Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist

Movies from a library

2012-01-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

By John, posted by Tracy

Watching movies involves so many compromises. Apart from power usage and how the energy for that is created, there’s the manufacturing of the hardware, and the general ecological and human cost of producing films. It’s a long list, taking us through multinational miners, industrial exploitation, pollution and destruction of habitats, to exploitation of underpaid factory workers at various degrees of separation from the product itself. And it is product. The moment film-makers begin to negotiate with the process itself, distribution, and the realities of ‘audience’, even the most independent-minded movie enters the chain. And if one thinks there is a way out of this, maybe it’s worth bearing in mind some of the funding compromises or interference with filming associated with some of the most challenging and created-under-duress films.

Nonetheless, I have always enjoyed cinema, and have watched a large number of movies over my life. When engaging with a library, I first engage with the book and journal collection, then the video/DVD collection. And I tend to work my way steadily through a collection, rewatching and picking up items I’ve missed.

Having mentioned the funding for movies issue, one might highlight the selection of Cassavetes films on the shelves. John Cassavetes (1929-1989) is almost the ur-indie filmmaker of ‘modern’ American cinema, who not only wrote and directed many of his films, but also funded and even distributed them. Often working with the same actors, especially his wife Gena Rowlands and the underrated Ben Gazzara, Cassavetes created one of the most impelling, original, socially conscious and multi-genred bodies of work out there. Often funding his films through himself acting in major studio films (Rosemary’s Baby being my favourite, though The Dirty Dozen may have paid better), Cassavetes pieced together movies how, when and wherever he could. His films are elusive revolutions, at least in part because of the drive for independence. And one has the sense that, though he covers so much of the production ground, of getting the film done, he is in collaboration with his actors, especially the brilliant Rowlands whose performances in Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, and Opening Night are disturbing, destabilising and epiphanic. And watch The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) to see how genre can be twisted and reconstituted by labouring a point rather than editing it into oblivion. My favourite Cassavetes will always be his first independent film, Shadows, which was a shock-wave of understatement with something immense, political and confrontational that was a tribute to a film’s sum of its parts.

Other films we’ve enjoyed or admired or even endured with enthusiasm, all from one library collection, and I say ‘we’ because I watch films together with Tracy (the discussion that comes out of experiencing a film at a given time and place is part of the whole for us), include a selection of noir classics. Among them are Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945) and the (literally) hypnotic melodrama, Whirlpool (1949) – even at his most laboured and illogical, Preminger has a chart of social concern and niceties he wishes to undo.

But for pure noir impact, it will always be the actor John Garfield for me (he was indelible in 1946’s The Postman Always Rings Twice), whom you can check out in Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948). I have always admired Garfield, who was born in poverty and was part of the Group Theatre Collective in New York in the 1930s, because he never named names at the House Committee on Un-American Activities, though he retracted his ‘beliefs’ shortly before his (early) death.

For me, in noir, it isn’t what the directors do with the male protagonists that matters, it’s what the women do to foil them, compromise, or undo them. Sherry is the femme fatale to watch in Stanley Kubrick’s genre ‘classic’, The Killing (which was a critical and commercial failure on its release in 1956 – often a good sign!).

Most recently, we rewatched Donald Cammel’s and Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece, Performance. Cammel made few films but was a poetic director (and son of a poet) who obsessed over his vision and ultimately died of it. Performance was completed in 1968 but not released by Warner Brothers until 1970. And Roeg is at his best here – his cinematography is festering and disorientating (and said to be the forerunner of the MTV music clip, but I’ve always found that claim ludicrous in so many ways, not that Roeg probably minded). The studio (I detest studios) were disgusted with the film they ended up getting and had no idea how to read its mix of gangster film, darkest satire, parody-lite, psychedelic implosion, Borgesian labyrinths and mirrors, identity play, doubling, exploration of the many faces of the ‘performative’, porn (offcuts of the film were apparently shown as a ‘blue movie’) and sexual and gender ambiguity. And that short list doesn’t even begin to do justice to this intertextual tour de force. Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg (as respectively the jaded, ontologically compromised rock star and one of his girlfriends in a ménage that folds and folds into itself) are precisely what they had to be, and James Fox is overwhelming in the role that is said to have largely led to his leaving movies for a decade and embracing Christian causes. I’ll say no more other than that, much like Antonioni’s Blow-up, this film is a nexus for the construct of an ‘era’ and interpretations of such a construct.

Sell-out to Uranium Miners in Western Australia

2012-01-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

By John, posted by Tracy

In case any of you think the Western Australia (or Australian) Labor Party stand for anything more than greed, rapacity and a thirst for power at all costs; in case any of you differentiate them from the corporate fascists (they are fascists in so many ways) who are in power now, then think again. SELL-OUT is barely worth saying - that's the 'price' of so-called party politics, of a dictatorship of corporate 'democracy'. No consensus, only greed. The mining companies run Australia.

Read about it here.

Highsmith day...

2012-01-19T06:06:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Patricia Highsmith was born on this day in 1921.

Problematic, contradictory, by all biographical accounts bigoted and not a pleasant person to be around -- yet strangely gifted, at times, in her fictional writing.

On the one hand, a critic (Noel Mawer*) can write: "Highsmith was radically concerned with morality, justice, guilt, and good and evil, and with the conditions in our society that define these concepts."

Another can state that she "loathed Patricia Highsmith's work for its inhumanity to man", that "her work was immoral" (Margharita Laski, cited in Mawer).

I am both repelled and compelled by it, and interested in the variety of conflicting (confused and confusing) critical responses to her oeuvre.

(*See Noel Mawer, A Critical Study of the Fiction of Patricia Highsmith -- From the Psychological to the Political, The Edwin Mellen Press, pp.5 & 10)

'Property is Theft' doesn't belong to Proudhon

2012-01-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

By John, posted by Tracy

Equipage (via Rod Mengham at Jesus College, Cambridge) have recently brought out my anti-greed and pro-ecological long poem based on Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book, Rapacity. The cover is below.

I want to take this opportunity to qualify my thoughts regarding the notion of ‘property is theft’, which I have cited many times over the years.

First, this from an unpublished article on (anti-) capitalism and poetry:

‘I object to the rapacity and selfishness, and have always believed that ‘property is theft’ (in the literal sense, not in the hypocritical and contradictory sense embodied by Proudhon who, as Murray Bookchin points out, was not in essence against certain forms of private property under certain conditions).’

and this from a published chunk of (new) autobiographical writing that’s come out of living at Jam Tree Gully:

‘…onto our place. Our property. I reject the notion of property. Custodianship sounds too appropriative, and for a non-indigenous resident, all too convenient. Really, that’s the issue that burns below the surface of all I write about this place. Proudhon is only halfway there with ‘Property is theft’. Some theft is more theft than others. He fails to investigate the nature of such theft: that’s more the key to understanding the implications of surveying, gifting, selling, claiming.’

and from a piece collected in the book Activist Poetics:

‘So much poetry does this and convinces us it’s best for our health. It’s not so much that I can’t celebrate, it’s just that I want to know what the implications of such a celebration are. Yes, Tim, as Proudhon noted, “Property is theft!” And so much poetry, art, and music are theft as well. The most “original” work is often the most property-like. We can only be custodians, and it is incumbent on all to recognise larger, more concentrated, and more defined custodianships. Wheatbelt Gothic is a style that allows for an observation of these considerations — it has no materiality, no claim.’

[note: ‘Tim’ here is not Tim our son, but a radical artist acquaintance]

I cite each of these to show that whenever quoting what for me is a truism in so many ways, I’ve always felt the need to qualify its usage. Murray Bookchin writes, in The Third Revolution:

‘Despite his famous cry, ‘Property is theft!’ however, Proudhon was no socialist: he definitely favoured private property, advancing an economy structured around small privately owned enterprises that would be linked together by contracts untainted by either profit considerations or by exploitation.

By making a distinction between ‘property’ acquired by ‘exploitation’ and ‘possession’ acquired by labor, Proudhon essentially smuggled into his vision a belief in private property, albeit with a moral aura. His statement ‘property is theft’ did not refer strictly to tangible economic property; nor was it intended to lead to the abolition of private property…’ (39)

When a statement becomes an aphorism or a saying, you’ve got to be wary. Anything that easy is bound to be glib and separated from its cause and effect. For me, property is theft because it denies mutual access. But property can have very different meanings in different cultures, so one must be wary of using ‘property’ as a blanket all-encompassing term. Furthermore, I suspect that Proudhon’s use of ‘property’ and concerns over control were deeply affected by his anti-semitism, which anarchists should not try to brush aside or minimise. Proudhon was a pathological bigot, and none of his words can be separated from this evil. As a statement in itself, ‘property is theft’ lives without ownership, copyright, or subscription. It is its own fact, but it needs to be given context to give it life and meaning, and needs to be wrested from the foulness of Proudhon. And if you wonder about Proudhon’s racism, look no further than his diary entry of December of 1847 with its calls for extermination and destruction. A proto-typical Nazi in more ways than one.

Keeping Poetry Outside the Comfort Zone

2011-12-13T09:26:00.000-08:00

Posted by Tracy

An article by John Kinsella, published in the New Statesman, can be read here.

Poem extract

2011-12-03T07:22:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

From "Cowslip Orchids: for David E. Musselwhite", published in Hothouse (Fremantle Press/Arc 2002/2006) pp. 97-98.

3

Which of us is gone
which away from

this is a third space
word-made   uninhabited

the flowers are asterisks
contested passages

if flags   then yellow alert

nothing less certain
than what the world gives

a waxen solidity
      that passes

grass that receives
our tread and erases
all flesh is

      yet how we grasp.

Disgrace

2011-11-23T01:41:00.000-08:00

By John, posted by Tracy

Yet again, the "Department", in their infinite wisdom, have destroyed vast areas of native bushland in Western Australia, killing animals and plants, and putting people's lives at risk. This is a yearly ritual, and the fires induced by so-called prescribed burnings done irresponsibly and without sufficient thought, result in catastrophic outcomes.

See this story.

Concrete: a no-act play

2011-11-16T12:10:00.000-08:00

By John, posted by Tracy

This is a pro-Occupy, anti-violence, anti-capitalist play written in support of the St Paul's occupation in London, and can be used for performance as presented here if desired.

Concrete

A No-act Play by John Kinsella

For as many actors as there are ‘voices’, or fewer. Plus a group of masked figures.

St Paul’s Cathedral. The steps. The tents. The dome. The actors ‘shape’ themselves as they talk. A chorus in the background of Schwitters’ Ursonate-like sounds. Building building building. Scattered around the location are ‘masked-up’ figures who shout the odd aggressive word of protest; as the play goes on, especially where the black-bloc are mentioned. They begin to unmask, still uttering the odd word of protest towards capitalism and the oppressions of the state and corporations, but in an insistent rather than aggressive manner. Unmasked, their protests clearly become more effective (this can be displayed in their faces and in those of the ‘voices’).

Voice: The dome holds prayers warm. They ascend in clouds when the dome is full.

Voice: They fall back into the cathedral and melt over the pews, the stone. They wash away or crumble into dust. They cover hymnals. They are breathed in and out and lost.

Voice: They go neither up nor down, but out. They rustle among the tents at night. The doors shut, they linger. They have a long half-life. They don’t burn like radiation but they change us. Even if we don’t believe.

Voice: Believe what?

Voice: Look over there, The young men in suits photographing each other in front of the tents. Group shots. They laugh. They are full of joy. They’ll facebook the images. They seem especially pleased if they get dreadlocks or piercings.

Voice: There’s the Apocalypse man. He says the signs are here, among us.

Voices: We says yes, they are. The stock exchange, the financial district.

Voice: He says we are wrong, and doesn’t approve.

Voice: Why?

Voice: I lost his voice in the traffic sounds, the machinery.

Voice: How many words are written by the shapes of bodies on the cathedral steps? The enriching crosstalk and overtalk and undertalk of different languages. Their shapes, their words, the new words are more concrete than the buildings. The old buildings, the new.

Voice: History intervenes.

Voice: The local matters. What did the Blitz say about orders to move on? Who listened out? Who sheltered? Who sanctioned living? Under what conditions? Shape up or ship out? Consensus? Occupation?

Voice: I saw black-bloc-ers gathering on the outskirts. They had the wind up. In twos and threes, masks half-cocked, working up a steam of affront. Looking for a phalanx.

Voice: Parachute.

Voices: Parachute?

Voice: Yes, yes, I get you. Materials. Tents, the dome, the sweat-shop labour that went into making the clothing of...

Voice: Phantoms of the operas.

Voice: Monumental.

Voices: MO-NU-MENT-AL!

Voice: Or the Letters of St Paul. Somebody has brought that up. Many people...

Voice: But this is against the master, against slavery.

Voice: It is.

Voice: It is.

Voice: It is.

Voice: But if you take one word out of George Herbert’s concrete poem, ‘Easter Wings’, the poem falls to the ground. Say, the word... ‘harmoniously’...

Voice: But is it any worse for being on the ground?

Voice: Is it unmasked?

Voice: Standing up. Being counted.

Voice: Lying down. One of the Fleet-Streeters came last night and invaded our sleeping places with infra-red. Their x-ray specs...

Voice: And I wondered if I heard the clergy praying against us.

Voice: No, no... they were praying for the poor and the wealthy. They were giving their blessing to tourism, the machine of the cathedral kept running.

Voice: But they are not blind to symbolisms.

Voice: Nor symbols.

Voice: Nor icons.

Voices: Nor masks. They are as one. Christ’s...

Voice: ...army?

Voice: But they’re just...

Voices: People.

Voice: Yes, and are all victims of corporate...

Voices: Armies.

Voice: Inside the tent of learning I felt I was inside Gomringer’s silence poem. His ‘Schweigen’.

Voice: What does translation mean?

The cathedral bells start to ring out the hour. All stay silent while they ring.

Voice: Indeed. Inside the reactor. Inside the control of money. Inside money. Inside history. Outside the dome. Over the concrete.

Voices: Who is that speaking in the background? What is that voice?

Voices (to each other, speaking slightly out of time with each other, so cross-talk results): Have you noticed the noisier it gets, the more silence floods into our oneness? Faces show. Mouths moving. Eyes blinking. The painted faces of the crowd. Each and every one. Pictograms. I can make out the script but they seem to be suffering the same.

Voice: Pain. It’s just pain, but the gadgets hide it. They are pain-obscuring gadgets, not pain-ending gadgets.

Voice: Obscurantism.

Voice: Corporate rationalism.

Voice: And the ennui of cyberspatiality — the need to convince themselves... ourselves?... they... we... exist.

Voice: We are all culpable.

Voice: All.

Voices: One and all!

Voice: Some of those masks remind me of the Three Musketeers.

Voices: ME too!

Voices: Wait. Time for a chat. Good to chat. Share the news. The Bobbies are checking up on us. Hi, we don’t want violence. Thanks. The same food is out there to share. Yes, yes — crimes of the state. But they placate with television series. Just say no. No. No.

Voice: No. You can hear the shutters of the record-keepers. Their vigil.

Voices: Vigil.

Voices: Watching over each other. Putting a fire beneath us. Purification of customers.

Voice: What’s the use of a person if they’re not a consumer?

Voice: What’s the use of a cupola on the dome?

Voice: And concrete. Concrete everywhere. Listen, listen to the abstract nouns gathering force.

Voices: Listen, listen... the passion. The consuming passion.

END.

Moers on Dreiser

2011-11-15T06:06:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Ellen Moers in 1970 describes Dreiser as

a writer of massive stature, fierce, unpredictable, eccentric, with the disagreeable habits that have always afflicted major novelists... He was a great novelist, perhaps the greatest of the Americans, and left a reputation for not knowing how to use words... Unusually cerebral in his approach to fiction, he spent most of his time informing himself about everything that science and philosophy could teach the novelist about the act and the will; but he left a reputation for being stupid, unlettered, a 'primitive'.

Of course he's not stupid or any of that -- and Moers is on his side, having "discovered" his fiction "with astonishment" not long before she began writing her very solid book, Two Dreisers, from which this description is taken.

It's the self-taught, wide-ranging aspect of Dreiser I most admire: there are some great advantages to a writer in not being thoroughly steeped in institutional education. Dreiser had limited schooling and in his early days it was in a German-language Catholic school (he had the strange circumstances of being born into mixed Catholic and Mennonite parentage); later he did one year of college paid for by one of his teachers. The rest, he did himself, through library access and building up his own collection of books. You can read about his personal library -- and check out a list of titles -- here.

Best seitan so far

2011-11-10T10:59:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

I kneaded it more than usual, and let it simmer at a lower heat than before. The texture was much firmer. Sliced and crumbed, then crisped very fast in the pan. The flavourings this time (just a pinch of each) were dried sage and thyme.

See this earlier post for how to make seitan.

Corporate education in schools

2011-11-07T12:19:00.001-08:00

By John, posted by Tracy

One should never expect anything from such a corrupt entity as a nation-state or its subsets. We might at the very least hope for separation of church and state, though "the church" constantly creeps into schools through the many back doors proffered. And now it beggars belief that the Western Australian government has been quietly fostering the fusing of private corporations -- in particular the global Pacman, BHP -- and state schools.

See this article for explanation of what's happening in the so-called state education system...

This is the very kind of corporate sway that the Occupy movements have sprung up to contest.

Re-reading Dreiser

2011-10-20T11:22:00.001-07:00

By Tracy

I'm most of the way through a re-read of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (see earlier post) and have to say that it benefits from the better format of the Library of America edition -- good font, good layout and spacing, restful shade of paper... a much less arduous read than the copy I read earlier, underlining for me how much those physical factors can affect my response to a book.

Dreiser's style hasn't changed, objectively, yet I like it better. This is partly a case of getting used to it, too -- the typos or possibly misspelled words (even in this better edition), the odd word-choice on occasion -- and the incessant use of "And... And" with present participles -- are sometimes beyond belief.

The critic Lee Clark Mitchell, back in 1985, actually saw that last stylistic feature as a positive, or at least as belonging in a pattern of repetition counted as part of Dreiser's art:

"Just as characters, events and descriptions overlap, so the prose itself divides and doubles, saved from utter fragmentation by participial clauses and frequent conjunctions that link phrases into parallel structure..."

[Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 19, no.1]

In any case, whether intrinsically flawed or following a pattern many of us have failed to recognise and appreciate, Dreiser's style bothers me much less than it did on first reading, and though undeniably a "big book" (934 pages in this edition), it doesn't seem to drag this time around.

Besides, even if you don't like his style, the vision and expansive grasp of the novel have plenty to offer. Alfred Kazin once wrote:

"With his proverbial slovenliness, the barbarisms and incongruities whose notoriety has preceded him into history, the bad grammar, the breathless and painful clutching at words... he has seemed the unique example of a writer who remains great malgré lui. It is by now an established part of our folklore that Theodore Dreiser lacks everything except genius."

Racism in Australia

2011-10-09T00:54:00.000-07:00

By John, posted by Tracy

Once again, the ‘outside’ world has paid more attention than Australia does to the abysmal conditions many indigenous Australians live in and under. Australia is a racist country, make no mistake. And racist in so many complex and overlapping ways. It’s not just a case of ‘white’ and ‘black’ politics, but an amalgam of complex and also very subtle personal, religious, social and institutional prejudices. Whether it’s the muttering behind closed doors about ‘their’ behaviour, or overt rudeness in public, or it’s government agencies and politicians acting as mirrors for concentrations of (voting) prejudice, the overall effect is devastating for the recipients of this racism (in the sense of racist individuals differentiating themselves from and demeaning other people on the grounds of ethnic difference)... in the end bigotry is bigotry, and it’s a simple equation.

I was involved in an Amnesty anti-slavery forum just before the Sydney Olympics, and it’s a sad thing that the same discussion needs to continue. No progress has been made in addressing the core of these issues of inequality. See:

"Amnesty slams indigenous conditions"

Remember this as you read this blog or play netgames in general. This tool of our lives is still about choices made out of privilege. Not even access is equality: how it is used and what it provides according to wealth and advantage are key factors.

