators sexual and thus complete power, or as doubles, designed and re-designed to stand in the way of death.
“I am wondering”, Amis’ narrator confessors, “as I always do at this time of day, why the body’s genius for pain so easily outsours its fitful talent for pleasure; wondering why the pretty trillings of the bedroom are so easily silenced by the impossible vociferation of the Interrogation Wing; and wondering why the spasms and archings of orgasm are so easily rendered inert and insensible by the climactic epilepsy of torture.”

The other night I was sitting, perhaps a little too close to the stage, in one of those vast and ornate caverns at the Arts Centre, watching a performance called Korper, (half dance piece, half play, half miracle) put on by the German dance company Sasha Waltz and Guests.
Korper consisted of a series of distinct acts, in which a dozen or so near naked performers variously interrogated the notion of the body, dissecting its parts for sale, exploring each inch of physical self, pulling out one another’s (mock) intestines, picking each other up by the fistful of skin, moving at underwater speed, or in a slow motion that outmatched those Matrix battle scenes. It was a performance which, particularly in its use of light and darkness, ached for an hour and a half on the other side of the sublime. Being German, Sasha Waltz has inherited the legacy of the Holocaust and you didn’t need to look too hard to notice references, beautiful and mournful at the same time, to mass graves, to bodies as fodder, as meat, as dust. At a certain point I realised my jaw was aching because my mouth had been open the whole time.

I have been thinking since then of the way in which a number of writers, Elaine Scarry and John Berger among them, have described literature as a sort of antidote to torture, a way of making the world again where torture unmakes it. In this same way, but even more so than literature because of its blood and liveness I suppose, contemporary dance such as Korper, offers an ethical testament to the human body. How, after seeing dancers such as these could you stomach for a second the justifications given for collateral damage, for example, or the idea of detention centres?

The filmmaker Federico Fellini, in a television interview, spoke about art in an incredibly physical way. “Left unto itself”, he said, life “would probably…seem devoid of meaning, totally insignificant, a monstrosity. Art on the other hand is something that comforts us, reassures us, tells us about life in terms that are extremely protective. It makes us think about life which otherwise would only amount to a heart that beats, a stomach that digests, lungs that breath, eyes that are filled with senseless images.

5 years ago

2009-10-29T16:39:00.001+11:00

the falling star project. spring - 2004

encounters with ice and angels (collages)

2009-10-21T16:01:00.002+11:00

the sudden righteous ones

2009-10-20T18:04:00.002+11:00

There is a something distinctly mystical, which accompanies the announcement of certain prestigious awards, such as those handed out this week in the fields of Literature and Peace.

If you run the fastest, you can rest fairly assured that you will be rewarded with the first prize, (the tragic case of the South African runner, Caster Semenya, being one prominent exception). Sporting events celebrate a measurable, physical, allocation of speed or strength – the human as animal.

The notion of Peace and the question of Literature on the other hand are irresolvable, and therefore rather more open to objection, as we have seen, particularly, in the case of Barry Obama vs All The Evil The Republicans Can Muster (which is a lot). Similarly there has been a bit of huffing about the Eurocentrism of the Nobel literature Prize, after Herta Muller, a little known German speaking Romanian was announced as this years winner.

In 1972, John Berger was awarded the Booker prize. In his speech, Berger dismissed as distasteful the competitiveness of such prizes, where the “deliberately publicised suspense” treated writers like race horses. The crude distinction between winners and losers is out of place in matters of literature, Berger argued. Literature attempts instead, surely, to complicate such reductionism wherever possible, to extend the human project beyond the merest survival instincts of the specious. Berger gave half his prize money to the Black Panthers.

Nevertheless, these prizes, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in particular, are fascinating for a number of reasons, not least the secretive, almost religious power, which, on such occasions is visibly exchanged.

Writers, as Roland Barthes noted, are the glamorous “spiritual representatives” of bourgeois society. This spiritual authority is bestowed through a complicated network of critical, social and historical interactions. Prizes such as the Nobel, conglomerate these processes in one dramatic and deliberately obscure gesture, like a slight of hand, like God’s pointing finger in the Sistine Chapel. In this single transfiguring moment, someone can be raised up from, lets be honest, resounding obscurity, to the position, henceforth, of master.