John Kinsella

Transit

2011-09-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Not even lifting a finger but with that swing
from walking, unconscious, palm open,
I catch it without volition, it catches me,
this white, minute feather, brush too aloof
to be called soft – but it did stop – weightless
as snowflake and just as blankly obvious,
the loss, the newness. Loose from a nest,
a fledgling, though there seemed
neither tree nor bird anywhere near me
to furnish it so listlessly, indifferently,
and I could not say what became of it
when it finished with me, glanced off,
as if it too might melt or dissipate, as if
without root in flesh or destination.

I am NOT a nature poet...

2011-08-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

By John, posted by Tracy

I have recently been disturbed by pre-publication statements appearing around my book Jam Tree Gully, due out with WW Norton in the US in November. These statements describe me as a ‘nature poet’. I want to state, once again, that I am not a nature poet, nor a ‘nature writer’, in any way. As I said in a recent interview with Overland regarding this matter:

I detest ‘nature writing’. I consider myself a writer of the environment - an ethically and politically motivated writer who perceives each poem, each text I write, as part of a resistance against environmental damage. ‘Nature writing’ is a concept is too tied up with validating the relationship with the (Western!) notion of self, of egotistical sublime, of the gain the self has over the ‘nature’ s/he is relating to. This privileging is a problem. Which is not to say I have a problem with the inevitabilities of the anthropomorphic, if that necessarily brings about greater respect for ‘nature’ than would arise without it. So once again, it’s relative.

Thing is, it is out of my respect for ‘nature’ that I feel so strongly about its fetishisation in ‘nature writing’. Poetry as environmental activism, sure. Poetry that tries to respect ‘nature’, sure. Poetry that problematises the human-nature equation in terms of culture and ecology (for which there is no pat ‘solution’!), sure. But...

And here’s a poem of mine from many years back that states my position most clearly:

Graphology 300: Against “Nature Writing”

Nature writing equals the new racketeering.
Nature writers make good use of plane travel and restaurants serving up nature.
Nature writing equals recognition as gratification.
Nature writers wear tough boots and mark their trail out hiking. They need to get back. They drive cars.
Nature writing equals the house in good order for the property owner. The sub-textual paths past the native garden beds are called ecology.
Nature writers grow at least a little of their own food. Or would if they could.
Nature writing equals the woods sans Macbeth. Possibly sans witches.
Nature writers get as close as they can to the birds, soaking up their natures.
Nature writing equals a separation in order to get closer — almost everyone can do it, if they see the light.
Nature writers are those who make the choice to step out of their front doors and breathe in the fresh air, or declare that it’s time to move to where it’s fresher.
Nature writing equals — not — pastoral and needs no bucolics to play out the hierarchies — it lives outside the narrative. It favours local picnics — best if the animals don’t even know one’s there.
Nature writers who are academics get paid for the conscience — administratively, at least, it’s called eco-criticism.
Nature writing equals the recognition that poisoned flesh and cellulose are not good to eat — support your local organic market.
Nature writers have, in the very least, a hidden spirituality.
Nature writing equals market-place economies.
Nature writers know that economy and ecology share the same prefix and have thought long and hard about this.
Nature writing equals quiet time following field excursions to get it down — preferably, a hut in the forest, a writing retreat. The keeping of like-minded company, occasionally hearing the birds tweet. Seeing a kangaroo, bear, or antelope, a double treat.
Nature writers get angry with consumerism — don’t giggle.
Nature writing equals space for tokenism but makes good use of natural colouring to bury it.
Nature writers know that via the Indo-European, gwei is to live, with metathesized variant striking a colourant, an accord with the weather outside their window, concordance with weather within: birds quiet without, a blowfly annoying within. Quick, vivid, vitamin, whiskey, amphibious, microbe, and hygiene all derive from this living, this high-life we all live, though most are more interested in the suffixed zero-grade form *gwi-o-. bio-, biota, biotic; aerobe, amphibian, anabiosis, cenobite, dendrobium, microbe, rhizobium, saprobe, symbiosis, from Greek bios, life (> biot, way of life), according to American Heritage, or Variant form *gwy- (< *gwyo-). 1. azo-; diazo, hylozoism, from Greek zo, life. 2. Suffixed form *gwy-yo-. zodiac, –zoic, zoo-, zoon1, –zoon, from Greek zon, zion, living being, animal; ultimately, though, they prefer nature to say bios or gwei for it declares nation, heritage, identity, it declares a place for the righteous, the knowing, the in touch, the separate. They don’t wish to be part of any club you’re a member of.
Nature writing equals overlays and underlays, carpets the best rooms in pile soothing to the feet. It shows real pleasure is in the walking.
Nature writers know as much proper-naming as they have time to accumulate.
Nature writing equals not being read by those land-clearing, or the contrary.
Nature writers want to look wherever something has been set aside. Attrition.
Nature writing equals targeting cats, not people.
Nature writers can be hunters or animal-rights activists.
Nature writing equals landmarking and wishing on a bird during war.
Nature writers become more animal by eating animals.
Nature writing equals the separation of the grotesque from the healing.
Nature writers are inspired, searching for intactness, and patient. They have time up their sleeves.
Nature writing equals the vicarious, equals verisimilitude, equals carving out a niche in the schema, in the pleasant picture.
Nature writers aren’t saving Mount Bakewell, don’t take on farmers with shotguns, will make do at a pinch with non-organic produce, are a bunch of fucking hypocrites.
Nature writing is a departmental party trick.

John Kinsella

Paradise Lust

2011-08-15T22:21:00.000-07:00

By John, posted by Tracy

Here’s an extract from a long-term work-in-progress: Paradise Lust. Obviously coming out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but also (later) Paradise Regained, this section is from 'Book One', which I have just completed. The final section of my 'Book One' is still in typewriter-script.

I’ve been writing ‘Book One’ on & off over the last nine months — as it largely reacts to local, regional and international political/ecological/social events, as well as to ecological concerns in general, it tends to be picked up when anger rouses me. I don’t intend it to be a diatribe — in fact, it’s more an engagement with Milton’s original (grabbing and reconfiguring his text, conversing with it, or just attempting to outrun its polished inevitability of form and idea).

However, I see it as a case of making a private torment public for a couple of reasons: firstly, the cathartic nature of public utterance, and secondly, in that perversely linked contradiction, the obligating nature of public utterance. A kind of desire to be held accountable for one’s mental and emotional resistance.

The stimulus to this section was the outrage I felt hearing ‘Twiggy’ Forrest speak (on a Four Corners documentary), regarding his desire to get ‘approval’ from traditional owners for yet another iron ore mine in the Pilbara. A very rich white man saying he can identify with the sufferings of local indigenous communities because of having been brought up in the same area seems to me classic colonial paternalism. Surely he does not know, because surely he can’t know.

I’ll say no more because I actually think the poem says it better. Poetry is the ultimate pacifist vehicle, I feel: its volatilities are tempered by the constraints of language and distance, which leads hopefully to more constructive outcomes.

Which is not to say I don’t think that one should stand up in person and clearly articulate an opposition — I certainly do. But reading a poem in person can often be a whole lot more effective than either speaking or yelling at the brick wall of self-interest (especially when it’s dressed up as ‘caring’: e.g. as soon as you here the words ‘training’ and ‘employment’ in the context of working in one’s own mines, you have to worry about motives, as much as the predictable questioning of the value of handing over money to ‘those’ people).

Poetry is action, and the story of Satan’s fall and battle with the legions of God, and his corruption of Adam and Eve, is the vehicle par excellence for dealing with issues of greed, exploitation and the capitalist desire for ‘choice’, and also the folly of pride, in a colonial context. For any who might think that the days of Australian colonialism have passed, think again. It happens on a private and state level most days, especially in Western Australia, a truly exploitative and paradise-lusting state.

I might add that the mining billionaires around here don’t merit Milton’s ‘glorious’ epic rendering of Satan (with his human depths and complexities!). And they are as much the ‘princes, potentates, and warriors’ of Heaven as they are of the sulphur of Hell. Whichever ‘side’ deploys military metaphors as signs of pride and worth is going to be suspect.

I am justifying the ways of no one, but I am justifying the rights of the exploited and the wronged (human and non-human) more than those who want to manufacture a ‘paradise’ in images of their own desires!

Paradise Lust 5 (Book 1)

Hesperian Celtic utmosts, island
to island I am not a person, prevalent
and prevaricating point-of-view: we are
what we watch with sore and running eyes,
get-back-together myth a rubric and flocking-
cause, damp walls I read of to go to: flight,
hypocritical hue or due: highest word orders
traipsing attention-seekers (ordnance)
reared in standard courage: clarion trumpeter
vengeance to perform, scrupulous as lustre
I cannot express my need for birds beyond
the window at dawn: sonorous and true,
‘martial sounds’ I make what I will of: damn me,
I am sure you will! Nightfright is explosives
and butane cannons a valley-fright, nightline
gone wrong at head of bed: I dreamt a cube
you looked into and there was an explanation
mark floating in analgesics — all those banners,
all those labels ‘with orient colours waving’:
hideous namesake who would locate and blame,
‘geek’ is the New Right with righteous indignation
flowing offhand, enlivened by microwaves,
phalanxes of digitisation, I escape to granite
folds where radon broods and alters ‘gift’
as much as birthrighteousness; none makes
from attack to battle traps clawing ankles
in the ‘firebugs’ storm of calling: who
are these dazzlers who surround me?
Who files and anglegrinds the view away?
Who cuts the heart out of the hill?
I place inside an empathy: I am mosquito
and gnat flayed less beautifully and with lesser
advertisement (never mind the samples, here
come the augmented profit programmes);
metaglories & heroic rage: O namesake disgrace,
race you to atomic or armoric knights, a flooding
of baptisms, a jest of clubbing: I cannot replace
the lifetime story I saw in a friend’s look,
acknowledging progress, a swirling of planet
faster than any measurement of orbit, any
counting down of days: we saw the juggler,
and the seat we sat at: a smile, a wave,
a passing over: I won’t say your name, I won’t
say it yet: names are more than I can bear: a pun
is worse than a lie to outflank the eye, resolution
of pictorials: a peerage of atoms and all their
(wasted? never) space; mortal shape immortal
or eminent, loss of tower and language
bright beneath the weighty beams of forests
turned to ships: ‘behind the moon’ in stunning
eclipse, a theft of archangel’s ruins; camera
obscura lumière of twilight sheds across the valley
which will never be tolled though thunder will
come tomorrow diastole in bloody pressure
not a sign of cheek fading to wet wood or thinking
ahead to flames. Passion in those billion spirits.
Heaven-blame is a scathing of forest and heath
and even clumps of spinifex edging rolling desert;
each battlefield mock-up to feel terrain sucked
away (a new uranium mine will open deep
in Western Australia) to little denial, little
weeping or bursting of the ranks; think:
what is work and who does work work for?
My father was a workaholic, my mother
works into her senior years, I work through
the night, and shiftworkers flying around the clock
make life about the life-altars of uranium oxide:
I was hideously exposed in my teenage years.
Myriad double-take, retaking of taken land:
firesale and compensation: digging deep to test
depth of the sign, marker of land and lines.
Lacking skin, lacking totem, lacking expressions
of light where growth begins, nothing is glorious;
those legions of state that would empty me out
into the borrow pit, so shorter days getting longer
in penumbra, exile outcast to blow channels
wide open, to excise and ‘repossess their
native seat’ — no question, just deliverance
of paternal facts (witness Four Corners forrestry);
throne; who sits where sits paternal overhang,
extended through funeral claims; who knows,
maybe pity beats deep unless profit plays havoc,
plays variations or riffs on stories: evidence
is the court’s maverick play, is the specialist’s boon,
is the shunning arriviste counterseal to have
a workforce, a New Slavery where pay is all prophecy,
is all Brave New Worlds and Nineteen-Eighty Fours
rolled over: New Slavery landless in ways
that count; repute custom consent regal concealed
billionaire monarch butterfly off course
aflame; rife rife rife rife rife rife rife rife
as sons as generations of hymns and songs
and daughters left in shade where the hills have
gone concave; onward Christian soldiers all things
bright and beautiful in your backyard you measured
out and made yourself; ‘spirits in bondage’ take your
seats at the table, this is the best offa ya gunna get: work
choices red as iron, red as the lips that tell you what’s
good for you: ‘money is not the answer’ from the obscenely
rich should shake the bones supporting such lips: Warhol’s
factory implosion: abyss war abyss: who spake?
Flaming swords — billions — are inevitable
in the swirl of being heard and lullifying:
the cherubim’s glorious cancelling out,
‘illumined hell’ and the hill hideaway
flattened out by the rolling smoke,
grisly leftovers of the hunter’s assignation
(one of the BOYS tried to run me down
but covered his action by keeping his line
and not following my steps onto the gravel).
The surveillance aircraft that grids us flies
its ‘glossy scurf’ of boundaries, and the truth
of womb envy plays out in HIS great ore
belly, his cultural involution he makes us
understand: capitalising sulphur, who could
speak more clearly of mining worship: ‘pioneers
of spade and pickaxe armed’: trenches and
all the metallic dead, all the metallic dead.

John Kinsella

Sweet Treats 2: Vegan Caramel Tart

2011-07-31T03:03:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

This one I adapted from various internet recipes for "Banoffee Pie" -- no bananas here, but I ended up adding more strawberries than in the photo, because this is extremely sweet and needs something acidic to cut the flavour and texture.

Crumb base:

250g digestive biscuits (McVities are vegan)

100g Nuttelex (or other vegan margarine)

Caramel filling:

100g Nuttelex (or other vegan margarine)

100g dark brown sugar

1 can soy condensed milk (see here if you can't get this in shops; you can also make it yourself according to various webpages)

Topping:

thick vegan cream (you can either buy it or make it: see Rose Elliot's Vegan Feasts)*

grated chocolate (dark or soy-milk chocolate)

fruit pieces

Crush the biscuits in a large bowl; melt 100g Nuttelex and stir through till well mixed. Press into the base and sides of a spring-form tin. (My mixture was a little too dry so the edges crumbled here and there; on the other hand, too much Nuttelex will make a crumb-crust greasy and too heavy.) Chill while you do the rest.

Melt Nuttelex and dark brown sugar together in a pre-greased saucepan till sugar dissolves. (I don't use Teflon, so I just greased the saucepan with Nuttelex and it worked.)

When it's melted, add the vegan condensed milk and stir while bringing to boil. Don't put it on a high heat -- you have to be patient with this bit. Now take your crumb-base out of the fridge. When the caramel mixture starts to boil, take it off the stove and pour into the base.

Chill it for at least an hour or it will be too runny.

[Left: basic tart, with slightly crumbled edges, but set firm]

When it's set, top it with the vegan cream, grated chocolate and strawberries or whatever you choose.

[Left: starting to pipe the vegan cream on]

[*The vegan cream is made by first cooking a small amount of cornflour with soy milk & a little vanilla, cooling that completely -- not in fridge -- and whipping margarine, then folding the two together, piecemeal. My Wakeman & Baskerville Vegan Cookbook -- a much-used standard -- has a similar method. If you prefer to buy vegan cream that is thick enough to use in this way, try the Cruelty Free Shop online or check in shops. There's even a spray-can vegan cream...]

Sweet Treats 1

2011-07-31T02:44:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Very sweet treats... and vegan, of course.

First, a cheap and easy one that Australians often call "honeycomb" (though it contains no honey), and that elsewhere is called "hokey pokey" or "cinder toffee".

I adapted the recipe from here (thanks, K at "In the Mood for Noodles") but doubled the quantities because my tray was 20cm square and I didn't want too thin a layer. (I needn't have worried!).

Note that you need a very big saucepan to make this, because once you put in the bicarb, it grows monstrously.

Next time I will use one teaspoon less of bicarb, hoping to reduce the slight aftertaste.

I also lightly scored the surface while it was still moist, so as to make breaking easier.

The other vegans mention needing dry weather to make this work; it's been raining heavily here (happily!) but since we have a fire going in the stove I thought I'd try it anyway. It's still chewy (not entirely hardened yet) but I am advised it tastes good.

What’s in a Name?

2011-07-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

by John, posted by Tracy

In the net world, one’s name is an empty signifier. I share my name with public figures who are butchers, composers, computing experts, swimmers, hurlers, you name it. It’s an uncommon name in Australia, but a common name in Ireland. We don’t own our names, and a name is only useful in what it represents. That’s fine, though it is always distressing when one’s politics are confused with the politics of another who is signified by the same name, because of a reader associating a statement made by another with ‘you’, because they have assumed... I guess that other John Kinsellas might not like the thought of their name being associated with my politics. I don’t want their words in my mouth, so to speak, and I imagine it would be the case in reverse. But maybe that’s just another victory for the cause of western subjectivity!

So when you hear or read a piece of, say, race hatred or cultural bigotry, and it has ‘your’ name attached to it, it is particularly hard to bear. In the mass of trackable ephemera that constitutes the net, it dilutes ultimately into a meaninglessness that can suddenly be activated as a ‘truth’. Horrific events inevitably evoke insensitive and brutal responses. The uncited reference, or the reference that creates its own citation: it was said, it is findable through a search, therefore is its own truth.

For my namesake out there who is looking to blame the Islamic world for all violence and hatred, I suggest he takes a look at his own motivations in posting such rubbish. The Grand Defence of Western values, and the fear of the ‘other’, are sadly alive and well. I am appalled to see ‘my name’ attached to a right-wing race-hate rant in the context of an horrific event (whose perpetrator, ironically in this regard, looks likely to be a Christian fundamentalist... but hate knows no boundaries, and the identification of the perpetrator’s belief-system/creed is not a marker of the nature of his hate).

I guess, heritage-wise, he and I connect somewhere way back. But I believe individual choices can be made regardless of genetics, cultural heritage or social context.

I have heard of people trying to take legal action to prevent another of the same name (that is, from birth) using it in public debates where they are well-known and it might rightly be assumed that they themselves are the source of certain comments, even if the comments seem out of character. A ’defence’ of who they are, how they perceive their public quiddity? Often, a middle initial or some other marker is introduced to differentiate. Appeasement?

And so many writers work under assumed names, even while writing under their birth name as well.

So, what’s in a name? Very little. But all the same, in those liminal and threshold spaces where the name floats like a buoy in the swill of comments that tail newspaper articles, I want to say clearly that I in no way blame Muslims for the ills of the world, that I am in no way anti-Muslim, that I celebrate cultural diversity, and fully accept that one’s own cultural backyard has as many issues and complexities as anyone else’s. I shouldn’t even feel the need to make these points when my life work has so clearly been dedicated to resisting bigotry in all its forms. But someone out there who has the ‘same’ name does have these abhorrent values/views, and thus I feel the need to claim my identity ‘back’ in the light of this.

So maybe I am defending the right to difference of opinion among all John Kinsellas, whether we can separate them off and identify the component parts or not!

John Kinsella, poet of the Western Australian wheatbelt, anarchist, vegan and pacifist. He refuses to use his middle initial as differentiator.

The Review of Fremantle Press New Poets We Have to Have

2011-07-09T03:53:00.000-07:00

by John Kinsella; posted by Tracy

I was disappointed to see the latest Westerly poetry round-up summarise the 2010 Fremantle Press collection of three ‘new’ poets with the general label ‘competent’. After lamenting the lack of ‘variety’ in the Fremantle list in recent years, the review leaves us with the simple assessment that the three-in-one collection was surely done for reasons of cost.

Now, in an age of declining poetry book sales (which is, true, matched by an exponential rise in web interest and performance interest in poetry), the presentation of three full-length collections, in an attractive and intelligently edited and introduced single volume, is a gain rather than a loss.

Let me express my connection to this volume before I begin — allowing that most collections published in Australia have at most one or two degrees of separation from a reviewer. The volume was edited by Tracy Ryan, my partner. One of the poets collected, J. P. Quinton, has assisted me in various tasks, and another, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, I adjudged (anonymously) the winner of a poetry competition some years ago. I have only briefly met the third participant, Emma Rooksby.

Dismissing each of these collections as ‘competent’ reduces the possibility of newness, innovation and breadth of publishing vision, far more than binding them within one cover in what will be an ongoing series (the 2011 volume has just been published, including two poets, and next year’s volume is a collection of performance-driven poets).