That such decisions take place secretly, in a country called Sweden, at a meeting attended by a select few people with stern elfish sounding names like Horace Engdahl and Knut Ahnlund, surely adds to the Award’s aura of mysticism. I am always reminded, when the Nobel prize is announced, of the Jewish fable of The Tzadikim Nistarim (The Hidden Righteous Ones) which describes a secret, scattered group of 36 people, unknown to one another, whose job it is to bear the sorrow of the world. When one dies, another is mysteriously appointed. I’m not sure if I’m referring to the chosen writers, or the judges themselves when I remember this, perhaps a mixture of both.

The process also calls to my mind, another similarly mysterious allocation of spiritual authority, the Papal Conclave, when The College of Cardinals gather in the Sistine chapel, to reckon on God’s newest ambassador. After each ballot is taken, the votes are burned and the smoke released into the Rome air. Added straw blackens the smoke, in order to indicate an inconclusive result, while the final plume of white smoke is accompanied by the chiming of bells. Upon his election the new Pope, chooses another name for himself, then dresses alone in the “Room of Tears.”

Something mysterious happens in all these examples, some alchemical, almost irreversible transference of power, and a sudden near infallibility comes to rest upon the shoulders of the newly chosen one. In the secular west, the bestowal of such an honour as the Nobel Prize is perhaps as close as we get to official holiness.

Of course, this is all nonsense, in some ways. The work of a Nobel Laureate isn’t miraculously changed overnight by some strange Swedish decree. And yet there are a good many people who believe that after undergoing a certain ritual clarification, a piece of bread can become, not just the metaphoric, but the actual body of Christ. True or not, there’s something mysterious going on, which I like.

eyes that are filled with senseless images

2009-10-17T16:48:00.005+11:00

"I think [art] is a necessity, an interpretation of life that, probably left unto itself would seem devoid of meaning, totally insignificant, a monstrosity. Art on the other hand is something that comforts us, reassures us, tells us about life in terms what are extremely protective. It makes us think about life which otherwise would only amount to a heart that beat, a stomach that digests, lungs that breath, eyes that are filled with senseless images. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling."

Federico Fellini- from an interview in the film "I'm a Born Liar", directed by Damian Pettigrew.

holy moments

2009-10-13T17:48:00.002+11:00

I electrocuted myself the other day. With a toaster. When you electrocute yourself, you feel it in the ends of your hair, which is unusual seeing as the end of your hair doesn’t feel like anything, usually. I’d like to say that my whole life flashed before my eyes, but the truth is, it didn’t, which was disappointing since I’ve been trying to figure out where I left my Chinese gangster sunglasses. Science breathed a sigh of continuing resignation. It’s possible, I read somewhere, to Hypnotise Away the Pain of Childbirth! Might it also be possible, I thought as I was flying backwards through the air, to “electrocute your way to a perfect memory!?” You can imagine the long lines at the nursing home toaster, forks all dully poised. “What are we doing again dear?”

Alas. I did remember though, a moment from my childhood at the zoo, when my father took me to discover tigers, (and how loud they roar). Tiger’s and electrocution are similar in that they can teach you to fly backwards. Landing is learnt somewhere else, near the butterflies I think. Being a butterfly is a constant near death experience.

I never learnt that landing trick properly, because a couple nights ago, I rolled up onto the bonnet of a white commodore, still sort of half connected to my bike, in a fairly unflattering posture of complete stupidity. A gang of butterflies hung about insulting my technique and four guys with eastern European accents got out and tried to force me to accept a large amount of money to repair the damage or keep me quiet, as is the traditional eastern European custom. It was all pretty painless, I admit, but it was the second near death experience in not very long, and so I was starting to worry, and to think about Charlie Kaufman’s recent film, his flawed, but strangely neglected masterpiece, Synecdoche New York.

In the film, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a fairly unappealingly nerve wracked theatre director who comes increasingly to be obsessed with death. Caden’s surname refers to Cotard’s Syndrome, a depressive, psychological state where a person comes to believe that they do not exist, or are, in fact, already dead. Caden is oppressed by a series of abject and mysterious ailments, which he struggles even to pronounce. He reads the newspaper obituaries with ritualistic zeal. Strange childlike diagrams are always playing on television, revealing his unknowable, quietly plotting internal organs to him, in hyper colour. Everything else is the pale, slightly sick colour of white skin in winter. And then something happens in the film; some twist of time, and the whole floor seems to tilt away from you, as if it were an ill-fitting lid over a great abyss.

After being awarded a lucrative ‘genius’ grant, Caden, stages an immense theatrical performance in his own bio-dome, a giant, elegant and abandoned warehouse in the middle of the city. The performance, which never seems to get past the rehearsal stage, grows increasingly complex, slowly subsuming the director's own life. Kauffman treads some fairly familiar post-modern ground in Synecdoche, confusing the real with the virtual in a series of meta-fictions, which become almost impossible to follow. But where others might stop, out of good taste perhaps, Kaufman keeps going and going. And going. The game stops being a game. You move through the point of ridiculousness, to the point of hilarity, to the point of something else, some holiness on the other side, which is real.

After I saw this film, I walked out into the underground car park, in a daze, unable to speak without thinking that what I was about to say had already been scripted for me by some unknowable force. There was the man whose job it was to walk past me, at that exact second with a green shopping bag. And the woman, whose role required her to turn and look strangely at me, as if I was some sort of deranged criminal. In the movie Waking Life, one of the characters talks about film as the recognition of life as a succession of holy moments. After watching Synecdoche New York, each holy moment after the next dawned on me, for hours. As Leunig said once, “It was a near life experience.”

this is where my soul got lost

2009-10-09T19:14:00.000+11:00

the brain the changes itself

2009-10-06T00:52:00.005+11:00

little green monsters

2009-09-29T16:02:00.001+10:00

Mrs Duan Qiongxiu, can't remember what she had been dreaming about. But the strange scratching sound must have moved up slowly from some underworld until it woke her.

"I turned on the light" she told the people who were interested the next day, "and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw."

In an unusually composed combination of bravery and foresight, which may not come as a surprise to her friends, the 66 year old Mrs Duan, beat the creature to death with her shoe, then calmly pickled its body for later. The world has since seen the pictures of this monster, which officials of more scientific inclination have termed "a snake with one leg."

No such thing has ever been reckoned with in such a way, not, at least, since the invention of the Internet. In fact a snake monster is more likely to have two heads, a fairly common mutation apparently, though one which adversely affects the creature's chances of survival in the wild due to the rather counter-intuitive, (but perhaps understandable) habit such heads have of attacking and killing each other.

The whole episode might not have fascinated me quite so much, if I hadn't, only the night before, read Haruki Murakami's short story The Little Green Monster. In this particular story, a woman sits in her house looking out half-heartedly at the garden through the window. “It was dark before I knew it” the narrator tells us. “I must have been there quite a while. Then, all at once, I heard a sound. It came from somewhere far away – a funny muffled sort of rubbing sort of sound. At first I thought it was coming from a place deep inside me, that I was hearing things – a warning from the dark cacoon my body was spinning from within. I held my breath and listened. Yes, no doubt about it, little by little the sound was moving closer to me. What was it? I had no idea. But it made my flesh creep.”

From out of the ground – that is, from some half inner, underworld, a little green monster emerges, shaking off the dirt. It has “slender little arms and legs jutting out from its green scaled body, and long claws at the end of its hands and feet” and, so we learn, it can read people's thoughts. But it doesn’t mean the woman any harm. No, it has come to propose to her.

The narrator, in an unusually composed combination of bravery and foresight begins to torture the love struck creature with her mind, tying it in her imagination to a chair with thick wires and ripping out its scales one by one with a pair of imaginary pliers. And the creature, who cannot help but feel these thoughts as if they were really happening, begins to dissolve beneath the extraordinary cruelty of these ingenious insults.

What do these monsters want from us, and how are we supposed to deal with them? I was camping the other day with a friend on a piece of land in Daylesford. It rained all night, and our swags steadily gave in to it. And all night, apparently, my friend suffered horrendously from nightmares, huddled in the last dying patch of moderate dryness. In his dreams, hideous spirit creatures were prowling the circumference of the camp sight, sticking their heads and fingers into his swag to leer and threaten him. He woke traumatised and told me of a time, camping in Western Australia, when one of his travelling companions, an Aboriginal elder, had woken him in the middle of the night so that they could accompany each other to the toilet. In that land, no man goes walking alone through the bush at night, since there are creatures who appear like beautiful women to lure you away forever. He was cautioned to never sleep on his back, lest similar night spirits get into him.