Westerly has a long history of supporting Western Australian writing, rightly placing it in a broader ‘Australian’ and regional context. The latest issue includes a wide selection of Australian poetry, with Western Australians coming off particularly well. What’s more, after questioning why Fremantle has tended to publish ‘established’ poets over recent years, the poetry round-up spends all the ‘Western Australian’ time concentrating on examples of those very poets. If it’s difficult to open a gambit with new poets and there’s no discourse to slot them into, let me provide a series of possibilities which will be just as much about how not to ‘slot’ them in, as how to ‘read’ them.

The first New Poets volume was part of a process that saw the submission of many manuscripts by journal-published poets looking for the publication of their first full-length collection. The process not only fostered the three poets included in this volume, but also resulted in a master class, in which a number of other poets presented and discussed their work in a supportive context.

The fact that Rooksby, Mitchell, and Quinton are dramatically different practitioners is a double plus in terms of their being collected together. It signifies diversity and cross-talk; it is about associations and clarifications of how we might read poetic cultural subtexts by creating context.

In her collection Time Will Tell, Emma Rooksby is what I would call an ‘internalising’ poet. The title’s colloquial familiarity captures much of the subtle tension between public and private that emanates from her poems. Pithy, compacted language, with a strong sense of ‘turn’ of phrase and idea, works image and rhetoric with equal skill and determination.

The external world is often presented in vivid sketches, but always folds in on the private or even intimate moment. Often there is the sense of a private conversation going on between the ‘voice’ of the poet and one with which s/he is intimate. But it would be wrong to think that these poems are simply making private communiqués public. Rooksby is concerned with how much private knowledge becomes something else when it is painted within the public frame of shared experience and awareness.

Hers is not a poetry of the material, though she is concise and precise in her empirical observations; neither it is a poetry of metaphysical aspiration. Rather, it’s a poetry of grounding, pinioning those hermeneutic fragments and moments that compile a life. The poem becomes a record of uncertainty locked within the apparent certainties of language (but that changes too). Memory is unreliable, but that doesn’t stop us constantly trying to validate and confirm memory in thought, in speech. This is structuralist poetry, in which subjectivity is a nagging doubt.

Try, but the quality of memory
decays. Somehow each incident
that’s set aside for treasuring
gets furred with motes of dust

In short, sharp, seven-line poems such as ‘Early afternoon’, ‘Winter’, and ‘Guardians’, interspersed through the collection, we are given imagistic glimpses and moments, interludes in the repetition of days. Rooksby’s uneasy relationship with closure in form, and her persona’s relationship with those towards whom it directs its voice, are epitomised by the closing line or lines of these pieces: ‘Surfacing, you see the long path back, in fading light’ (Early Afternoon). Rooksby’s skill is in taking the quotidian and showing its necessity to a greater, almost spiritual vision. She doesn’t demean or diminish the ‘ordinary’; the reader feels privileged to be part of the ‘quiet’ accumulation of detail and observation built across poems. The process is not passive; it’s a wrestling with how and why we privilege one perception over another.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s {where n equals} a determinacy of poetry is a collection in which (or maybe through which) poems are part of a broader display. If Rooksby delights in bringing the details of life into focus, Mitchell delights in graffiti-ing the streets of the psyche’s inner city (I use ‘psyche’ in its analytical sense, not as a vague sense of something). This is not so much in his specific references to inner-city spaces or markers (though they are there), but in his creating a street-map of language-play and public displays of private art. Mitchell’s elliptical and paratactic plays on line and expression are as much about the ‘domestic’ moment, the private encounter with language and occasion, as Rooksby’s poetry. His work ranges from love poems with a self-ironising edge (consider his love poems and poems of desire in the light of Rooksby’s opening poem, ‘Drink’ and the aesthetics of de-romanticism: this can manifest in so many ways!) through to a struggle with the validity of the symbolic versus the representational, in poetry and artistic expression in general.

Mitchell’s syntax and grammar are about beginnings rather than ends. By no means the first poet to place his punctuation at the beginning of a line rather than at the end, he’s nonetheless one of the most able practitioners of this approach. This invites a line to begin rather than end, and asks for an inverted reading, as well as encouraging us to read against meaning that has so often already been expressed or investigated ironically. Which is not to say Mitchell takes himself less than seriously — or expects the reader to take it less than seriously — but that he is fully aware that creating poetry is a self-conscious act of display and performance the moment it is spoken or is committed to the page.

Mitchell’s constant linguistic play on subjectivity advances beyond mere questions of the lyrical self or unified self, and questions the subjectivity of the recipient subject. He takes a ‘confessional’ mode and reinstates the very doubts expressed by confessional poets themselves (e.g. Robert Lowell). Take the poem ‘dew’ — a play with a Victorian romantic cliché, a self-reflexive love poem, and the medieval traditions of aubade:

.it is morning &
you twitch at each
kiss from these lips
placed ethereal on
ridge & slope of
body i dote

The ‘landscape’ solidity of ‘ridge & slope’ in the context of the body not only maps flesh on place but also links sensibility to surroundings and occasion. The you is as implicated as the ‘i’, but is also separated off as an idea, a notion, an extension of the ‘i’. The ‘you’ only exists because of the display of the poem. This reaches a deadly self-irony that still operates in the realm of need and desire in the seemingly off-putting (though not), ‘alopecian dreams’:

I dreamt last night
I had hair
; long
ocean-dipped
, arse tickling

The play of classical literary tropes with the slightly ‘off’ familiar is at the core of Mitchell’s poetics. Its best expression is actually found in a poem of more overt ‘beauty’, the wonderful ‘heliograph’ which reminds me of Callimachus’s (ca. 305BC.-ca. 240BC) ‘Hymn to Apollo’. Mitchell’s great skill resides in his poems’ openings — like Rooksby, his frustration is with the need for poems to end at all (which is not a bad thing!). ‘heliography’ opens with:

ball me up in a ball of light so I can write
how our sight foresaw this new beginning

The Steinian repetitions, the gentle sound-play, the nursery-rhyme explosion into what amounts to ontological clarity, launch us into a tour de force of ode-making fused with the ironies of ordinariness. Performance in the light of the sun matters to Mitchell.

The colloquial gets a full workover if not makeover in J. P. Quinton’s Little River. I feel confident in saying there’s nothing quite like Quinton’s voice (including his own voice!) in Western Australian poetry, and possibly Australian poetry as a whole. If you can imagine aspects of John Forbes and Nigel Roberts coalescing with Les Murray and maybe John Tranter, you might get some way toward unravelling its studied intricacies. In terms of environmental sensitivities, you could be rewarded by looking to John Anderson and maybe even Charles Buckmaster. Which is not to say Quinton’s ‘voice’ is the result of absorbing his models, but rather that he always writes meta-textually and always with an ironic awareness of how ‘voice’ can only ever be derivative and comparative. He says it as he hears it, and as he ‘speaks’ to his mates, the bloke in the street, in the bush, on the road.

This is Quinton’s genius; this most ‘voiced’ poet really writes outside poetic voice. He writes and speaks in his poem as he sees and experiences it. It’s what we used to call, in my ‘out-of-it days’, a ‘no-bullshit voice’. You believe it, whether it’s true or not. It counts as witness. When I said ‘studied intricacies’, I meant that Quinton’s ‘talk’ in the poems is both casual and immediate, and highly studied. He is a master of open-form poetry that gives the impression of having been written in stricter forms. In his work there is a kind of formal and tonal mimesis which are not replicable. At its most blunt, you might even think Charles Bukowski or Banjo Paterson; at its most sharpened and deadly you might think John Donne.

Little River is a book of range and variation. From engagements with localised popular culture in which tropes work hand-in-hand with the blunt reality of their application (or where ideas and theories of their nature derive from), through to environmental poems, poems in which the relationship between the ‘self’ and the transcendentalised ‘natural’ world is pondered and troubled over (the Swan River in Perth is a vital focal-point for Quinton), through to elegies that overwhelm with their bluntness and clarity, their almost brutal confrontation with loss of an older brother.

To give a sense of how a Quinton poem fuses casual language usage with formal (seemingly almost accidental) constraint, the ‘throw-away’ observation with sharp, cutting insight, and a simultaneous respect and trashing of ‘art’, we might consider the devastatingly ironic ‘Art for Life’s Sake’. Quinton can be gauche, brutal, frank and razor-sharp in the same line. Once again, as characteristic of Rooksby and Mitchell, Quinton is a deft poet of beginnings:

Your brain-damaged neighbour checks the mail ten times a day
for a bill he knows is due next week. Here, the sky is forgotten.

But Quinton is a poet of endings as well, maybe because loss and death are never far behind an observation, a thought, a recording. The last three lines of ‘Art for Life’s Sake’ say it all, and more. And it’s the more that comes out of confronting loss every time you wake that does it:

Having kids means spending all your time trying not to hand down
the malignant shit your parents gave you. At least with art you’ve only got
yourself to blame and perhaps Mr Imagination will stick around.

One gets the sense there is no other way to write it. Take these lines from the elegiac ‘All the Albums We Listened to Together’:

Is it you
Your deadness
Or me
My unforgiveness.

Air-drumming along
In your kombi
With its over-adjusted headlight

The first stanza quote shows inversion and play on primary and all-encompassing ‘values’: death and forgiveness. The person addressed is dead. Forgiveness has not been forthcoming. And yet the absoluteness of the dead is questioned in the irony of the ‘ness’, and the failure of forgiveness is countered by the guilt of the ‘un’. Suffix and prefix become the values, rather than the concrete reference. In the second stanza it’s the ‘over-adjusted headlight’. The light works, but doesn’t work right. This contains condemnation and understanding without saying so: nothing is precise, there is no exact measurement of death and its causes, and of how we deal with loss.

Quinton is a landscape architect, and his poems are landscapes. The persona is out in nature to remake and qualify himself, to give purpose. But the intellect behind this subjectivity can’t give way to ‘feeling’. Feeling is brutal. Reality is all-consuming. The poem ‘The Lookout’ shows closure up for what it is, and architecture of place, emotions and ideas, cancels itself out. We survey place from our privileged position of life. We begin:

Ice melts, green belts.
Alpine cold, frozen eucalypts
mountains near and far off.

and thirteen lines later we close off with:

Not so long ago
siphoning the world
my brother broke down and gassed himself —

a total, fucking, gas.

Endgame. Quinton will be one of the most significant poets of his generation.

So, one asks how three such vital poets can be merely described as ‘competent’. These are groundbreaking poets in a groundbreaking collection. Tracy saw it when she selected their work, I saw it while she was doing so. It has to be said. These poets have to be heard.

[Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets. Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell; J. P. Quinton; Edited by Tracy Ryan. Published by Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2010]

Statements

2011-06-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

by John Kinsella (posted by Tracy)

I think some clarification regarding my views on a few matters might be useful for those who read this blog. A list might be the way to go — I apologise if it seems officious, as it’s not intended to be.

1. I still maintain that technology fetishism is destructive to the planet. These occasional forays into the electronic world, (kindly posted by Tracy), are not intended as some kind of personal approval of the medium. The internet and computers are, to my mind, part of the disturbing portrait of ecological destruction that is being painted across this planet. However, I do think that on occasion one must speak out through all means available, and that includes the internet. For the last two-and-a-half years I have lived in virtual isolation on a bush block, and I am proud of this, and believe that one should constantly aim to minimise impact on the ecologies of the planet. But one must also be wary of a quietism by default. Having said this, I maintain my (non-violent, pacifist) neo-luddite position that gratuitous technology is destructive in so many ways.

2. What has convinced me to go ‘out into the world’ in as low-impact a way as can be managed is the distress imposed on the place where we live by Targa West Rallying’s insistence on conducting one of their dangerous and environmentally insensitive events where we live. This is not just a case of one’s own backyard, but a microcosm of a much wider problem. I have always believed in acting locally. Use of the net to bring attention to this problem (as well as writing to local papers etc), is a judgement call: a case of two evils.

3. In going forth into the world again, I do so in the belief that one can minimise impact in so many ways. Still needing to make a living and demonstrate alternative ways of approaching one’s art and practice, I might contribute to a broader awareness. The experiences of the last few years are worth publicly articulating.

4. I recently dedicated a poem about human-induced climate change (which I believe is a fact) to Cate Blanchett. I did so because I am very sick of seeing contempt and ridicule of women who are willing to challenge the industrial and mining power complex. As someone who believes that centralised power of any sort is a denial of liberty, the controls and impositions of government in any context are anathema. However, I am also pragmatic in that I am interested in seeing ecologies protected and respected, and if taxing these industries, which I don’t think should exist at all, will in any way reduce their abusive hold on the lives of all living things, then that’s a step on the way. I place this under the rubric ‘umbrella anarchism’. In terms of the abuse I have copped for dedicating a poem to Cate Blanchett, well, so be it. I make no apologies; I stand by the poem and the dedication. At least she had the guts to stick her neck out. I have no interest in her status or her iconicity, only in her humanity and willingness to take a risk on a vital subject. The bullies have been merciless.

I have dedicated many poems in my life, to people including Yehudi Menuhin, Noam Chomsky, my partner and my own children. Every dedication has a political and ethical purpose that is also about respect of the ‘person’. Persons should be respected. The dedication is never arbitrary. The people to whom I dedicate poems don’t have to have my views; neither is my dedication necessarily a confirmation of their views. Dedications are subtle as well as loud. They do many things, and I think readers would benefit from considering the nature of their own varied interactions with others. It’s a strange imposition on what a poem is, to read a dedication as a rigid and ‘loud’ fact.

5. I have spent many years writing and campaigning around refugee rights. I believe emphatically that all people have a right to sanctuary, no matter where they come from or how they get anywhere. Australia is a racist country, and racism should be resisted in all pacifist ways possible. There should be no mandatory detention, and the so-called Malaysia solution (or that of any other place outside the ‘target’ place of the refugees) is outrageous.

6. The World Health Organisation have confirmed the high likelihood that mobile phones cause brain cancer. I don’t use a mobile phone, have never owned one, and am not about to start. They are the ‘asbestos’ of our time. It saddens me to see young people using them because of social expectation. So many people see themselves as liberated by technology when they are performing exactly as the industrial (and military) power complexes want them to.

7. Activism isn’t just fronting up at a demo. It especially isn’t damaging things or being violent. Activism is a record of how we live our lives. Twenty-five years of veganism have taught me that identifying cruelty in an abattoir (what do you expect, seriously?) is always going to be no more than ‘identification’ if one turns around and eats an animal. Don’t eat them and they won’t be slaughtered. Don’t eat them and the window for cruelty closes considerably.

8. I believe poetry can literally change things. Though it might trigger hatred, ridicule, abuse, it will inevitably create discussion. You can ask for no more, but that’s worth asking for. Often your poem won’t ‘be got’, but you have to accept that language has its own ways in different contexts. Once you take a poem outside the safety of the discourse (and that’s not really very safe), you have to expect to cop it. But it’s worth it. Allowing or offering a poem to be posted on the web, printed in a newspaper, read on the radio, etc, may contradict beliefs about the corruptions of media, etc, but pragmatically (‘umbrella anarchism’), maybe you help undo the structure itself by doing so. It’s that old pacifist Trojan Horse again. The net, for example, will consume itself in the end, if the power holds out that long.

9. I am about to write an essay on ‘greed’. I believe that greed’s many faces need identifying and I will attempt to do so. Anarchism for me is about sharing: not only of wealth, but of knowledge and experience. It’s also about being willing to receive where appropriate.

10. The small acts accumulate quickly. There is no radicalism in violence, just compliance. Violence is the illustration that future violence is based on. In perpetuity. Break the cycle. Each of us has it in us — the violence, and the ability to deny its pollution.

Farewell for Dan

2011-06-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

from John, your son-in-law

You were everywhere
as we crossed the Nullarbor
and everywhere as we
crossed back again: in you,
east met west, and the compass
beat like a heart. We recognised
you in outback towns, yarning
with workers in the main street,
telling the shire president
what’s what. Your name
resonated through decades:
everybody knew you,
and the stories
by and about you.
We spent nine hours
talking hind legs, and each
minute was a discovery;
places I knew well
you repainted in rich colours:
red dust, endless sunrises,
blokes who knew a bloke
who knew a bloke,
the station, the mine, the motel
you stayed in there and back,
there and back, a view
at the Bunda Cliffs you shared
with Tracy, who shared it with me
and Tim — the power of an
ocean that holds the continent
in place, accountable.
‘What’s news, Dan?
How have you been?’
Overdrive, gift of the gab,
full of spark, don’t judge
a book by its cover.
That’s poetry, Dan,
and your yarns
were the utterances
poems live through.

The Duchess of Malfi at UWA

2011-05-29T07:05:00.000-07:00

By John and Tracy

Last night we saw the closing night performance of John Webster’s darkly tragic play The Duchess of Malfi (written 1612-13), directed by Steve Chinna with a cast drawn from UWA’s English & Cultural Studies theatre students.

From the moment we sat down the show looked promising – a simple set with plain flats – and the opening dance scene was eye-catching. Other than the odd piece of furniture – and at one point a starkly menacing coffin – most of the scene changes required nothing more than the deft shifting of these flats, ably handled by the cast.

I love the kind of understated design and direction that is not so minimalist as to be pretentious, but knows how to enhance a complicated plot and set of characters by keeping it streamlined.

I agree with what Tracy says above. It’s a richly cross-genre play, ranging from wit through an almost surreal burlesque (at least to modern tastes), through horror, to a more ‘conventional’ (maybe read ‘modern’) notion of tragedy. Teasing all these elements out so effectively shows what a brilliant director Steve Chinna is.

Tracy and I have worked with Steve before, and he and I are colleagues at UWA. I have met few directors and thinkers on theatre with as much depth, creativity and versatility as Steve. All his skills were on display in this production.

It’s such an intense blast of grotesque psycho-trauma fully charged not only to entertain but to challenge us as audience. It even asks questions of the theatre itself. This play includes some of the most memorable lines in English-language theatre. Beneath its in-your-face drama is an almost surprising subtlety, so hard to weave in a world in which the “ten thousand several doors” that death has, “for men to take their exits”, are almost default settings.

This brings to mind two of this production’s great aspects: the entries and exits that were deft and often stimulating in themselves, ominous and full of suggestion; and also the skilful handling of the substitutions within the blank verse, the movements into prose speech (e.g. Antonio), and the mini-closures of rhyming couplets. Steve Chinna is a supreme interpreter of verse in drama, much like Tim Cribb of Cambridge University.

The actors handled these with varying degrees of success, but what stood out across the performance was their ease of expression: the language glowed with clarity, as if the events were taking place down the road – though it’d be a very weird place they were happening in... The music was excellent, especially the live flute and percussion, never overdone.

As for the actors, I was taken with most performances in different ways at different times. After the show, I chatted with Steve, and he noted that he had asked the performers to let their characters grow and evolve with the moment. To be ‘mercurial’, I think he said, rather than operate within the expectation or ‘stencil’ of a character. Astute advice. It’s what allowed Aisling Murray as the Duchess, who began by playing the role a little too rigidly ‘haughty’, to settle into a far more complex and wide-ranging performance, coming into her own particularly in her last scenes.

Similarly with David Roman’s Duke Ferdinand: his interpretation of the Duchess’s mad, conflicted brother, actually blossomed with the revelations of his lycanthropy — Roman’s extreme take on this actually brought pathos as well as grotesque ‘humour’ to the part. There was tragedy in his revenge lust as well.

The Duchess’s other brother, the lustful and plotting Cardinal, was played with staid poise and perverse aloofness by Patrick Whitelaw. One of the play’s star turns was by Harriet Roberts as the saucy and coquettish Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress. Her timing was excellent.

Maybe the essence of this production’s tackling of the absurd contradictions in John Webster’s tragic revenge play was embodied in Mark Tilly’s Bosolo (‘a malcontent’) and his perversities. Tilly played Bosolo as both panto-villain and traumatised wrestler of split personality — a Jekyll and Hyde act that could have fallen flat on its face, but didn’t. In fact, insofar as he is the machine driving the plot and the ephemeral nature of ‘conscience’, I think he nailed Bosolo.

Reverting to the Personal Pronoun: engaging the ‘lyrical I’

2011-05-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

By John; posted by Tracy

The reclaiming of ‘I’ isn’t a gain, but a willingness to be held accountable for the necessarily compromising effects and affect implicit in the deployment of words. The concentrations of poetry increase the impact of allusion as much as declaration, and the machinations to avoid locating culpability for the possibly deleterious effects of one's words should be held to account.

By removing the unified self in its overt guise from the picture, the poet seeks both to universalise the text and to comment on the false claims any individual has to a ‘right’ way of seeing, into any sort of unique knowledge. It’s a social ploy, and that’s useful, and it resists capitalist fetishisation of text as brand-named product, and questions the authority of any one individual.

But it’s a smokescreen because whether written individually or collaboratively or even instigated in some random way, the original impetus necessarily relies on at least the notion of personal subjectivity in terms of its reception. All readers and listeners listen and read differently — most of those who reject the ‘I’ would at least consider this likely.

Tendentious, yes, but any claims of the best way to programme a poem are just that. And to my point: the ‘I’ is very rarely ‘honest’ anyway, and can only be a representation of the idea of self even with the most self-centred, world-seeing, self-defining authority of a poet. The I is the ultimate persona.

However, I believe one can bolster the ‘I’ with a personal willingness to take responsibility and be held accountable for witness, observation, and the many slippages and ambiguities that make a poetic text. A super-ego I, that reflects on the conditions of not only its making, but its accountability.

This is achieved through mixing verifiable ‘fact’ with that which evades confirmation: the conversation between these qualities is at the crux of the poem, and in many ways the ‘I’ manages this conversation (its conflicts and agreements and neutralities) within the poem.

The accountable I is the mediator, not the judge of the poem. Its accountability is to do with the value of presence in the text, and in the environment observed and/or created by the text. Its position is one the reader/listener might scrutinise: its position in terms of how it conveys and manages the presentation of poetic ideas and poetic language.

What’s more, it’s not (necessarily or necessarily desirably) the job of this ‘I’ to ‘confess’ anything. To hold one’s hand up and be responsible for one's own actions is not to have to lay one’s private history on the table. But it is an offering of a form of ‘privacy’: the accepting that even in its most private moments of creation the writing of a poem for publication is an act of declaration, a surrendering of varying degrees of privacy.

Mother and daughter movie

2011-05-12T04:05:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

I don't usually get to watch films on broadcast t.v. (not enough time, too much else to do!) but last night, having sat down to watch the first episode of Chris Lilley's long-awaited new series Angry Boys (mixed feelings, but it's only the first, so we'll have to wait and see) -- well, I got caught, because a French film came on straight after, and I stayed up too late.

The film -- Carine Tardieu's La Tête de Maman (In Mum's Head) (2007) was mixed, too: I'm not a fan of the quirky, mildly pretentious bits that French film-makers seem to feel obliged to put in as perhaps some sort of nod to their often-experimental and non-realist history -- one more sequence that might-be-happening-but-isn't, one more irruption of a fantasy-character into an otherwise smoothly plausible plot, and I switch off.

However, certain aspects were quite compelling. The teenage daughter of the film, Lulu, is a tomboy on the cusp of maturity but stuck there partly because of the grinding pressure of her mother's (Juliette's, or Juju's) permanent depression and fixation on apparently psychosomatic illness.

Lulu accidentally discovers a photo and then a home movie in which she glimpses her now-staid mother's pre-marital life, twenty years before. Juliette back then was vivacious, happy, freewheeling and open to experiment of all sorts, madly in love with Jacques... not the man she married.

The rest of the film is about what happens when Lulu digs around in that past and tries to "improve" things for her mother. Despite the sometimes-twee gestures the film makes, the central story -- how naive youth works on assumptions about its parents -- kept me watching, and was handled with appropriate ironic distance on the daughter's actions as well as compassion for her own process of growth and lesson-learning.

(I could have done without the cameo from Jane Birkin, whom I find somehow irritating. Lulu is an obsessive Birkin fan and the singer-actress appears as herself in fantasy mode, as a kind of substitute mother-figure to Lulu, materialising and vanishing after their short dialogues.)

It's fairly well-acted in the parts that count (mother and daughter -- the rest are foils, even the waspish grandmother) and kept me watching till the end, in spite of myself...

(NB On the web this movie is often named with U.S. spelling, In Mom's Head.)

Graphology Postscriptum 8: Moondyne Festival, Toodyay

2011-05-01T04:31:00.000-07:00

Poem by John, posted by Tracy

Graphology Postscriptum 8: Moondyne Festival, Toodyay

The marks a crosscut saw ‘insinuates’ (too soft, too quaint?)

Into the log’s circles of growth (irony, parody?)

Make carnevale and genealogy (fate of tree a footnote)

Or the shearer working hand-blades (sheep’s relief and distress)

Or Irish dancers smacking the road with heels (midday heat, not twilight)

And the Top Pub’s dark threshold (stories of you told in fourth person)

Snare drum and minor keys answering back (with a crash and a yawp)

Stand-up convict with dead-weight epilogue (heat straightening his beard)

Cautious proselytisers offering a glimpse (free games — prizes for the kids)

Moon-aspiring Plymouth and wavy white Corvettes (MGs delicately bright)

Classic and vintage prompts to touring (weekend outings fuel the town)

Old petrol-guzzlers cataclysms of clean air (drought hills, stark blue sky)

Carnevale on May Day where locals aspire ‘down’ (each a rebel, ipso facto)

Carnevale on May Day where Moondyne Joe rides again (here, onset of

escapism)

Carnevale on May Day where Joe melds bikies and establishment (which is

which?)

And so the orange metal of the mobile forge (beaten flat)

And so the whores with hearts of gold (only the well-off could afford the

blousy historic costumes)

And so the coconut shies to raise funds for a swimming pool (the river run dry,

unhealthy)

Each recognition a brief encounter (acts of mutual tolerance)

Each official doing-the-head-count (religion is truly the weather)

Each sale a contract (with the devil of Settlement)

We weave our way through with Sunday shopping (‘into town’ doubles as

survival)

We hear the town singers singing (against the jam session’s rousing)

We learn this ‘carnivalesque’ is post-Lent (masks on and off with curiosity)

John Kinsella

Southerly

2011-04-29T04:31:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Just another reminder for those interested in literary discussions: you can visit and comment on the blog at Southerly online. I'm their current monthly guest blogger, and there are others to follow.

The most recent topic is "Creative Collaborations". Just click on the speech balloon below the post if you want to respond...

Reconfiguring and Revitalising Anthropomorphics

2011-04-24T00:14:00.000-07:00

Written by John, posted by Tracy

Returning to translating Leconte de Lisle, especially his animal poems, has reaffirmed my growing belief that the bad press given to anthropomorphism arises from a ‘modern’ tendency to separate the animal off from the human. On the positive side, this gives animals the autonomy and self-identification they deserve and any notions of liberty should encompass. Animal rights necessarily require the human to be able to allow, compensate for, and respect difference between themselves and other creatures that occupy the planet. Through this we are able to perceive that what benefits us might not benefit a different ‘species’.

However, built into this very same perception is a degree of removal from personal and collective empathy with the plight of animals that ‘excuses’ the prioritising of the human condition over that of the animal. If we are unable to identify with the ‘feelings’ and sensations, never mind the ideas, of a given animal, then we are more able not to apply the natural justice we would necessarily offer a fellow human. I increasingly believe that anthropomorphics that are motivated by a desire to empathise with the ‘state of being animal’ are largely ways of extending these rights across ‘species’.

Ironically, the attribution of human traits to animals allows for the perception of difference by creating a familiar, even a level playing field. As the very useful Burns poem goes, ‘see ourselves as others see us’, and vice versa. Allow that animals’ eyes (or senses), are relative in their perceptions to ours. Allow they feel as we feel, allow that pain is pain, and pleasure is pleasure and so on. And if one requires a mirror for this to be the case, then that’s a step in the right direction.

Or even more indirectly, if we need to see the animal as a form of ourselves ‘wearing a mask’, and no matter how distorting that mask, that behind the unusual features we might roughly equate to our own, are the same needs, desires, and range of emotions and conceptualisations, then so be it. Whatever allows the bridge to be created, the ‘other’ to be dissolved.

Of course, ‘the other’ is not necessarily an undesirable state for some. To be seen as outside, different, even ‘less than’, might be considerably better than being part of or equated with. Difference is intactness and agency. But if difference is used by those empowered to oppress and demean, it can never be ‘right’.

I have also been thinking about these issues in the context of the ‘close encounter’ I had with a short-beaked echidna on the block last week. A young echidna, probably just ‘free’ of its parental bonds, was establishing territory around the great granites in the north-west corner. I watched it (with Tracy and Tim), explore, hide, curl up in a cleft between boulders. This was around sunset and it was very active — digging over ground around and under rocks, searching for termites.

We walked back down along the track to the house, but a short while later, I went back up, out of curious compulsion. I usually just leave things be, and I did so here, but I did go and look in between the rocks. I crouched. The echidna was in a coiled and curled position, quills bristling. And then it stretched and emerged. It moved towards me, sniffed the ground around my feet with its sensitive tubular snout, examined me with its tiny eyes, circumnavigated me, then proceeded to dig at the ground for termites. I stayed as still as possible. Eventually it ambled back into its cleft, and I discreetly removed myself.

Over the years, I have written many echidna poems, often through the lens of Derridean notions of metaphor. But this was quite different. I wrote a poem. I struggled to avoid equating the echidna’s emotions and actions with mine, or any correlative to mine. And I succeeded reasonably well, though underneath the moment you map an ‘encounter’ you are imposing human understanding about the processes behind ‘engagement’.

But since writing that poem and since working on de Lisle, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should write a more directly anthropomorphic take on the interaction. That is, give the echidna human traits and feelings, the better to understand my own motivation for writing the poem, and even more so for strongly believing it, as a creature, is no different from myself in terms of the rights it should have, the respect it should have, and the empowerment it should have. I almost said ‘it deserves’, and stopped myself, but maybe that’s the point. It does ‘deserve’ and because I am clearly in the empowered position (we share space, of course, but in truth I have far more control over the dispensation of that space), maybe I need to be frank and declare this position. My conscience prevents me from doing so because I know it’s wrong.

But in the twists and ambiguities of a poem, these contradictions, this conflict between how one feels it should be and how it really is, can be articulated without one position preventing awareness of the other. The poem that uses expressions attributing human feeling and, say, features, to an animal, can also illustrate the problems behind doing this.

Anthropomorphism can become generative and liberating in the sense that one gives away one’s platform of authority by expressing the belief that equality is implicit in the relationship, but that in reality there are few grounds for it to exist. It doesn’t surprise me that many of those I’ve read and met who are so rigidly opposed to the anthropomorphic, to pathetic fallacy, are those who either have the most conflicted views over the use of animals for human benefit, or are in fact the most indifferent to the conditions of animals outside their ‘use’ to humans, either as food, medicine, clothing, or pets.

John Kinsella

Note: the photo was taken when the echidna was in the ball position. It was also taken from a distance. The echidna was not disturbed nor directly intruded upon. Its territory now covers acres across the block. Its lines of foraging take in areas around the house, especially the outcrop just above us.

Narnia from page to screen

2011-04-23T06:37:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Tim (now 8) and I just finished reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together. It's a book I have some reservations about, but he's got a huge appetite for fantasy fiction just now (John's reading The Hobbit with him), and so in some ways it was inevitable.

This weekend we also watched the film version, and it was interesting to see the changes that had been made between the two formats.

Some were minor alterations to make the children seem more feisty (perhaps), such as their breaking a window with a cricket ball to send them hiding into the wardrobe (as opposed to the novel's idea, which has them merely seeking to escape visitors).

Others were minor gender-role revisions. (Tim had already observed that Susan's reluctance for adventure and pushing forward was "like Anne in the Famous Five" -- although to be fair, in both story-worlds the more nervous girl-character is offset by a braver one.)

All in all, the film would not be a disappointment for readers of the book -- though a comic scene Tim was looking forward to, in which the cowardly White Witch lifts her skirts and flees from Aslan's roar, became a mere sinking back into her chariot before him, removing the bathos I suspect Lewis was trying to associate with the ego of evildoers...

It was beautifully animated and the children were good in their roles. Tilda Swinton is a perfect White Witch and a hideous vision especially when she turns warrior-queen in the latter half of the film.

But it's always disappointing for me, the way that Lewis's story can turn what could be an image of non-violent response (Aslan's suffering at the Stone Table) into the core of a quasi-militaristic vision (self-sacrifice = the noble interpretation of war?).

Setting aside the question of whether the heavy-handed Christian allegory at times mars the story, Lewis comes across as at pains to avoid any possibility of pacifist ideals. Overtly, for the children in the story, growing up and growing better means accepting not only the need to do harm, but the "nobility" of doing so under the supposedly appropriate circumstances. (Lewis of course famously wrote a speech entitled, "Why I Am Not a Pacifist", so it's hardly surprising his fiction should be so hooked on violence.)

German film

2011-04-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Last night I went to one of the last films of the 10th Audi Festival of German Films in Perth. (The Festival was held in five state capitals, but Perth had the smallest selection, running from the Thursday night through to the Monday.)

The offerings were divided into three: "German Currents", "Retro 2001-2011", both of which speak for themselves, and "Radical Docs", which the programme described as "taking you into the minds of radical lifestyles across the globe, be they in art, fashion or sports".

The film I saw was in the second category, and billed as a tragicomedy, which was roughly accurate. Made in 2001, "Berlin is in Germany" follows Martin, imprisoned in the Brandenburg penitentiary before the wall came down, and released after more than a decade into reunified Germany, a Berlin whose once-familiar east has changed all its street names.

Reading the blurbs beforehand, I expected something of a Rip Van Winkle tale, and it's true that the movie makes poignantly humorous contrasts between the "outside world" that Martin came from and the one he emerges into (planes in the sky where travel was once impossible, the constant ringing of mobile phones), where those who mattered in his previous life at first hardly recognise him. Or don't know what to do with him...

But he's by no means been asleep: Martin's experiences in prison have shaped both his understanding of the regime that put him away, and his future struggles, through the otherwise-unlikely friendships or alliances formed during his incarceration.

The film has just enough lightness of touch to steer between traumatic political fable on the one hand and sentimentality on the other. At least part of this is due to the handling of the main roles (Martin firmly understated and well controlled by Jörg Schüttauf; his estranged wife again kept low-key by Julia Jäger), and to director Hannes Stöhr's emphasis on simplicity and restriction of the field -- the film doesn't try to bite off more than it can chew).

The only pity with this Festival was that Perth got so few of the films, relatively speaking. In Sydney, understandably, it ran from the 6th to the 18th of April. Several of the drama-thriller type films I would like to have seen were not showing here.

By the same token, we were spared Goethe!, which looks like a shocker. I know it's not fair to say that when I've not seen even the trailer, but any film whose blurb says, "The spirit of Shakespeare in Love is alive and well in this impeccably performed and beautifully decorated period piece", has given me fair warning... And that's without even taking into account the still on the back of the printed programme: a male-model-looking "Goethe" of vacant expression in low-necked frilled white shirt running along a dusty village street with what looks like a manuscript or letter in his hand. Why do films about writers always look like this?

Guest blogging at Southerly

2011-04-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

For anyone interested in following, from this Friday I am a guest blogger for a month at Southerly journal.

There will be subsequent monthly bloggers too -- looking forward to seeing what turns up!

What's in a name... and: The Argument, at last

2011-04-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Even though they're starting to wither, I wanted to capture these beautiful flowers that have now sprung up here a second year. They were obviously planted before my time and so were a surprise when they first bloomed.

I love bulbs and have often written poems about them, probably because of their startling aspect, as well as their recurrence, their pattern of disappearance and regeneration.

These are what people here call "Easter lilies"; also known as belladonna lilies or naked ladies. It is not the same flower (in any case there are various flowers) that people in the northern hemisphere call "Easter lilies" -- and our Easter is not in the spring...

Here is an excerpt from a five-sonnet sequence I wrote when they bloomed (much more pinkly) last year; the full sequence was published in the UK's Poetry Review. The sequence is called "Pictures, as Promised".

These are the lilies, flushed with shocking pink

people call Easter lilies here, the way

names grow from usage, cling to what we say

they are, however tenuous the link

to language elsewhere. Sprung up in the chink

between the septic tanks, resistant clay,

marking a distance and a funeral day,

so far and so final. We always think

there'll be one more occasion, one last word

to fix the thing, to capture what was meant

clearing the air -- not that we'll be cut short.

Rest of my life, the news you never heard,

and now, the images I never sent:

fading as light, the best of them uncaught.

*********

On a much happier note, I just received the first advance copy of my new book of poems, The Argument, which will be out in July from Fremantle Press. It's always a strange moment, seeing the thing take physical form.

The Truest Faces of the Military

2011-03-26T23:43:00.000-07:00

Written by John, posted by Tracy

In the same way that the use of nuclear power can only ever lead to destruction and pollution of the very people it purports to help, so with the military in all its guises. If for a moment one is ever deluded into thinking a genuine humanitarian motivation underpins a military vision, think again. Unless soldiers have been drafted against their will, or maybe even drawn into the military out of poverty, only to find themselves enslaved to something every bit as destructive as starvation, inevitably the ‘thrill’ of violence underpins the decision to ‘join up’. Adventure at the expense of someone, somewhere. Or maybe something far more malign than that.

In my teenage years, I was highly ‘militarised’, and had every intention of going to Duntroon and becoming an officer. I was obsessed with strategy and tactics, starting with Alexander the Great, the Peloponnesian War, Hannibal, and Caesar’s writings, and worked my way through to the finer details of armaments of the Second World War, their manufacture, deployment, usage, and the general thinking behind total war. I was a strategy game aficionado. As with a chess game, I saw it as intellectual pursuit.

Wilfred Owen’s poetry made me rethink things. I connected the dots between ‘intellectual’ interest, and the physicality of playing wars in the backyard (and elsewhere), and issues of repressed aggression (often engendered by humiliation and inadequacy in the face of being bullied). As my political and social awareness increased, I found it a struggle to resist this urge.

When I look back I am aware that this struggle came out of a paradox: a belief in the morality of ‘protecting’ in the face of a desire for control, excitement and power (however limited). This desire for power arose from being bullied at school, and compensating for an offended masculinity. I knew many people who went into the military, or had been in the military in some capacity. I don’t now. Not a few of those who went on to become soldiers were bullies, were very often racist and misogynist. Military women I only knew through others.

Now, to be fair, this was not carte blanche. I did meet those whose moral convictions were melded with defensive nationalism, who believed they were doing good (though all claim to be doing good!). But still, scratch away and an excitement over military ordnance, and an almost prurient interest in the casualties of war, drove motivation.

It astonishes me that anyone should be surprised that Australian (or any) soldiers in Afghanistan should post racist brutalities on their facebook pages. Just be surprised that it got through the military filter system. The military is that, but knows it must hide it to survive. The military exists because people believe it is necessary. The very same soldiers that committed these offences against human dignity at the very least, and maybe much worse, will be tomorrow’s heroes if they are killed on the battlefield. Their individuality will be consumed by the nationalist cause, while portraits of their goodness will be painted. Ironically, the military (and the country) will treat who they really are with as much disdain as they are treating the Afghan people.

When I was a youth I worked on the wheatbins for a couple of seasons. Soldiering and racism went hand-in-hand for some of my colleagues. They know what crimes they committed against others. It was just an extension of the military dialogue into civilian space. From a war/military-obsessed childhood and teenage years, to total pacifism: it seems an obvious journey to me.

I live in a place where violence is worshipped. Guns are never far away and they go with an anti-ecological stance and general social conservatism. The army recruits from such demographics. They brush the soldiers up so as not to show it in public (though they do, anyway), but they rely on racists, bigots and ultra-conservatives to feed their recruitment drives. Those very attitudes are what allow them to kill an enemy. An enemy they wholeheartedly believe in, that they’ve been encouraged to believe in as they’ve grown up, watched television, played violent games, and towards which they’ve been socially directed as an outlet, rather than venting on their own streets (which is obviously also disturbing).

A couple of years ago I met a cop who despised guns. Despised violence. He didn’t believe in meeting violence with violence. He gave me hope. The military isn’t designed to operate that way on any level. It is the home of propaganda because it is founded on violence and not an aversion to violence. The military needs all the propaganda tools it (and the government) possesses to sell itself to those who aren’t violent by inclination.