“The dwarf comes into my dreams every night and orders me to let him inside me.”

So begins the final page of another of Murakami’s stories from the same collection.

“ ‘At least that way, you wont be arrested and dismembered by the police,’ he says.

‘No, but then I’ll have to dance in the forest forever.’

‘True says the dwarf, but you’re the one that has to make that choice.’

He chuckles when he says this, but I cant make the choice. I hear the dogs howling now. They’re almost here.”

tree of man

2009-09-26T20:44:00.000+10:00

today in poetry

2009-09-22T17:04:00.002+10:00

My housemate, Clint, despises poetry. He hates it so much in fact that he has deemed it necessary to allocate certain areas of the house where poetry is out of bounds. Those certain regions include pretty much everywhere except the Persian carpet (which was made in China). We call it the poetry mat. Even on the back porch there’s no room for poetry, since that’s where Clint keeps his bike. “On your mat” he tells me. "Onyourmat!" On Tuesday night I still get to wear my beret though, because that’s the night Clint goes to his grandmother’s to eat spaghetti.

Poetry acts suspiciously. It’s obsessed with the wind in the stupid tree. It attracts small crowds of unlucky looking people. If you tell someone you’re a poet that’s only because you’re in a hurry and ‘poet’ has fewer letters than ‘wanker’. Even Charles Bukowski, a famous poet, hated poetry readings, hated poets, hated people trying to be poets at poetry readings: “I am ashamed for them” he said.

I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,

I am ashamed for their lisping egos,

their lack of guts.

If these are our creators,

please, please give me something else.

To be fair, Charles Bukowski hated a lot of things, including women. And he wrote a lot of bad poetry himself, especially toward the end of his life, but I’ll never be able to dismiss him entirely, since he changed my life in a certain way. I can still remember, very vividly, the afternoon my father called me out to the workshop to hear a scratchy recording of Charles himself, reading and drinking and burping into a sweaty sounding microphone. I must have been about fourteen and my mother pleaded with me not to go because Charles Bukowski hated women.

Fifteen years later, I can still quote whole passages from that day, still remember the real feeling as some sort of secret view opened out before me, a view that had to do with adults and sadness and sex and failure and death. These were the things no one talked about, and then here was this old guy on the radio, ruining the secret with complete irreverence. Telling me that this world, which other people had invented, didn’t have to be enough, that actually we all invent the world, and screw them if they think we can’t. His words got into the cracks between things, with a crowbar.

Yet even Bukowski was suspicious of poetry, despised its reputation for properness and sentimentality. Everyone who’s been made to read Wordsworth against their will knows that this suspicion is warranted. Even those of us who care about poetry, (or Wordsworth for that matter) sometimes feel this suspicion, the worse since it’s a suspicion of ourselves. We are ready to be disappointed by poetry. We are ready to be embarrassed. If we consider ourselves decent writers of poetry, then we are ready to hate each other like seagulls in order to protect our crumbs.

My friend A.S Patric has been reviewing the Overload Poetry Festival the last couple weeks, for the magazine Overland. His description of a recent performance, a night filled with loathing, suspicion and mutual disdain, has stayed with me, for its eloquence and its tragedy:

A large woman struggled to climb the stage and propped herself on a walking cane. Read out a poem about how once upon a time she was able to write without fear of judgement or self-laceration, but now struggled to remember the taste of basic things like natural enthusiasm.

Last night… also answered an earlier question I had about why more people don’t go to poetry events. Why even at the height of a poetry festival some events are barely attended. It’s because most of the time we don’t really want to see the vulnerable and hurt, mutilated and mangled things we can often become.

Our fear that poetry will be bad, though often justified, hides a deeper fear: That it will reveal us. That it requires a kind of gentleness, an embarrassing earnestness and receptivity that is fundamentally incompatible with the hostility of living in a competition.

The poem in the Saturday newspaper can sometimes seem like a kind of quaint embarrassment beside the brash lifestyle pages, both obscure and fragile at the same time, interrupting the glossy daze with its difficult pretensions, its alienating and emaciated absurdity.