All sewn up? No. I won’t forget the boys cat-shooting and fox-shooting and roo-shooting, hyped up and talking about joining the army. And I won’t forget their elders saying ‘it will do them good and harness their aggression — give them control and make use of it’. No, it just puts the aggression in a holding pattern until it’s let loose to serve the military overlord-vampires and their human helpers who can walk in the daylight.

Our small son has had to endure threats of shooting, knifing and witnessing a parrot corpse frenziedly beaten with sticks. Many of the perpetrators idolise the military and say ‘war is good, we need it’. I don’t doubt that more than a few will sign up when they’re old enough, encouraged by their parents, their peers and the state.

See this article. Actually, evidence of an endemic problem is implicit in the article’s title — the headline is as much part of the problem as the soldiers themselves. We all provide the environment in which these things are fostered and projected. These soldiers just do the dirty work. Watch who comes out to defend these actions. It won’t be surprising. Think about it.

Angela Carter's poems

2011-03-15T19:02:00.001-07:00

By Tracy

The Observer this week announced that Radio 4 in the UK would be broadcasting some unpublished poetry by the late Angela Carter. Their article gives a short extract from one of the poems at the end. It's hard to tell from this extract what the poems might really be like, though it seems there are not many of them ("more than a dozen", the article tells us). Apparently Carter had serious thoughts of being a poet in the 1960s, before her first novel was published. She was a strikingly powerful writer of fiction -- it would be interesting to see the rest of the poems.

The Performative Activist Poem?

2011-03-13T04:49:00.000-07:00

Written by John, posted by Tracy

I see the term ‘activist poem’ is spreading, or spontaneously appearing. No doubt it has many individual usages or histories I am unaware of. However, I want to differentiate because it bothers me that it might be used generically to indicate a poem noting a problem that requires addressing or even rectifying, that it serves the purpose only of creating debate and awareness.

For me, the activist poem is a ‘performative activist poem’: one in which action is an implicit part of the writing, delivery, and hopefully the reception of the piece. I am extrapolating from ‘performative verb’ whereby the act is performed by writing itself (or speech). The poem becomes a literal act with cause and effect. Its action cannot be denied because it is an implicit part of its creation (and delivery).

It is not about delivering a window into ‘history’ (I think ‘history’ has failed as an activist prompt) or an overview of a situation that merely provides knowledge or alternative ways of viewing the situation. Rather, it is an intrinsic part (a contrary part) of the situation it critiques. Born of the place it seeks to protect and preserve. A part of the moment, of the whole.

I am not using the expression in the sense of ‘performative writing’ (though an activist poem might deploy aspects of this), nor of Austin’s ‘performative utterance’, though ‘utterance’ is certainly part of what I personally do. Maybe it’s best to quote that ultimate system of systems, the OED (that through adding new words and ‘pop’ expressions creates the illusion it’s growing and flexible when in fact it’s reinforcing the terms of its own creation and duration) regarding ‘performative’:

‘designating or pertaining to an utterance that effects an action by being spoken or by means of which the speaker performs a particular act.’

It’s the ‘effects an action’ that is key (or pertinent) here: the poem needs to come out of the situation and work to resolve the problem. I don’t mean merely an act of nominal intervention or disruption, or an ‘artistic moment’ that enters discourse and brings change according to a socially self-supporting (cadre) system, but a poem that puts itself out there to suffer the same alienation and potential damage suffered by the subject (the ‘wronged party’) it is trying to protect.

From an ecological pacifist perspective, this would be the poem in front of the hunter’s guns, or the poem coming out of the bush that’s being bulldozed, spoken in front of the bulldozers. I am being quite literal. The activist poem requires its moment of activism, rather than being written in a protected space and hoping people will ‘hear’ (they won’t). A few academic or poet-mates might hear and back slap a bit, but nothing will change. Okay, collect these moments post-event, but accept they then become something else. They are no longer the performative activist poem, but rather the subjunctive activist poem.

If you’re vaguely interested in where I’ve discussed the writing of activist poems, you could see my book Activist Poetics or go to the article (one of a series I did for Poetry Review): Kinsella, J.V. 2007, ‘Lyric and Razo: Activism and the Poet’, Poetry Review, 97, 1, pp. 66-79.

A few notes from recent conversations might further illustrate my point. One of my very sharp correspondents rightly differentiated what I am saying from ‘situationist’ moments (which he said were a ‘good model’ but weren’t about poetry per se), which pleased me. These are some of my words from that correspondence:

I just don’t see history as being as useful... in terms of an activist text — I want to enact resistance immediately — (rhetorical) lyric as gesture and literal action-intervention.

...’history’ is there, but in the moment of intervention it becomes either overshadowed or deleted. Violence if you’re on the receiving end annuls most things. Seems a privilege of writing locale to me that I find deeply bothering. If you write the war zone, then confront it and try to stop it (in a pacifist way) immediately. Too much conjecture, too much wandering in text. Text should be there, here, now!

and

That’s what I am on about re making the poem a live part of protest and resistance rather than a record or even a prompt to discussion (they’d like to think action, but it’s only coterie action when and if so).

So, poetry is part of it, not just a tool for analysing the wrongs (and at best promoting discussion among like minds). I suppose in the end this might seem like hair-splitting; surely any poem that claims to be activist and that is working to rectify inequalities, bigotry, exploitation, and damage is a good thing. But there is a difference in modes of approach, and ‘activist poem’, as a term, is always going to wear too many faces to retain emphasis.

John Kinsella

Company

2011-03-09T03:24:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

So I was working at home today in a quiet house, alone -- as I thought -- when I heard a squeaking-barking sound from the window near me. It was almost birdlike, but not from any bird I knew. I crept to the window and there, climbing up the outside of the flywire, was a sleek, dark monitor lizard with an incredibly long tail. It just stayed there, clinging on and looking at me.

Rilke's Stunden-Buch again

2011-03-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Here is another quick and rough attempt: this is the first poem from Rilke's Book of Hours. I have been doing them in no particular order and they may well undergo more changes.

[Da neigt sich die Stunde...]

So the hour is closing and striking me

in its clear and metallic way:

my senses are trembling. I feel: I can,

I take hold of the pliable day.

Nothing was finished until seen by me

every becoming had stopped.

My glances are ripe, and whatever they want

comes to them like a bride.

Nothing's too small to me -- I love it still

and paint it on gold ground, and great

and hold it up high without knowing whose

soul it might liberate.

From Rilke's Stunden-Buch

2011-02-27T04:42:00.000-08:00

Another short translation by Tracy, from Rilke's Stunden-Buch or Book of Hours.

[Ich kann nicht glauben...]

I can't believe the short man, Death, whose

very head we're used to looking over,

still gives us trouble and still worries us.

I can't believe his threats are serious;

I am alive and I have time to structure:

my blood stays red longer than the roses.

My mind runs deeper than the merry hell

it pleases him to make when we're afraid.

I am the world

from which he, straying, fell.

Just so,

wandering monks around in circles go;

we fear their coming back, we do not know

whether it will be the same each time,

is it two, is it ten, a thousand or more?

We only know this strange yellow finger

that stretches out so naked and so near

here here:

as if emerging from the clothes we wear.

For my late and former teacher

2011-02-23T03:12:00.000-08:00

by Tracy

You always found something more

to show me, shed light on, as if it

couldn’t be helped, as if no matter what

we did, over a decade, to shift it

from this foot to that, rearrange

some shared mental furniture,

we were fixed in one relation:

I still had things to learn. And I do.

Now you continue, demonstrating

just what a year means, the ache, the worth,

the heft of it – even the empty weight:

this year of you gone.

But please go on,

pay no heed to interruption –

when the day’s late and you really ought

to get home, students will always hold you back

with one last question.

Christchurch

2011-02-23T03:10:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Our thoughts and feelings go out to the people of Christchurch and all New Zealand dealing with the aftermath of a horrendous earthquake. Words fail at a time like this.

Why I Oppose the Genre of ‘Nature Writing’

2011-02-22T17:57:00.001-08:00

Posted by Tracy

Written by John

This was written in response to an editor asking why I don’t call my work ‘nature writing’. For an earlier instance of the same topic in a different context, and as poem (written in 2005), see here.

Why does ‘the land’ have to give something back to the writer? Why do we need to imagine, manufacture or ‘experience’ some kind of bridge between self and ‘wild’ to give purpose to writing the land?

I have recently been reading (in a variety of places) essays that in one way or another map the self onto ‘nature,’ or even more disturbingly, so centralise the self that nature is mapped onto (self) identity.

This disease of Western subjectivity, this defence of the natural world because it has so much to give us, grant us, return to us, reward us, or affirm us, is the final sliver of aesthetics that would guarantee the hobbling and dilution of any poetic resistance to the killing of the land itself.

As writers (rightfully) struggle with how they might place themselves in ‘place’, within ‘nature’, they so often settle for a self-portrait backgrounded by pseudo-scientific fact and tidbits of ontology. Illustrating with ‘scenes’ and asides from personal experience (‘I encountered a creature, a plant, a rocky outcrop, and had an epiphany’), they dress nature up to give a sense of the authentic. This creates an authority by convincing us that these feelings are feelings we too could have, or should have. We are ‘there’, we are them. This is vicarious, real, and often steeped in pseudo-mysticism. It’s the act of writing and the attention to self it brings, rather than the place itself, we are interacting with.

That’s fine, but so often it pretends to be more than this. Or maybe it’s wish-fulfilment – an earnest belief that a conduit of sensing has been created, that moral turpitude will be dispersed by engaging with what, on occasion, almost elevates itself to holy text. We are granted a royal ‘we’ when the writer is more often talking of ‘I’, and that ‘we’ is always exclusionary. We – the readers (inevitably being non-indigenous – why? why shouldn’t we be the imagined ‘other’? – and lacking a traditional totemic relationship with that place) – will learn by vicarious participation with the writer of the piece, how to respect the land and share in its mystical-giving qualities.

If only we’d learn how to sense properly, be sensitive to animals and plants and the spiritual vibes deposited by those who have known the land ancestrally for thousands of years.

This is at best appropriation, and can verge on racism. Yes, of course one should respect and learn from indigenous peoples if one is of a ‘migrant’ cultural heritage (or even if forced to locate to a particular place due to transportation, wars, famine, political or personal exile, family relocation — I am referring to modes of non-indigenous arrival in all their complexities). But it is hypocrisy to use indigenous knowledge, to co-opt it, as a way of affirming one’s own connection to the place that one has directly or indirectly helped oust them from anyway. This is not to say that one can’t or shouldn’t refer to indigenous knowledges, that they won’t necessarily become a positive part of a non-indigenous discourse, but rather that so often it’s a veneer of connection and respect hijacked to validate one’s own presence and disturbance of land.

I am reminded of nature-lovers who build a house on the edge of a rare wetland, or ‘virgin’ forest, or among fragile dune ecologies, and state they are guardians of that endangered nature. I could accept this if the house was already there and someone moved in to convert that ‘edge’ into more of the primary ecology of the place, but so often it’s not the case. The nature they hug against is annexed into their spiritual and material needs, their affirmation of a unity with the endangered. In doing so they value-add their own corporeality.

I see this as what we might call ‘belonging angst’, the desire to suggest to outsiders and themselves that they are compensating for their presence. A bit like those soon-forgotten carbon offset programmes. Tree-planting isn’t something that occupies many plane-travellers’ minds. It’s all about rights of access when access would reasonably be denied (because of fragility of an eco-system, for example). It’s all about land, and who controls it. In the western genre film The Violent Men, the doc says to the Glenn Ford character at the beginning, that the Anchor ranch owners are ‘land eaters’. Indeed. As are the small farmers the cattle baron is trying to drive away. It’s not just the big that do the damage. Exploitation has many degrees.

I should state clearly now that this is not contesting the ‘I’, that old lyrically challenged chestnut, as the ‘I’ is always hidden away there by varying degrees of separation. Nor is it a contestation with writing the self when experiencing the world around us; rather it is the use of the super-validated self as authority, as reliable configurer of empathetic experience.

However, I should state that I believe the ‘I’ should always be under pressure: under pressure in what constitutes the self, and under pressure in how it operates as messenger and witness. I certainly don’t trust reading my own ‘I’ in an essay or a poem, thought I trust myself and believe I have tried to speak with all honesty. As soon as ‘I’ become ‘I’, I doubt and assume doubt is part of the reading or listening process. Poetry, and writing in general, should be about witness and resistance. It should critique the position one’s own subjectivity comes out of, and why one’s own voice is problematic. The yearning ‘I’ isn’t enough. Delicacy and tact aren’t enough.

Returning to the issue of validating presence-in-place in nature writing (by non-indigenous writers): surely to co-opt indigenous beliefs and knowledge purely to enhance one’s own connection to the factor beyond this disenfranchisement is delusion or corruption? And associating indigenous cultures purely with nature because they might not traditionally have built permanent towns or cities (though what constitutes permanence is challengeable), is another version of ‘noble savagery’.

So often the artiste guided through country by an indigenous elder is entirely insensitive to what’s being made ‘available’ and what’s not. They write it up later believing that their interpretation of what’s been said is the right one. It’s their own subjectivity they express, not actually understanding the purpose behind the process in the first place. It becomes ‘excursion’. It ends in glib comments like, ‘We can learn from...’ when all that’s being learned is how to augment one’s personal mysticism, one’s colonising expression of unity with stolen land. It’s not a case of the original owners and the new owners — there is no ownership, only theft. Like the Australian Jindyworobaks openly defending their ‘annexing’ of indigenous culture, in their attempt to get closer to their land, this neo-Jindyworobakism in Australia should face up to itself and accept that it is doing the same thing.

All the issues and factors above, I see as components of ‘nature writing’ propaganda – the affirmation of the self within a given ecology (while clandestinely separating the self from that ecology through affirming and qualifying personal subjectivity), claiming that if the community at large could only listen with equal sensitivity, nature would benefit. At the centre of this is the ‘exchange’ – human and nature (everything else not human-made) in dialogue with each other, even in spiritual communication. A give and take that’s really just a take-away fast-food version of nature.

The destruction of habitat will only stop when people give up on the idea of getting something back. I was appalled by a recent essay whose author spoke of walking through a dieback area and along closed trails, and lamenting the state of things. Stay out. Don’t go there! Stop looking and lamenting and enjoying. Recognise your own scopophilia, your own fetishisation of the damage. It becomes like an act of confession followed by an act of contrition (and I’m not Catholic or any other religion: it’s just the closest analogy I can make).

I love jarrah forests but won’t walk through them anymore, because of the risk of spreading dieback. To respect nature, you don’t have to experience it. Sometimes you need to leave it alone: not just one socio-ethno-cultural group, but all. Death is death. Stay out! Leave alone. It’s not the same world; different approaches need to be applied. Respect is not getting pleasure back. It’s always bemused me that people follow a God because they expect something back in return. I’ll worship you if you grant me a place in heaven. Garbage. Surely faith is expecting no reward. Doing something because you know it’s right.

Damaged land is abundant – go out and repair it. Bushland that’s ‘intact’ – preserve it, but not so you can feel good. Animals? Let them come and go as they please, not as you please. Spare them and me the mystical indulgence that makes a faux pantheism where the centre is the self, not ‘nature’.

When writing the land I find a huge tension between the desire to express what I think I understand of the place – in essence, to describe – and the knowledge that my presence anywhere is so often destructive. This destruction is built into so many human interactions with place – on a micro level there’s no perfect balance, anywhere, anytime. On a macro level, certainly some cultures have ‘managed’ place better. Nyungar people here in south-western Australia did less damage and conserved with more efficiency than the colonists that followed. But even so, on a micro level, some individuals inevitably did and do their damage as well. Denying that is buying into the ‘nature writing’ binary.

Poems for me are disturbed and even damaging. They are about resistance, and induce troubling self-criticism. When they fail in this and become a gloss of ‘experiencing nature’, they are joining the big lie, the big watching-it-diminish while comforting ourselves that we are aware and conserving. The poem – or any piece of writing – should surely be an expression of crisis: a crisis of description, of where the self sits in the propagandising of place, of how one deals with what might seem the deepest affirming of connection with place (I love Jam Tree Gully, I love the forests, I love the desert and so on) – but in the knowledge that even the act of observation, and certainly the acts of occupation and habitation, are yet more nails in the coffin.

The writing itself, and the act of writing, should be under constant scrutiny. Even communal and collaborative ‘nature writing’ becomes a smokescreen for those individual expectations and subjectivities, for a mutual sense of usage that will give pleasure and affirm that one is meeting one’s ‘responsibilities’, that one can ease the guilt back a little by ‘respecting’.

Inevitably, rather than ranting or screaming resistance, that nature writer asks us questions: about our complicity, about searching our souls, about asking ourselves whether we’re doing enough. Maybe? Maybe not? If you’d only commune with nature, you’d see the beauty, the ‘joy of creation’. Or, the necessity of ‘conservation’ because the science of loss adds up to our loss in the end. Either way, the nature writer offers a mediation, a negotiation with subjectivity and fact, or subjectivity and a mystical affirmation. It angers me. Stop the damage. Stop abusing animals. Stop placing SELF at the centre of nature by pretending to look on from the sidelines. Stop using the hawk hanging in the air, or the kangaroo watching in the distance, as a mirror or a bloody crystal ball.

It’s none of these things. The writer communing with nature can so often mean the death of nature. The writer’s joy becomes its misery. I am not interested in reading of the beauty of encounter, the journey of the human soul. The act of writing long ago left ‘nature’. The ‘For Sale’ sign went up and we all, to some degree, bought into it as readers. Then we sold again. We can watch the sale of nature on flat-screen televisions. We can fly to conferences to object to the destruction of habitat, to the contribution of others to global warming! None of this sustains, even within the parlance of nature-writing propaganda and hypocrisy. It doesn’t have to be like this. Write in resistance to this usage of nature that feeds the self, that feeds community desire for an interactive self.

For me, writing of ‘nature’, especially in poetry, should be about the carnage to which its production necessarily contributes. Such awareness surely helps us use the poem as a means of resistance, a non-violent confrontation with the limitations of self in dealing with the crisis so many of us have constituted? Non-violent but refusing to participate quietly! Pivotal though, whatever one writes, is to reduce the hypocrisies of one’s own occupation of land where the writing is done. ‘Nature writing’ so often seems a projection of how we might really live, but this is deceptive: it is a construction, an aesthetic representation designed to please an audience (even one from whom the author is hoping for a change of opinion, empathy for preserving a threatened environment — all ecologies are threatened, not just those of ‘beauty’), and the writing self. It soothes, or only shocks a little — too little.

Stendhal's forebears (1)

2011-02-20T03:57:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

I started an earlier series of blog posts called "Stendhal's heirs", looking at later texts that seem modelled on his The Red and the Black in connection with fictional crimes committed by characters who are social climbers or parvenus. This one instead considers a predecessor, Marivaux's Le Paysan parvenu (literally the peasant-parvenu or parvenu-peasant; the peasant made good, upstart peasant... though it's been published in English under completely different titles such as Up from the Country and The Fortunate Peasant).

Marivaux was a prolific playwright, but he also wrote novels. This one is unfinished but still substantial enough to have been influential -- and a good, rollicking read. The protagonist, "Jacob" (it's told in the first person & this is the name the narrator is willing to use!) is a handsome young peasant from a wine-growing village who's sent to Paris with deliveries and falls under the aegis of various older and better-off ladies.

It's not a novel in the sense that Stendhal's later masterpiece is, but it's one of those prototypical narratives (begun 1735) that must have influenced him: many of the basic elements are in place, and the "triangular desire" René Girard traces in Stendhal's novel is repeatedly made explicit in Marivaux's tale. Curiously, rather than committing a crime, Marivaux's Jacob is arrested for a crime he did not commit, so that we have prison and judicial scenes even though he's not strictly speaking a "criminal parvenu". (I won't tell the outcome; even an unfinished story can suffer from a spoiler...)

Part of my continuing research on these narratives is to ask why so many of these narratives of upward mobility have their "heroes" commit a crime. In earlier instances it tends to lead to courtrooms and prisons; in contemporary ones they may get off scot-free... on one level.

Is the criminal turn sometimes the result of a conservative ideological bent in the text? (They will be punished for their class-transgression, which makes them intrinsically criminal anyway; their true nature will be revealed as base; they will fall because they tried to rise?)

Or is it in fact something subtler and potentially progressive, critical of social inequality? (The very rigidity of the social and economic structures requires its transgression; the parvenu is criminal because a superior being, outside laws and mores?)

Or is it both? I'll keep you posted on what I uncover.

I've got my eye on another couple of early texts, but later than Marivaux's, which may be even more rollicking reads: Restif de la Bretonne's Le Paysan perverti (1775) and La Paysanne pervertie (1784) -- companion his-and-hers stories that are more directly about the moral corruption of peasants-who-go-to-Paris. The titles probably speak for themselves without translation. (Apparently the word "rétifisme", meaning shoe fetishism, comes from his name -- also spelled Rétif)...

Queensland

2011-02-01T23:51:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Watching anxiously and wishing safe shelter and no harm to come to all those in the path of Cyclone Yasi. We can scarcely even imagine what this is like (and will be like). We (like many others) are thinking of all the people there.

The Red Cloud

2011-01-31T04:04:00.000-08:00

Written by John, posted by Tracy

This is just to wish well all those in the central wheatbelt who were affected by Saturday’s horror storms. We will never forget the day the red cloud arrived and ate the sky, and, indeed, the world. I was outside securing loose stuff on the block because I’d heard a storm was approaching. I looked up and in the north-east a bizarre red-black plume was billowing, cascading, and looming. I thought it was a fast-moving fire and we were finished. But there was no smell of smoke, no burning at the back of the throat.

I called Tracy out to take a look and by the time she got there the cloud was massive and red and almost on us. We ran inside and shut the door. Everything went red-black and then black, though it was 2.45 in the afternoon. A thunderous rush of air, like a vacuum being filled instantly, rocked the house. Winds that must have hit 120kmh suddenly ripped in like whirlpools. The trees on the block whipped across the screen of the window before vanishing into the red-black howling. We didn’t think anything would be left, or that the house would be left standing. But it was.

However, many in Northam and York lost roofs and much more. Mum’s place, where we lived for many years, was devastated. Barely a tree was left intact. Old York gums and flooded gums were splintered, jam trees ripped out by the roots. A neighbour’s house lost its roof, another neighbour’s parts of the roof and infrastructure of the house. The entire town is in ruins. And apart from the trauma experienced by humans in the area, birds and animal life are disturbed and stressed.

Our house has since filled with various species of ants, frenziedly crossing from one room to another in their desire to move, move, move.

So please spare a thought for those affected: it has been a time of huge disasters in Australia, and when they happen out in the bush and on a more ‘isolated’ scale, they are easily subsumed into the whole. Many of our young son’s schoolfriends from his old school have no roof (literally) over their heads, and it’s a tough, tough time. I find it surreal and disturbing that the place I wrote for so many years, where I set my Divine Comedy, has truly seen heaven, hell, and purgatory crunched together.

I’d heard a storm was approaching and Tracy rang Mum to let her know. Shortly after, Mum looked out the back window and a vast red wave rushed down over the mountain and enveloped the house. The chimney went, and they waited for the rest of the house to go too, but it hung together. The red cloud — full of red dust from further north (it was the colour of the dust around Yalgoo and Mt Magnet, where we have recently been) — ate the sun, ate the light, and ate the district. Apologies for the mass of descriptors, but it was that overwhelming. It was like being inside a thesaurus that didn’t have enough words. It’s a case of letting the experience rush out or remain forever silent, it was that dramatic and that indelible. It will mark all our lives.

Some Graphology poems from the journey

2010-12-26T00:13:00.000-08:00

Poems and text by John, posted by Tracy

From John's journal: I've written a number of 'graphology poems' relating to our journey to Adelaide and back. I have written four or five sequences (including Poet in A Train, which Vallum editions brought out in Canada) relating to this west-east journey, but all have been from the perspective of a train passenger. Because I no longer fly, I have gone across the Nullarbor a number of times on the train over the last few years. (Obviously the train is better than the car, but there were three of us on this occasion.)

Driving across with Tracy and Tim was a very different experience. Whole different insights and interactions with place. The collective experience of engagement en famille was special and enlightening. Some of the poems I wrote during the journey were actively part of the manuscript I have been working on recently, Book 6, which comes out of an engagement with Virgil's Aeneid, Book 6, as a precursor to Dante's Divine Comedy, and my own 'distraction' on Dante's great work. But I've also written a dozen 'graphology poems' - smaller, momentary 'glimpse' pieces that fit within the fabric of the 'graphology' sequence I have been working on for the last fifteen or so years. The numbering is sequential but also arbitrary in so far as I have not written 3000 (or 4000 or 7000!) of them, as numbering at times might suggest; rather, it is to create a location canvas on which the interludes might appear. Numbers and texts seem so closely related to me, and to be bound to one kind of sequencing is to miss the point of the vitality of number 'screens'.

I also scratched or created poems in dirt and sand on the way, 'poems of dissolution' that would have vanished once the wind lifted or animals scratched at their surface. I recall one night going out into the saltbush and bluebush and ubiquitous wild oats you find fringing those small points of habitation along the highway, and listening to and watching in the moonlight hundreds of rabbits moving about. Parts of the limestone plain have become 'their' plain in so many ways. And the wedgetails which scan the ground during the day. I wrote a poem there - scratched with the point of my boot in the limestone dust, and then on the page. Might get to typing that one up.

One of the experiences that will really stick with me was driving through the length of the South Australian wheatbelt - knowing the West's wheatbelt so well, it was equally engaging and distressing to see the vast monoculture of beige and bisque and off-gold in another space, on the edge of the vast dry, though in fact it rained as we passed through. And the great yields they are getting this year as opposed to the drought-ridden minimalism of the west. The ironies are the same. My being enraptured with those ironies slightly out of kilter, a little uncanny, but feeding on the same impulses. The Goyder Line is much further north - it's the line beyond which the pastoral fails in many ways due to dryness. I was thinking of another imaginary southern line where wheat-growing fails. In the west, they keep clearing further and further out beyond wheat-growing reality, wasting scrubland for a yield every few years. Insanity. And as they clear the scrub, the rain lessens and the land erodes, and is peeled away by the winds.

Graphology 3732

Prior to departure east
an all-black black-headed monitor
swaggered — I say this in the way
young Tim imitates my walk
from behind as male habit,
when in fact my swagger comes
from watching monitors
and is, I’d like to think,
largely unconscious — swaggered
the range of the window, hunting
sand between ridge and house.
Magnificent! Then, days later
on the Bight, at 'observation
point two' we passed the first time
round, crossing over (now,
we’re talking back, and west),
a skink and a gecko on stone,
in bluebush and saltbush;
I didn’t identify them
precisely though if I think about
their gait, twist, slither,
I will come up with something.
Names, imitations. Imprints
of character.

Graphology 3735: dingo

‘Best friend’ dash,
road parsed,
ditch diver
salmon gum
goldfields blackbutt
drain where litter
might well shelter,
daylight bright
on mother’s yellow coat.
Overwhelming
involvement: wild dog! wild dog!
feed your fear,
this side of the endless
endless fence.

Graphology 3737

Superpit
true grit
induced
earthquake
historic centre
Boulder
cracked
but NO
cause
& effect.

Graphology 3738: South Australian wheatbelt bandwidth

What is wheat’s Goyder line?

Counties and hundreds,
mono beneath the hammock,

filled to the gills of the boot,
granary of foreign exchange,

returned servicemen
answering calls of nature

we see those homesteads
enveloped in opening,

at most, windbreaks
of pines, imported.

Drive from mallee
dust as dry as fallow,

lessen rust. And, sad
to say, I got excited.

John Kinsella

Crossing the Nullarbor

2010-12-20T04:31:00.000-08:00

Posted by Tracy; photos by both of us.

The cliffs at the Great Australian Bight. These magnificent cliffs run for hundreds of kilometres along the bottom edge of Australia. East of Eucla they are called the Bunda Cliffs; in the west, the Baxter Cliffs. Together they're apparently about 400km long.

I first saw them when I was twenty and have never forgotten it. Seeing them again was even better.

There is a section of the Nullarbor where the cliffs run inland, forming the edge of the Hampton Tableland; below it are the Roe Plains. This photo, taken at Madura Pass, looks out to the Roe Plains from up on the Tableland. Madura Pass is one of the highlights of the journey.

I wish I had taken a photo of the moonlit Nullarbor, achingly beautiful -- it makes you want to lie flat on your back on the ground and just stare at the sky.

There's a detailed book about the Nullarbor by Neville Collins, The Nullarbor Plain: A History, including many striking photographs. It surveys the region's Aboriginal history as well as colonial incursions, and has other sections covering everything from flora and fauna through UFO claims, hoaxes, space debris (Skylab fell near Balladonia, on the western edge of the Nullarbor, in 1979), to meteorite finds and nuclear testing. Collins was born at Ceduna in South Australia, to the east of the Plain.

Musselwhite Extract #2: Tess

2010-12-03T02:49:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

This is from David Musselwhite's 2003 book, Social Transformations in Hardy's Tragic Novels: Megamachines and Phantasms.

... in Tess, Hardy seems to be working with a wholly new conception of what is entailed in the 'construction' of a 'character' or of a 'consciousness' -- a conception that finds parallels in the psychoanalytical notion of the phantasm where the human becomes human -- acquires character and consciousness -- when the accumulated and consorted bruit or dit -- the lore -- of the tradition or the culture becomes accreted around and inscribed on the blank surface of the physiological body...

...In a sense what Tess becomes is a kind of 'phenomenological palimpsest' -- or, to recall another favourite image of Freud for the unconsciousness, a 'magic writing block' -- of all that she unconsciously registers of what has been said or thought about her, of all that has anticipated and been brought to bear upon her, of all the phantasmatic events that she has passed through. What this means is that Tess becomes something like an 'expressive digest', or 'phenomenological prism' of the world into which she has been born -- a world not just of material conditions but of a host of pre-existing roles, attributes and singularities. I think this accords well, in fact, with what we sense of her luminous presence. Much has been made of Tess as the object of voyeuristic fantasy but much less has been said of the degree to which we see the world through her. Indeed at times in the course of the text Tess seems to function like an 'expressive cursor' or like one of those ruler magnifying glasses that come with miniaturised editions of the Complete Oxford Dictionary. (p. 117)

Even in this glimpse of only one chapter* of Social Transformations..., we can see David's typical ability to think things through from an "opposite" angle, to consider Tess as see-r and not just seen; and the outlandish but exact and just image of something unexpected (Tess as a dictionary-accessory!). The theoretical underpinnings of the book, again in Deleuze and Guattari but even more extensively in Laplanche and Pontalis's work on the "phantasm" are too complex to paraphrase here -- so I urge anyone interested to get hold of Social Transformations for themselves.

*There are actually two chapters on Tess in this book. The other novels studied are The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure (also two chapters) and The Well-Beloved.

Musselwhite Extract #1: The Monster

2010-12-03T01:28:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Today would have been David Musselwhite's 70th birthday (he passed away in February this year). In our writers' group today we read an Emily Brontë poem he particularly admired. Now in honour and memory of David, I want to redirect people to his marvellous books, beginning with 1987's Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel.

In this book there are wonderful chapters on Austen, Brontë, Thackeray and Dickens, but for me most strikingly of all on Mary Shelley. Here's a characteristic quote from "Frankenstein: The Making of a Monster":

...the Monster confounds all classifications and identifications: it is alive and dead, male and female, master and slave, pursued and pursuer, parent and child -- all at once. Rather than allowing itself to be located in a system of classification what the Monster embodies is a radical dispersal of roles and states and a nomadic roaming across and between them. The Monster is always ahead or behind, always elsewhere, ever in a condition of migratory adjacency. Moreover the tracery of these migrations, like the scars on its body, are not the investments of limits but the openings of boundaries, the splitting of ever new laminations, the establishment of ever fresh surfaces. The Monster's wounds are not the evidence of a history but the sensitized possibility of a beginning. Or, rather, it is because there has been a history that there can be a beginning -- just as there can be identity because there is difference, or thought because there is language. One does not begin with the punctuality of a birth but the reappropriation of a scattered genesis. One begins, that is, with repetition. (pp. 69-70)

The chapter on Emily Brontë is also original, inventive and memorable -- in one of David's obituaries, UK academic Gary Day said,

"I've yet to read a better interpretation of Wuthering Heights. For my money, [David] was the best reader of literature we've had in the past 25 years."

In the book's appendix there is an extremely useful entrée to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, included to provide background for the way David's book draws on their work. With regard to his theoretical bases, David wrote in the introduction,

"... I have endeavoured as much to let Austen, Shelley, Brontë and the rest read Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari as the other way around. I also happen to think that is the right way to go about things."

David was always one for the closest attention to the text, and used to joke, despite his affinities with post-structuralism, about having been a student at the "last lectures of Leavis", a legacy not easily shaken off in its best aspects.

Ludwig Steinherr

2010-11-29T05:10:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

I've just been reading a striking and unforgettable collection of poetry by Ludwig Steinherr. It's a bilingual (German/English) edition selected from ten of his books, and it's published by Arc under the title Before the Invention of Paradise. Translations, deft, apparently simple (though much work has gone into them) and impressive, are by Richard Dove.

The poems are mostly sparse and short and take my breath away. They remind me just how powerful and productive the tension between statement and understatement can be. Steinherr knows exactly when to say, and when to say no more. He really does work in the

... language-quarries
where silence
blasted open with explosive
hits us with the full force
of its very first
splinters

("To the Sculptor Josef. A Henselmann")

[... Sprachbrüche
wo das aufgesprengte
Schweigen uns trifft
mit der ganzen Wucht
seiner allerersten
Splitter]

I meant only to dip in and read the odd poem, having other tasks to do tonight, but I haven't been able to stop.

The book, part of the Arc Visible Poets series, has an introduction by the series editor Jean Boase-Beier as well as a translator's preface, so there is plenty of context and background on the process of the book's emergence.

(Now I want to go back and get the individual titles from which these poems were selected...)

More about Facebook et al.

2010-11-29T04:30:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Further to my blog post of the other day, The West Australian today reports that social media like Facebook are "causing people to become increasingly anxious as users feel pressured to be constantly connected", according to an Australian survey.

I find it interesting to note that the student cited in the article (Nikkita Venville) had fought her "addiction" (my term, not hers) to the point of getting someone to change her password (then hacking back in to access it!) and even more, that she felt she was being left out by her "friends" when she wasn't on Facebook, which is exactly the phenomenon I mentioned in my post.

"I did feel like a bit of my social life had (gone) because I couldn't keep in contact with the people I usually kept in contact with - and I didn't know what was going on," she said.

"People were saying haven't you got my Facebook message instead of calling me up to invite me (to parties)..."

Well, I'm not worried about the "parties" -- but the cutting-off from non-users is a sad reality.

Rilke

2010-11-28T03:56:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

I am working on translating a very long Rilke poem -- it will be ages before it's finished.

In the meantime I did some little short poems -- this is just a quick draft, which I may not go back to for a while now that I'm entrenched in the longer one. It's not even re-checked, so this is "in process"!

(There seems to be a general view just now that Rilke is too-translated into English... too bad.)

Rainer Maria Rilke

[I am, you anxious one. Don’t you hear me]

I am, you anxious one. Don’t you hear me
breaking against you with all my senses?
My feelings, which found wings,
circle your face whitely.
Don’t you see my soul, how it stands
close before you in a coat of silence?
Doesn’t my May-like prayer ripen
at your glances as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am your dream.
But if you desire to wake, I’m your desire
growing powerful in all splendour
rounding out like the silence of a star
over the strange city of time.

--------------------------------

I love Jo Shapcott's book of versions in dialogue with Rilke (actually with his French poems) -- it's called Tender Taxes. The French poems are in a very different mode from the German ones but (I think) equally amazing.

We don't want Facebook

2010-11-27T05:39:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

I came across a page on Facebook (no, I don't use Facebook, it was something I stumbled across via a search engine) that reproduces a Wikipedia entry (full of inaccuracies anyway) on John, and thereby bears his name.

John loathes Facebook for what it does (me too -- can't stand the utter breakdown of privacy it involves -- not to mention the fact [this bit is me, Tracy, not John] that Facebook addicts cut you off in real life if you're not in their Facebookworld! -- I am excommunicated by those for whom it's too much effort to step outside Facebook for a moment!) and is surprised and irritated that this Facebook page bearing his name should exist. (It reminds me of the line from John Forbes -- "even if we don't choose to join you, we do". Well, we don't.)

John also loathes mobile phones. Are we the only people who don't have them? I hope not. They too are an addiction, and they are environmentally damaging as well as a risk to health.

Some Facebook and mobile phone addicts think it's about snobbery, not deigning to be part of something because it's perceived as "too popular" and therefore uncool. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the case of mobile phones (and other wireless equipment) it's about being conscious of EMR. In the case of Facebook, it's because we don't need it, and because we have a stronger sense of privacy than it allows.

By the way, we managed to keep in touch with others, not get lost, and know where our children were, long before these things became the "norm".

For Vek and Timo

2010-11-25T01:40:00.000-08:00

Poem written by John, posted by Tracy

This is to celebrate and mark the recent marriage of my (Tracy's) brother Vek and his partner Timo. They were married in Mexico City; Australia does not yet recognise or perform same-sex marriages, and Timo is from Mexico.

Vek points out that there are dimensions to this issue often not discussed, particularly pertaining to immigration rights, which he might like to pick up on in our comments section...?

We support Vek and Timo in every step of the struggle they are facing, and in all their happiness too.

So here's John's poem in celebration of their marriage.

Graphology 3725: an epi-epithalamium for Vek and Timo

May your marriage anneal plains and mountains and high air,
heal populations, open doors where all might locate, declare

grit and sinew and energise words: love is where
we might locate despair, and where despair

might lose its grip within us: it’s a turning
inside out, melodic shout of a burning,

spectral bird. The day of marriage
makes its own rituals against prisons, cage

opening, not closing: the liberation of bee
worlds and ant worlds and those models we

worship, follow, indict; no, no, you’ll translate
until ‘translation’ is forgotten, a liberation: rate

the vow your home, your celebration.
See, I will listen. See, I will be there. No ocean

cleaves intuition, no valleys or plateaus divide you.
Myth speaks a common language, and the body

shares consonants: let light link a communication
outside electronics: its own satellite, its own creation.

John Kinsella

From this dry place...

2010-11-14T05:29:00.000-08:00

A poem by John Kinsella, posted here by Tracy

FROM THIS DRY PLACE I THINK OVER CONTEXTS OF WAR

a rebuke for Julia Gillard, Piers Akerman, Peter Coleman et al.

‘Look, cranes still know their path through empty air;
For them their world is neither soon nor late;
But ours is eaten hollow with despair.’

James McAuley, ‘The Tomb of Heracles’

Restart of the fire season:
a mushroom cloud on the first
horizon — the penultimate —
an edge not far enough for
comfort. From his fire-tower

my great-grandfather scanned
the sea of trees for that wisp:
that leader, sign you can never
over-read. I went to that tower
as a child and did the same.

I barely remember. Maybe
he was already dead. I’ve been
talking fire all day long: poets
writing it, neighbours discussing
the risks, all our preparedness.

The firebreaks are done.
Scraped and scraped again,
looking for that second layer,
that second safer layer.
It never reveals itself.

Mostly, it’s the smell: weird
sign of noses cocked to the air,
like some unwholesome fetish.
It’s so dry that ‘dust to dust’
would seem our mantra.

But it’s not. ‘Fire to fire’,
‘fire to fire’ is all we utter
when the water-tanks are low
and flood (should we be smitten)
could only fill the valley

enough to lap at the foot
of this block. But here they
reference conflagration
by stating war is necessary
in another place (we’re not far

from an army camp), to make
our place. There’s not a drop
of water left on the block
but still a white-faced heron
loops in, surveys, lifting

back to reconnaissance.
Maybe I’d be excused
thinking it a profit, sign
in a secular world, expression
of divine intervention and polity?