“Am I the only person left who reads poetry on the train” wondered the Australian poet Alison Croggon. Reading poetry on public transport can sometimes seem as inappropriate as reading pornography on public transport. There is a kind of requisite intimacy, which is irreconcilable with the task of living amid so many strangers in a city.

“You cannot get the news from poems”, Williams Carlos Williams wrote, "but men die every day for lack of what is found there.” I told that to Clint.

“That’s tautological,” he countered. “You can’t use poetry to justify poetry. That’s like quoting the Bible to prove the existence of God.”

But I know Clint is buckling. I bought a set of those word fridge magnets. The Genius edition. We leave notes for each other like: hence the munificent endeavour secretes a mellifluous ropose or languish here in the catawaul and lapse you obtuse pedagogue! And last week I found my copy of Shuntaro Tanikawa’s poems lying in the bathroom, lying open. Finally, this morning, I found a note Clint left for me in the kitchen, a haiku, still a little unconcerned with the grammatical orthodoxies of the form perhaps, but a haiku nevertheless:

Rain through the open window

Soapy rain in the dishes

you didn’t clean up like you said you would, bastard

a freak chemical accident 30 years ago

2009-09-13T12:20:00.002+10:00

recent design work

2009-09-12T00:40:00.006+10:00

a confrontation with falling

2009-09-04T17:05:00.003+10:00

I'm doing a poetry reading on Monday night with some other people. Details here if you're interested.

and a review here and here.

paris light

2009-09-04T14:43:00.006+10:00

"And yet I am living, I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk, like the silk that would have been as beautiful as water. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I was suddenly worth the trouble. But I liked it in the light of, how shall I say, of new things that I had never seen glow before."

Andre Breton- from Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)

the ideal city ( london as paris)

2009-08-21T12:47:00.001+10:00

cities and water (paris as venice. 1910)

2009-08-20T12:13:00.003+10:00

found photograph, dated 1910. paris

In late January 1910, following months of high rainfall, the Seine River flooded the French capital when water pushed upwards from overflowing sewers and subway tunnels, and seeped into basements through fully saturated soil.

Winter floods were a normal occurrence in Paris, but on January 21, the river began to rise more rapidly than normal. Over the course of the following week, thousands of Parisians evacuated their homes as water infiltrated buildings and streets throughout the city shutting down much of Paris' basic infrastructure. Police, firefighters, and soldiers moved through waterlogged streets in boats to rescue stranded residents from second story windows and to distribute aid. Refugees gathered in makeshift shelters in churches, schools, and government buildings. Although the water threatened to go over the tops of the quay walls that line the river, workmen were able to keep the Seine back with hastily built levees. Once water invaded the Gare d'Orsay rail terminal, its tracks soon sat under feet of water. To continue moving throughout the city, residents traveled by boat or across a series of wooden walkways built by government engineers and by Parisians themselves.

wikipedia

cities and water (venice 2)

2009-08-03T19:13:00.008+10:00

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba -- 'Memorial Project, Vietnam' 2001

I arrive in Venice again, sun burnt and half deaf. If you put your ear to my ear, you can hear the sea, which is appropriate since walking through Venice is like moving underwater, dreamlike, at half speed, almost silent anyway. People speak in whispers. The alleyways are empty, except for a few old women who float past. The sound of far cutlery, water moving for the coffin black boats. I have arrived carrying luggage up the marble steps of a drowned city, like Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's underwater rickshaw drivers.

There is a conspiracy of graffiti in Venice, an illicit defiant conversation; names, accusations and best of all, misdirections, painted arrows pointing the wrong way the Venice's famous landmarks, the great age blackened piazza San Marco, the vaulted marble Rialto Bridge. I am reminded of the Czech ingenuity which resisted the invading Russian force in 1968 by painting out the street signs. Maps lost their value, local knowledge became a private conspiracy.

Similarly in Greece recently, the corner where a teenager was shot by police has become a site of collective outrage, a place where a myriad simmering dissatisfactions were crystallized by a single act of official violence. By popular consent both streets which run off that corner have have been renamed identically after the victim Alexis Grigoropoulos.

The Venetian sign writers might offer the most playful of these interventions, but there is nevertheless, in all these examples a kind of anarchic resistance, the seizure of names and signs by a local population otherwise divorced from their city by a larger occupying force. In Venice this resistance is endemic, even institutionalized, part of the very character of the place, since it is, after all, a labyrinth, a trap and the Venetian a trickster.