We cover ourselves from head
to toe — Tracy’s dad is being
eaten by melanomas. To sing
the ‘sunburnt country’
doesn’t really work for him.

In the death of adrenaline,
a vacuum makes its own contexts:
the stony ground, a harsh wind
that cuts hot and cold. Who quotes
and speaks our heroisms:

our world is theirs, bird
or human, and each year
fewer trees make it through, more
of us die at the edges, the centres.
‘Fire-fight’ the default setting.

John Kinsella

Rain: need I say more?

2010-11-10T00:09:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

It's raining at Jam Tree Gully. Cause for celebration. Let's hope it lasts.

Play against racism

2010-11-08T00:21:00.000-08:00

Posted by Tracy

This is a little play John wrote for a group of us (i.e. writers) who meet every so often -- expressing his anger and bemusement at the racism focussed in Northam at the moment.

If anyone ever wants to use it, they are welcome.

The Gathering: a half-act play for six players

by John Kinsella

Players 1-6 are seated in something approximating a circle. A small room. Maybe an office, but could be a work crib room, a shed, or any other confined space. The players are without identifying characteristics. The allotment of player identities among the group of actors is ascertained in as arbitrary a way as possible. They stand when they speak, otherwise remain seated. In the background, Dvorák’s New World Symphony is playing quietly.

Player 1

Sine qua non.

Player 2

Veni, vidi, vici.

Player 1

Bellum omnium contra omnes.

Player 3

Alea iacta est.

Player 2

E Pluribus Unum.

Player 3

O di immortales!

Player 5

And so say all of us.

Player 6

Not quite. Shelley quotes the correspondence of Voltaire at the beginning of Queen Mab: ‘Ecrasez l’infame!’

Player 1

And Lucretius.

Player 4

What about Lucretius? By whose authority?

Player 1

Six lines. Too many for me to recite. My Latin is shaky.

Player 2

I love that line from Mab: ‘The chains of earth’s immurement...’

Player 6

You need to be wary of propaganda in an environment of privilege and learning.

Player 4

Too true, brother [or sister], too true.

Player 5

I made a rhyme today:

They place refugees in hot places.
Hot places cast faces on 'races'.

Player 2

Not much of a rhyme, that. All the same, disturbing.

Player 5

Then how about:

Inland they make a stand.

That’s a single line with an internal rhyme.

Player 2

Who makes the stand?

Player 5

I am not much of a critic.

Player 1

Power to the people...

Player 4

That’s copyright. Do you have any idea of the cost behind a cliché? The legal ramifications of specifics.

Player 3

Surely it’s just populism. No price on that!

Player 2

Too right there is. I’ve worked hard.

Player 3

For whom? For us?

Player 2

Too right. I’ve worked hard.

Player 1

Some bloke is cruising around town calling the old army camp a sacred site. A couple of sporty-looking women have ‘bomb the boats and ‘sink the boats’ on their bright red t-shirts.

Player 4

And the wheat is about to be harvested.

Player 2

And the wheat is about to be harvested. I’ve worked hard.

Player 1

What would Cicero have said on the floor of...

Player 3

...empire...

Player 5

or some other player. Not just Cicero? How about one of his cronies? A fly-in fly-out rouser of rights? Pick a name, any name.

Player 1

Quid pro quo.

Player 4

Primus inter pares.

Player 3

Goodnight. Sleep tight. New world orders have to be processed.

Player 2

Not in my backyard. I’ve worked hard, hard, hard!

Player 1

Acte est fabula, plaudite.

Northam and refugees

2010-11-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

Typed in by Tracy, as stated by John

We were in Northam today, our regional centre, where we do most of our shopping, other than what we are able to do in our immediate, much smaller town. One of our kids went to high school there, because it's the only Senior High in the region. Northam is the centre of the Avon Valley wheatbelt region in which we live.

It was disgusting to see a bloke arrive in town with his tray-top bedecked with large painted panels carrying maps of Australia with diatribes of racial vilification. Without going into the details, suffice it to say that there was a representation of a figure in a hijab with a line drawn through it, bearing the word "parasite", and referring to the Northam Army Base, intended site of a refugee detention centre, as "our sacred site" (meaning of the military). The ironies and insensitivities behind the use of this phrase are obvious.

I managed to control myself and not call out, "You racist bastard". But I feel it essential I articulate my opposition to the mass racism taking place in Northam and surrounding region at the moment. It was doubly disturbing to see bigots drive past this bloke in their utes, giving him the thumbs-up.

On top of this is the irony that Northam has a long history as a migration centre. But the racists are busy differentiating between the European migrants after the Second World War and the Afghan refugees who have left the country which those very same bigots are more than happy to insist needs the Australian military to be waging war against oppressive political elements.

My concern is with the fact that these refugees have to be kept in detention at all. It would seem a far more humane approach to treat them as migrants awaiting confirmation of their status, rather than as prisoners in a concentration camp.

In country that was stolen from the Nyungar people, it is bizarre that the non-indigenous residents feel they have a claim to this land through eternity.

During the 1890s, my great-grandfather, who was foreman of the South Champion mine at Kookynie, was dying of thirst in the desert when he was saved by an Afghan camel driver. Anyone with any knowledge of Western Australian history will know that Afghan people have had a long and important relationship with this place. But even if that were not the case, we are all humans, and all humans should be treated with dignity and respect.

It is many years since I and my fellow activists were involved in resisting the anti-Asian racism campaigns of Jack Van Tongeren and his ultra-nationalist cronies. But today, seeing those signs in Northam made me feel as if we have not progressed, not gone any further forward at all. Western Australia still reeks of racism.

John Kinsella

Making seitan (gluten)

2010-10-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Seitan* is wheat protein, malleable and versatile – you can slice and fry or grill it, cut into chunks or cubes and add anywhere you would add other proteins – with pasta or in curries. We like it in browned slices with mashed potato, vegan gravy (Massel does a vegan gravy powder, for example) and veggies.

It's made up from a dried protein staple (gluten flour) that will keep for ages in the cupboard. It's simple to prepare, as long as you have at least an hour before you want to use it.

You need: gluten flour (try the breadmaking section of your supermarket), plain wheat flour, water, veggie stock/soy sauce for simmering, and any condiments you want to flavour it. (I used a third of a cup of nutritional yeast, added to dry ingredients before mixing; you can also add onion powder or any spices you like.)

You need a large pasta-type pot or big saucepan, which you’ll fill with 4-5 litres of water, adding the veggie stock and/or soy sauce, and bring to the boil.

Stir together two cups gluten flour to one cup plain flour in a large bowl. Quickly add just over a cup of water, and turn till it forms a ball of dough (not too sticky, or you won’t be able to get it off your hands!).

Turn out on a lightly floured surface and knead to remove air bubbles or any pockets of still-dry flour.

Divide into three or four chunks. When your stock has come up to the boil, add the chunks and turn down to simmer (lightly bubbling will do) for one hour.

Don’t add the chunks before the stock has reached the boil, or they will turn out too fluffy and porous.

Once cooked, drained and cooled, the gluten will have a firm, sliceable texture.

The best seitan/gluten dish I’ve ever tried is the roast on Beverley the Vegan Chef’s site. It takes a little more preparation than the simmered style, but is well worth it.

(*Seitan is one name given to one style of gluten; my recipe is a rough approximation of the idea.)

Tim's Tapioca

2010-10-28T03:04:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Tim's had a sore throat, and so requested this smooth and soft pudding which he loves at any time...

Ingredients:

1 cup seed tapioca
4 cups soy milk
1 cup sugar or other sweetener
1 tsp vanilla essence

Soak the dry tapioca in the soy milk for an hour or more.

Add vanilla essence. Bring mixture gently to the boil. (If it's too fast, the mixture will catch and burn on the bottom of the saucepan.)

Simmer till the tapioca looks clear, or mostly clear. (If the tapioca is still opaque, it will be hard and gritty.)

Remove and stir the sugar through it, then pour into bowl.

You can eat this hot (runny) or let it chill (sets into a jelly-like texture).

There are lots of other things you can do with tapioca (and sago) but this is one very simple vegan option. Serve alone, or with soy icecream, vegan cream, fruit, coconut cream... etc.

Our dwindling bushland

2010-10-21T02:10:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

The West Australian reported a few days ago that according to WWF Australia, over the past eight years, bushland "has been cleared around Perth at an average rate of 10 WACA stadiums a week". (6812 ha of bush between 2001 and 2009.)

You can read the full article here. It's already very obvious just from looking around -- so many housing developments where bush used to be -- but it's still devastating to read such a confirmation.

Vegan chocolate layer cake

2010-10-17T02:01:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

I made this today to welcome in John and John A. who were cutting the grass all day, to get it down before deadline (fire safety). 6 steep acres with many large and small rocks. It's mostly wild oats, with some wild barley (apparently harder to cut than the oats).

Anyway, because the cake turned out a little lopsided, Tim and I had to sample it first to make it look more symmetrical...

Recipe

For cake:
2 cups SR flour
1 scant cup sugar
1.25 cups soy milk
4 dessertspoons cocoa
3 tsp egg replacer (made up with about 2 dsp water)
1 tsp vanilla essence

Sift flour, sugar and cocoa into large bowl. Mix egg replacer with the water till fluffy, add to bowl; add oil and vanilla essence, and use beater to add soy milk little by little until the consistency is of a good thick batter.

Pour into greased (Nuttelexed!) and floured cake tin, bake at 180 deg C for 45-50 min, depending on your oven.

Icing/filling
2 cups icing sugar
3 dessertspoons cocoa
1 dessertspoon Nuttelex or other vegan margarine
splash of soy milk as needed

Sift icing sugar and cocoa into bowl, fold together briefly. Add the Nuttelex, and little by little add small amounts of soy (very little) as you beat (electric beater does this more easily). If you're too hasty or heavy with the soy milk, the icing will be runny.

To make up: Halve cake horizontally with large knife; fill with half icing and put halves together, then ice the outside. While the icing is still unset, you can grate vegan chocolate over it as I did this time.

Vegan article

2010-10-09T20:38:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

The Herald this weekend has a rare article on veganism (albeit not quite, since the featured author cooks vegan some of the time but is not actually vegan).

Still, it's not often it even gets a mention, and a fairly positive one.

New novelist

2010-10-08T04:26:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

I've just finished reading Saraswati Park by debut novelist Anjali Joseph (born 1978).

This was a birthday gift, nothing to do with my studies, except of course that it's a novel -- so I read it for pleasure.

It's a quiet novel whose atmosphere certainly drew me in, though I was disappointed that the back-cover blurb tells practically the whole plot (such plot as there is -- this is a mood-driven and character-driven book).

Middle-aged Mohan, a letter-writer, lives in reasonable comfort and calm with his wife Lakshmi in Bombay/Mumbai. They are at that stage where children have left home and an uneasy distance has crept up between husband and wife, though it takes a while for Mohan to realise this.

Their nephew Ashish comes to live with them because though his parents have moved away on account of work, Ashish must repeat his final year of college because of under-attendance.

Ashish has his own emotional (and sexual) life unknown to his uncle and aunt; the novel moves between his story and that of his uncle's marriage and daily life.

The writing is poised and observant, the characters credible -- and for a first novel, it's quite subtle and sophisticated in approach.

If you don't like very slow-paced or middle-class-style fiction, it won't be your thing. Ignore the back cover if you want to make the most of its developments...

The UK's Telegraph listed Anjali Joseph as one of their "20 best novelists under 40", for what that kind of list is worth.

Holding-pattern post

2010-09-12T04:29:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

I'm conscious of not having posted for ages. I've been very busy with PhD work for one thing.

Recently read or still reading: Gillian Mears, The Mint Lawn, Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water, Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (this one I haven't finished yet).

The Gillian Mears novel was very well-written but disturbing in its protagonist/narrator's apparent lack of compassion or generosity toward other people. The Highsmith was ok: not her absolute best, but it had its moments.

The McCarthy is elegantly written but pushing the limits of credibility. She does address this by having after-comments in each section, noting where other people's memories or her own doubts contest what she had written earlier. But the "agonies" of the childhood period seem very overplayed. (Still, I'll eventually finish it.)

I also squeezed in Simenon's The Little Man from Archangel, which was (to my mind) faultless. (John thought it was the best book of existential angst -- better than Sartre's Nausea or Camus's The Fall -- though acknowledging Simenon was not an existentialist in their sense.)

For my part, no Simenon novel has ever disappointed me yet.

Review of Honey Spot

2010-07-20T17:34:00.000-07:00

Posted by Tracy

(This is a review of a recent production John originally wrote for a newspaper but it didn't end up being used because it was filed at the end of the production's run.)

This warm play of reconciliation from 1985, written by Jack Davis for younger and older audiences, was energetically staged by the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company (Perth) under Kyle J. Morrison’s direction.

Davis was able to treat serious themes without didacticism. In Honey Spot, a 12-year-old Wadjela (“whitefella”) girl and a 13-year-old Noongar boy find friendship and creative affirmation in W.A.’s south-west forests.

The play is adept at touching on all potential issues of appropriation and disrespect without ever compromising the integrity of Noongar culture.

Peggy (Katya Shevtsov), and Tim (Ian Wilkes), develop common expression through dance, combining European ballet moves with Noongar corroboree dance. They brought a liveliness and energy to their interaction that rippled through the audience.

Lynette Narkle as Mrs Winalli, Tim’s mother, was a guiding light, while Peggy’s father, the forest ranger, forced to confront his own racism, was ably depicted by George Shevtsov.

But the finest moments came with Phillip Walley-Stack’s turn as the resistant, confrontational William, Tim’s cousin, underscoring seriousness with humour and verve.

Tristen Parr’s music, using cello played by Emma McCoy and didgeridoo mainly from Walley-Stack, skilfully ranged from subtle to bold. Dance, music and drama merged with ease.

Fluid scene-changing through the actors moving in and out of the circular performance area was especially effective. Keeping it simple was key.

Davis’s plea for Wadjelas to engage in genuine listening conversation and respect for Noongar language and naming persists long after the show is over.

Activist Poetics

2010-07-04T04:12:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

John's got a new book out: Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley.

It's a collection of his essays edited and with an introduction by Niall Lucy.

John Kerrigan on the back cover describes it as an "exhilarating constellation of interview, essay, polemic, lecture, memoir, apologia and verse".

The book is published by Liverpool University Press and you can read more about it here.

Wheatbelt full moon

2010-06-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

A few hours before lunar eclipse a couple of days ago...

Trying something new

2010-06-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Last week I heard novelist and musician Willy Vlautin talking on the radio from the Sydney Writers' Festival, and decided to try one of his books.

I wanted to partly because I get tired of novels limited to privileged or middle-class characters, and he's more interested in what reviewers keep calling "the dispossessed".

He's published three novels -- Planet Books only had two of them. I wasn't that interested in the new one, Lean on Pete, because of the horse-racing motif, so instead I chose his second, Northline (Faber and Faber, 2008).

It's a fast read. At first I found it quite annoying -- too much dialogue, phrasing too staccato for me, and the sense that the so-called "low-life" aspect is self-consciously on display for the reader. I couldn't tell if it was simply over-edited, stylistically, or if it was running on the assumption that people can only read very, very pared-back flat language. Some great writers of course have used a simple approach to style, but here it's frequently clunky, stilted.

Yet I kept reading, and it grew on me a little: there's a strong sense of compassion in the novel, and although it veers into being too sentimental (the Paul Newman fantasy-sequences, for one), it does leave you with a distinct feeling of atmosphere and some memorable characters.

Not the protagonist, however -- Allison -- who seems, perhaps intentionally, little more than an outline. It's the people who befriend her on her desperate downer -- like Penny, who trains her in phone sales, and Dan, a trauma survivor -- that seem vivid and durable creations.

The story is set in Las Vegas and Reno, among the drinkers, gamblers and workers of those places (Vlautin comes from Reno, according to the radio interview, though he now lives in Oregon).

He's singer-songwriter with the band Richmond-Fontaine, and there's a soundtrack for the book too.

All in all a bit disappointing -- certainly not the new Steinbeck or Carver that publicity led me to expect -- but still not a bad read.

Stendhal's heirs (2)

2010-06-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

I recently finished Theodore Dreiser's monumental novel An American Tragedy (1925). I'm not the first by any means to notice its indebtedness to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, though the two novels are also extremely different. I was reading it as part of the "parvenu" or "upstart" thematic list I've set myself.

The protagonist (anti-hero rather than hero) is Clyde Griffiths, a young man raised in poverty and relative ignorance by well-meaning street preachers. Clyde has a longing for a better life in every material sense, and a sensual nature he has difficulty controlling.

Taken into employment at his rich uncle's factory, Clyde finds himself in a social no-man's-land: forbidden to mix with the women workers he supervises, but too lowly for acceptance among his uncle's set. Good-looking and sartorially-minded, he attracts the attention of wealthy young Sondra, but not before he has entangled himself -- compromisingly -- with Roberta, whom he now wishes to be rid of.

The story echoes Stendhal's only in its outlines -- the pride and social ambition realised through a woman's love and attentions, the abandonment of an earlier love -- the crime and trial and the question of capital punishment.

What's more, Dreiser took his plot from a real-life news item, as did Stendhal in his own time, so that both were to some degree fictionalising fact... although to say only that is to misrepresent the phenomenal fictional achievement of both authors.

Dreiser's novel is much less readable than Stendhal's. There were many passages I had to force myself to read simply because of over-telling. Dreiser seems to think he has to state something, then state it again, then re-examine for other ways of stating it. For a modern reader this is excruciating -- but it's not just a matter of being stylistically dated -- plenty of novels of similar age are more readable. It seems to be a deliberate stylistic choice, his own kind of realism.

Most credible critics seem to agree it's a masterpiece, but a flawed one.

Film-makers have made several attempts at it. The only one I've seen is George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951), with Montgomery Clift in the lead role (character names are all different, and half the story is missing, but film adaptations have to do that sometimes). A very young Elizabeth Taylor plays the rich love interest, and Shelley Winters the cast-off working-class girlfriend. The film is highly watchable and very disturbing.

The Beat that My Heart Skipped

2010-05-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

I watched this film recently for the third or fourth time because -- despite an unsatisfying ending -- it has a lot to offer. (In French its title is De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, made in 2005.) It's apparently a remake of an American film, Fingers (1978), which I've never seen.

Like many of the 'parvenu' narratives, it's another story in which the protagonist's two worlds clash, but here the two worlds are more about modes of living than exactly class, though that's not unconnected...

'Thomas' (Romain Duris, excellent in the role) is a young man whose now-deceased mother was a concert pianist. His father, still very much in the picture, is a moneyed thug, and Tom has followed him into a life of violence and brutality in shady real estate dealing.

Tom is not a likeable character, and the film sets this out very clearly. Yet when he glimpses the possibility of changing direction -- becoming a pianist like his mother -- you can't help identifying with him and hoping he will come good through music. There's a strong feeling of potential sensitivity and power of expression barely contained in this taciturn and often sullen individual.

But it's never that easy to switch tracks, and the patterns and entanglements of the life Tom has led till now pose a dramatic challenge to his 'ambition'. Violence is not easily left behind...

The last section of the movie (to me) feels tacked-on, but the rest of it is still worth watching. I have also caught part of an earlier movie by the same director, Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres, 2001), that had me on the edge of my seat -- again, a clash-of-two-worlds story -- but I've not managed to get a copy so as to watch the parts I missed.

The director, Jacques Audiard, has also made the more recent film A Prophet (Un prophète, 2009), which I missed at the cinema -- will have to watch out for the DVD.

Morning views near Jam Tree Gully

2010-05-07T03:11:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

This is where I walk Tim to the school bus in the mornings. It's hard to capture the depth, the distance of those hills...

Stendhal's heirs (1)

2010-05-05T04:41:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Stendhal's literary influence on subsequent writers is huge, so theoretically this topic could go on forever.

What interests me at the moment is the way so many narratives have picked up on the motifs of The Red and the Black and re-worked them into such different and often compelling stories, or films.

Julien is the paradigmatic upstart whose destiny is crime. I haven't read John Braine's novel Room at the Top, but I have seen the film -- first many years ago in Britain, and then again recently (VHS from Planet, almost the only place you'd find it in Perth!).