In Venice it is not uncommon to see the same person again and again throughout the city, each time fulfilling a a completely different role. The man who served you coffee in a little bakery ten minutes ago can be seen, for example, hawking stupid plastic gimmicks in the piazza or singing Sinatra in Italian an hour later in a gondola. Venice is is riddled with secret corridors, through which the few remaining inhabitants are forever running, frantically exchanging occupations.

Among the glass trinkets, the masks and the fake leather goods, Venice does a healthy trade in souvenir maps of the city. They are beautiful and impressive for their audacity and each is as dubious as the next. The true map of Venice cannot be read like any other. In order to reflect the city it must constantly misdirect you. It must neglect to mention certain streets and make an effort to misspell certain names. Ultimately, like the official map handed out at the tourist information centre, it should be made form a particularly volatile paper stock that disintegrates into a dozen pieces, which can, in turn, be reunited in any number of ways and still seem sensible, even if the city they describe is not the city of a moment ago.

Cities and Water (a further invisible city) - for e

2009-07-30T16:43:00.005+10:00

Casimme is an island of white rock, out of which is made the stone masks for every festival; The Day of Perishing, The Week of the Hunted, The Seasons of Oblivion and Kindness. Each of these peculiar festivals require participants to wear upon their faces great slabs of carved rock, in rememberence of the sea. For the sea, which gave birth to the island is also a testament to our heaviness they will tell you. It is the sea, the great darkness, into which each would sink like stone, should he trespass beyond the city, since none among them has ever learned to swim.

All day the people of Casimme line the brink of the land, desiring what they cannot have. Some venture knee-deep into the white hurlf of water- the brave or the foolish, idiots, men jousting for the eye of a woman- these few are pounded like bits of plastic and are either saved at the last minute by a team of desperate hands or are swept out and lost from this world.

The people of Casimme have no boats. They fish with long rods from canyons of rock, from the bridges, in terror of the edge, ecststic as lovers. They distrust foreigners and refuse to learn from them, perhaps understandably, since they live each day exposed to the full force of the unknown. They are a boiling people, brown skinned, anxious and quick to laugh. They will never leave this pitiful rock to which their love has condemned them.

winter solstice

2009-06-22T23:17:00.009+10:00

My father died on the morning of June 21, the winter solstice, 2007. I found this card yesterday, in an antique shop, two years later.

'The winter solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun's position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observer's hemisphere.

'The Saami, indigenous people of Finland, Sweden and Norway worship Beiwe, the sun-goddess of fertility and sanity. She travels through the sky in a structure made of reindeer bones with her daughter, Beiwe-Neia, to herald back the greenery on which the reindeer feed. On the winter solstice, her worshipers sacrifice white female animals and cover their doorposts with butter so Beiwe can eat it and begin her journey once again.

'The Inti Raymi or Festival of the Sun was a religious ceremony of the Inca Empire in honor of the sun god Inti. It also marked the winter solstice and a new year in the Andes of the Southern Hemisphere. One ceremony performed by the Inca priests was the tying of the sun. In Machu Picchu there is still a large column of stone called an Intihuatana, meaning "hitching post of the sun" or literally for tying the sun. The ceremony to tie the sun to the stone was to prevent the sun from escaping.

'Mōdraniht was a Germanic feast. It was believed that dreams on this night foretold events in the upcoming year. By 730, it was thought by Bede to have been observed by the Anglo-Saxons on the eve of the winter solstice.

'Adapting the Egyptian Osiris Celebrations, the Babylonians held the annual renewal or new year celebration, the Zagmuk Festival. It lasted 10 days overlapping either the winter solstice or vernal equinox in its center peak. It was a festival held in observation of the sun god Marduk's battle over darkness. The Babylonians held both land and river parades. Sacaea, as Berossus referred to it, had festivals characterized with a subversion of order leading up to the new year. Masters and slaves interchanged, a mock king was crowned and masquerades clogged the streets.

'In ancient Latvia, Ziemassvētki, meaning winter festival, was celebrated as one of the two most important holidays. Ziemassvētki celebrated the birth of Dievs, the highest god of Latvian mythology. The two weeks before Ziemassvetki are called Veļu laiks, the "season of ghosts."'

- wikipedia