Room at the Top follows Joe Lampton as he attempts to make his way up in society. Joe has little in common with Stendhal's Julien except perhaps his youth, his humble origins, his ambition -- and the fact that he loves an older woman but pursues a young woman who's the daughter of a rich and socially important man.

What goes wrong as a result of this conflict is not quite in the vein of Julien's criminal trajectory, and the endings differ accordingly (I don't like spoilers, so that's as much as I'll say!).

But the story shows a clear inheritance from Stendhal's plot, transposed to 20th-century Britain and a different set of class circumstances, with many of the same mistakes and emotions.

It's a finely watchable movie with a poignant performance from Simone Signoret as the older woman and an appropriate cold, callous manner from Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton.

Apparently a t.v. series based on the character of Joe Lampton, Man at the Top, also written by John Braine but set after the movie narrative's end, was screened in Britain some decades ago (thanks to G. for this info).

Remembering David

2010-05-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Here is the link to the obituary I wrote for my friend and former teacher, David Musselwhite, who died in February this year.

David dedicated his first book, Partings Welded Together, "For my parents. All of them."

For me, intellectually and emotionally, he was certainly one of my "parents". I think this was true for many others too.

Lionel's latest

2010-04-29T01:10:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Now onto Lionel Shriver's newest novel, So Much For That.

I was offered to choose a book as a gift the other day, and couldn't help myself. This one is for leisure, not for study, so it will have to be a slower read. (Leisure?)

It's essentially a book about the US healthcare system, and if I hadn't had first-hand experience of that, it might have lost me already, because it's rather reliant on long mouthpiece speeches.

And though I've appreciated most of the other Shriver novels I've read, I would class my most recent experience of her work, an early book called Game Control, as one of the worst novels I've ever read.

In this latest, there are the usual wonderful moments of clarity and perception of human foibles; unfortunately these turn all too quickly into harping on human foibles -- there's a bleak hard edge in her writing that's sometimes hard to bear.

There's also a kind of "book-club" topicality that I find irritating (certain subjects are just always going to get an airing with the book-buying public).

That's not a hit at book clubs, just an observation that you can sometimes feel how writers cynically aim at a niche.

However, in this case Shriver is also writing from experience of a friend's terminal illness, and it's not just a "topic" for her.

Why do I keep reading her, when she keeps making me so uncomfortable? I don't want merely to feel comfortable when I read -- and she steers clear of the sentimental. But she can also steer right into the grotesque... as when one of her male characters goes in for a botched "enlargement" operation. (Well, she is dealing with the medical system in this novel...)

Pondering the parvenu

2010-04-28T05:41:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

So I finished Piers Paul Read's The Upstart, and while it was mostly compelling, the wrap-up was ridiculous, perhaps deliberate bathos.

I won't go into it here, in order to avoid spoilers. But the story was "resolved" in a way that only a religious writer who wanted to get his "moral" in could do it.

Now I'm aware that he built in lots of ironies so as not to make it too pat; that the dénouement is more than half tongue-in-cheek. But it's also not, and you can't have it both ways.

In sum, I expected something more outlandish from a mostly outlandish book. The challenge, for the writer, was always going to be in the ending. You could argue that the "happy outcome" is the very anguish, is the punishment, that the protagonist deserves. But that's too easy. The book is unforgettable yet doesn't satisfy.

Saying more would ruin the experience for anyone who hasn't read it yet...

Starting The Upstart

2010-04-22T05:22:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

I've never read any Piers Paul Read before, though I've been aware of him since my teens when I bought a cheap copy of Martin Seymour-Smith's Novels and Novelists (a guide I still sometimes dip into, nearly 20 years later, even though by now it's missing many later writers!).

I've begun Read's novel The Upstart (1973) because it fits into a narrative pattern I'm studying -- of the parvenu who is (self- or socially?)-driven to crime or transgression -- but it's unlike anything I've read before, except perhaps obliquely the bizarre, compelling short novel from 1970 by Muriel Spark called The Driver's Seat. (The memory of that one still makes my spine tingle. How surprising books can be. I think, though, that it has very different aims from those of The Upstart. But I haven't finished reading that.)

PP Read is disturbing -- the content is often misogynistic and homophobic, but then that content is placed in the mouth of a very unreliable narrator... and you don't realise he is so until quite well into the book. Like Spark, Read is a Catholic and to some degree this sits with the right-wing odour that pervades Read's book. (Not all Catholics are exactly right-wing, of course. I say that as one brought up Catholic myself, though long since "lapsed".) I don't like his politics but am aiming to read a wide selection of narratives with this kind of theme, so he's on my list.

To put it colloquially, this book messes with your head. Nasty but arresting, startling, and well-written. I will report again when it's finished.

Bad, Botched Brel (but still...)

2010-04-22T03:00:00.000-07:00

By Tracy

Smitten as ever with le grand Jacques, but rarely getting time to listen these days, I finally succumbed and borrowed the DVD of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris from Planet Video in Mount Lawley last week.

Can’t say I wasn’t warned – apart from a few fanatics who must be tone-deaf or very tolerant, almost every online review I read had stressed how awful the film was.

It’s not Brel singing – though he does make a brief appearance to sing Ne me quitte pas at one point in the film. It’s the filmed version of a stage show built around translations – sometimes complete makeovers – of a clutch of Brel’s songs into (American) English.

We saw the Perth version of this stage show, minus some of the numbers, two years ago, with much better singers and far greater dynamism – a production to mark the 30^th anniversary of Brel’s death. It did, however, downplay the politics and was more about pure entertainment. The original play dates from 1968 and even in the later film you can see many of the political and social concerns of that time being alluded to or openly referenced in the way the set of songs has been stitched together.

Some of the translations are quite good, or at least quite in keeping with the spirit of the Brelien universe. Some are weak.

The film dates from 1975 and feels at least as dated as that, or more. It’s as if the filmmaker was trying to cross Godspell with Hair and Rocky Horror, and run it through the sieve of a chaotic Andy Warhol production.

That on its own wouldn’t bother me – chaos being okay to some degree, and representative of what they were trying to say about the world.

But the voices of the singers in this film version were unbearable to me. And I don’t think it’s just the inevitable mental comparison with Brel himself – Elly Stone is simply too shrill for my liking, and the others watery and wobbly. (I did find Stone's rendition of Marieke quite moving, but I suspect it was the translation and the melody itself. Here is Brel's.) Voice styles change, go in and out of fashion – some seem to transcend that, as Brel's does, but not these. I tried just watching the versions of my own favourite songs, but it was painful.

Still, I put myself through it. And survived to tell the tale. One for desperate fans only (if then).

Launch of Niall Lucy's Pomo Oz

2010-03-11T06:11:00.000-08:00

Posted by Tracy

This is the text of the speech John gave in abridged form at last night's launch, held at Planet Books in Mount Lawley. (It was John's first venture out in months due to ill health.)

Niall's book is published by Fremantle Press.

LAUNCH SPEECH AS OBJECT: On Niall Lucy’s Pomo Oz: Fear and Loathing Downunder

John Kinsella

As subject, both as speaker responsible for the public presentation of a new work, an endgame in the mysterious but often exacting process of publication — and as point of reference as person and a creator of texts generally known as ‘poetry’ discussed in some detail within the work I am launching, and with pleasing empathy in the second part of this book, I feel privileged — and I use the word in a Derridean sense of privilege of speech and not metaphor — to be standing here, to be part of a spectacle whose evolution reaches back through the Enlightenment, finds some of its finest moments in a Chaser ‘fake motorcade at the APEC Summit’ in 2007, the prompt for this work in so many ways, and encompasses resistance to an increasingly deep-set status quo that is anti-ideas, anti-text, and generally fearful of truths whose existence it believes postmodernists deny.

In response to factors such as the bashing and brutality of the Howard years’ assault on critical thought, exemplified by that foolish exposition of emptiness, Kevin Donnelly’s Dumbing Down (launched by Howard) Niall Lucy claims that he is not necessarily a ‘postmodernist’ (though he might be), that a name is but a name, but that he is going to stand up to the plate (the American baseball allusion will be brought into focus, despite the firm anchoring of this book in Oz!), and take on those balls being hurled at critical thinking in schools and elsewhere. Cultural wars are religious wars, are crusades. Niall Lucy is writing against a New Crusade, and he is writing against cultural quarantine. He is writing for understanding and equality, for fairness. I have no scare quotes around any of this, which is really weird for me! The strangest subtextual thought I took from this book was that Howard’s Australia, and maybe ‘Rudd’s’ also, has no idea what ‘Australia’ is, even less so than Baz Luhrmann, who maybe knows a lot more than he’s letting on.

About time! I will say, as subject, personally, that I am unabashedly a ‘post-modernist’, and believe that to claim to be so is a claim to ‘truth’ and necessity. When I teach postmodernism, I usually start with a consideration of French Dandyism and 1830-50s France in particular; my journey takes me to Chicago and the architectural theories of Charles Jencks, with side tours via Thomas Pynchon and Language Poetry, ending with the attack on the ‘Twin Towers’. Behind all that is the ‘punch line’ of Niall’s contention that Derridean thought becomes not only blame but something akin to the ‘death of pleasure’ (please, critics of the postmodern, look to Baudrillard in the least here), ‘There is nothing outside the text.’ As Niall, with characteristic logic and efficiency, scythes his way through the inept thinking that allowed a generation of popular critics and educationalists to argue the ‘truth’ of the canonical and the denial of the need for truth in the ‘critical’, we become increasingly aware that communication of any event, however serious, can only be ‘textual’. Speaking of a letter by Artaud to Benjamin Crémieux, Derrida says:

Released from the text and the author-god, mise en scène would be returned to its creative and founding freedom. (Writing and Difference, Derrida, 237).

Considering an issue of surface, spectacle, and spectators, Derrida locates an entirety within and without text. For a student at high school — one fairly funded, say, rather than, as Niall notes, overprivileging private schools with public money, and creating disjunction — the sheer ability to value ideas expressed within the text as saying one thing and inevitably meaning another, is exciting. When Niall notes the university complaint that theory destroys ‘the pleasure of reading’ , then he laments that narrowness of a teaching that allows nothing in or out of the text, that truly there is nothing but the text in the literal sense. That the values of a piece of writing are intact and self-informing, that context is purely historical and localised. That how we read won’t alter those perceptions. But I am twisting Niall's words — he says this with so much more clarity. As subject I can illustrate by a couple of examples:

First: After 9/11 I told my American students that the destruction of the twin towers was the end of postmodernity as a functional critical application in America. The skyscraper undone, the skyscraper centring capitalism undone by ‘Holy War’ — a terminology that would suit the ‘attacked’ as much as the ‘attackers’. An Australian telling Americans. They weren’t sure where to position themselves. An ‘ally’, but a foreigner. This mattered to some in terms of what kind of ‘truths’ I could be uttering. Suddenly, this left-wing teacher was to be seen inverting a left-wingism. Postmodernism might be usefully right-wingism for some? If we start with architecture servicing the needs of capitalism (say, from 1972 per Jencks), if we start with the theories of postmodern architecture, are we always going to be looking to the right? I would clearly argue not (and did with my students), rather that postmodernism has become the resistance to that original perception of service to capitalism.

Some of my smartest students — the highest-achieving student graduated at the top of his year to leave to become a sanitary worker and showed me he’d learnt something — said, no, it wasn’t true that it would be the end of postmodernity in America. To explain: it is the consolidation of the postmodern. They will rebuild and the façades will be greater than ever. A Freedom Tower!? Indeed, and Ground Zero becomes a New Enlightenment, thoroughly Western in a way that would appal Derrida, and Chomsky. The point is that an anarchist such as myself can be ‘postmodern’ in worldview and practice (I see no choice), but so too can deeply conservative reinventors of the status quo who want to make the edifice greater than ever. They apply a kind of critical thinking that is the opposite to what I understand or take from the ‘event’, but in the end it is reduced to spectacle. It’s how we interpret that reduction that matters.[1]

Second: I studied at high school in Geraldton under a great postmodern teacher of literature — Bill Green. He let me run riot. Whether it was Blake or Tolkien, he encouraged the introduction of not only history but even chemistry theory into my final paper (which was, outlandishly, done on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings). I had, incidentally, bought the entire collection of Penguin ancient and English classics the year before, and read them from A to Z. I wasn’t lacking in the ‘classical’. Now, back then I was no pacifist, and Bill didn’t try to make me one, but critiquing war motifs in Lord of the Rings in the context of gender (go re-read Lord of the Rings) and racism (go re-read Lord of the Rings) took me from playing War Games to the streets. It needn’t have — he didn’t encourage that, in fact he was ‘neutral’ — I might just as easily have gone the Freedom Tower way. Point was, a critical faculty was engendered in me and I didn’t do what the author of the text intended or wanted or maybe just wondered I might do. For me, the author was dead. And I wanted to be one of those dead authors for whom text was the world, and the world was text because that’s the only way truth can be conveyed.

What I have said is at the basis of my friendship and admiration for Niall Lucy. His book is rigorous and yet highly readable. It’s also bloody funny at times and Miranda Devine and other such figures are played out in this new Dunciad Major. Don’t let the lines of exquisite prose fool you, this is a new type of writing, a poem-book that prize judges won’t know where to fit. But they should give it something to show that the old is confirmed in the new, whether they like it or not. In my favourite chapter, ‘Everybody Loves Raymond Williams’ (which I do because I am a pastoral guy who thinks big country houses hold most of the State’s evils) — Niall considers the fear of deconstruction in terms of a fear of a loss of authority on the part of the ‘Teacher’ (don’t worry, he’s firmly on their side) in terms of the State, and the university. He writes, with reference to Derrida, ‘Like the essence of a poem, the essence of the new international is that it doesn’t have one. Its limits, then, are indeterminate, approximating something like a positive form only in the conservative denunciation of whatever questions the authority of "proper" ways of thinking and the "proper" order of things.' Touché.

Harold Bloom says I can write canonical poems, I read canonical often realist literature, I believe in essences, I think metaphysics make for poor science but I love metaphysical poetry. I am a postmodernist. I am going to take Niall’s model and try to write an anti-pomo potboiler — it’s a good guide, he has read his dunces carefully and closely, and is too generous in his pisstake (to quote Marion May Campbell from the cover). Niall Lucy is the smartest bloke out there, and I hope he likes the book I am going to write as a result of thinking about the book he has written.

[1] I wish to prevent a possible confusion between motifs. (These comments should be taken in the context of a respectful acknowledgement of the many people who died in the destruction of the towers.) The Twin Towers were essentially modernist architecture — the new Freedom Tower will likely incorporate pomo architectural elements but not ultimately be double-coded in structure. But it will double-code in national and international meaning, as did the twin towers in their symbolism as target. I am not saying that the end of pomo was because the towers were pomo buildings, which was not the case (really), but rather, that the notion of the skyscraper that oversees the market (skyscrapers are panopticons that often obscure their own vantage points by being in each other’s eyelines, and by vying for space), looks out over the world in its modernist-capitalist certainty but dissembles in its electronic (networked, of course) sleight-of-hand, becomes double-coded and a symbol of corporate postmodernity. The irony being that postmodernity gave the critical tools to undo this reading and this function. Thus postmodernity has its own course, its own ‘mind’, becomes a set of organic critical tools (sure, gratefully co-opted by the left). These perceptions come out of my being a poet for whom poetry is a textual practice (poems as buildings, especially houses).

In memory of Alison

2010-02-25T00:35:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

This is a short quote to mark the passing of our loved friend Alison, who was a poetry-lover and did a dissertation on Wallace Stevens...

Farewell to an idea... The mother's face,
The purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together, here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.
It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

[from Wallace Stevens, "The Auroras of Autumn"]

"Now he is gone..."

2010-02-25T00:26:00.000-08:00

Posted by Tracy, for a friend who passed away this week.

Thomas Hardy, "Afterwards"

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
'To him this must have been a familiar sight.'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'?

Wanton destruction of native forests

2009-12-14T17:55:00.000-08:00

Said by John, typed up by Tracy

The whole Avon Valley is blanketed in smoke at the moment as a result of bushfires in the south.

The most disgraceful aspect of the 10,000 ha of old-growth & other native forest that are being destroyed around the Walpole area is that they are the result of "controlled burns" that have got out of hand.

Government authorities are often responsible for these devastating fires, it seems -- in so many cases, the so-called "prescribed burns" are destructive and senseless, and this is another example of the broader consequences that can come of such actions. Even though it was obviously not part of the intention, surely those carrying out the burns are aware of the possibility that the fire may "escape" their control. Some kind of accountability must be had here.

Remembering Merton

2009-12-10T03:46:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

Today is the anniversary of Thomas Merton's death (coincidentally too, the anniversary of the day he entered the Trappist order many years earlier).

Merton's writing has been immensely important to both of us at different stages in our lives.

Here's an extract from one of his poems, "The Fall":

They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established!

They find themselves in streets. They are licensed
To proceed from place to place
They now know their own names
They can name several friends and know
Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at once and all cars crash at one crossing:
If all cities explode and fly away in dust
Yet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and a number for everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for ashes:
Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?
Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower of nothing:
This is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words end and arguments are silent.

[From The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, New Directions, 1977)

Reading Reading

2009-12-09T22:42:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

John tells me he's just re-read Peter Reading's Work in Regress, which he reckons is one of the best books of poetry to have been published in Britain in the last 20 years (it was published in Britain in 1997, by Bloodaxe).

He says: it's a very slim book with a kind of rhetorical, fragmentary lyricism, with all ebullience sucked out of it -- it's possibly one of the darkest & grimmest books he has ever read. The use of Latin, Greek and medieval & Renaissance references and stylistic subtexts inflects a rotting modernity that makes for an implosion of imperialist aesthetics ("Ovidian"; "Theocritan"; "Propertian...", etc).

And he adds: But Reading is never this unnecessarily wordy! -- spitting out words and phrases so sharp and so honed that they are frightening.

The individual title is out of print, according to the Bloodaxe Books website, but can be found in the third volume of Reading's collected poems.

You can listen to recordings of Reading reading his work at Lannan Foundation's website.

The Latest Westerly

2009-12-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

The newest issue of Westerly, guest-edited by Sally Morgan and Blaze Kwaymullina, is entirely focussed on "Indigenous writing and art", with a great variety of articles, stories, poems and images from Aboriginal contributors.

It has a striking cover ("Paradox of Inequality 2007") by Bronwyn Bancroft, who also writes in this issue of her background and context as an artist, accompanied by further colour reproductions of some of her works. (Tim, aged 6, has long been a fan of her children's-book illustrations, and though this Westerly material is not in that mode, when it arrived, he said immediately, "Is that art by Bronwyn Bancroft?", before I'd even told him anything about the journal...!)

Another great highlight for me is the piece that opens the issue: Nyungar yarns about specific birds, contributed by Leonard M. Collard ("Djidi djidi, Wardong, Kulbardi, Walitj and Weitj: Nyungar Dream Time Messengers").

I also learned a lot from the inspiring family history-writing by Pat Dudgeon and Sabrina Dudgeon, about their mother and grandmother's life.

But there's much more in this current journal issue than I can cover in a blog entry. You can check out the details here.

Stendhal online

2009-12-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

By Tracy

The Guardian reports that Grenoble's Stendhal University and public library have created a website that carries Stendhal's original manuscripts (500 pages up so far!), which you can inspect alongside transcripts (also annotated for clarity and background).

It's an amazing experience, and it's at http://www.manuscrits-de-stendhal.org/

All-vegan shop in Western Australia

2009-11-21T02:55:00.001-08:00

By Tracy

Cruelty Free WA opened in Fremantle in late October.

They have all sorts of items, and everything is vegan.

Of course, you don't have to be vegan to shop there -- anyone looking for "humane" mousetraps (ones that enable you to move the mice without hurting them), or alternatives to leather, or toiletries and makeup that are not tested on animals and contain no animal products -- will find what they need here.

There's also a great range of chocolate, soy cheeses, sandwich slices, nutritional yeast (the best one, Engevita) and non-dairy cream too.

The shop is at 28A Queen Street, opposite the side of Myer that runs down to the multistorey car park (near where Queen Street meets High Street).