In memoriam Niall Lucy

Poem by John, posted by Tracy


You can also read John's commemorative prose piece about Niall in The West Australian.


Pomo Elegy for Niall Lucy


Textures of low-fi
magnify space;
closure an error
of programming.

You get these jokes,
irreverent as Venice,
drinking over tables,
crooning dirges, hair

shining like shook foil
without God-fearing overtones.
But spirit — spirit in buckets,
winklepicker semantics.

I sit in a poorly-lit room
and see glitz on windows,
the scales of justice
reverberating Nick Cave.

All those overlays...
in there, indelible.
And death is more than:
an embedding no military

will ever get hold of,
no rightwing shockjock
bed down; I’m with you
all the way. Out of it.

You trashed the door
of the mining boom
and went straight
to the basement:

reclaimed The Cliffe
for music, those early tapes
resonating louder than pinballs.
The jarrah house that stands

as urban-rural element
in the folklore of rock,
your occasional drives
into the bush, giving

the nod to bushrangers.
And when all hell broke
loose, you compiled
the mix-tape par excellence.

Bartleby is the script,
and the obsessive Ahab
a trick of light off Fremantle.
Elvis was glorious in rhinestones,

but a Freo sunset... those pines.
But you’ve played the album,
written the liner notes: I’ll call
you out, litcrit’s ultimate

frontman! In this fiction
a poem is neon smoke,
and the rhythm section
never claims a Beat.

But it’s as true as Bon
belting it out by the sea,
the navigation lights off Fremantle,
the drinkers’ raucous chorus.

And I never had the chance
to tell you that I know who Pynchon is,
and where he hangs out...
those corner shops of Westralia.



John Kinsella

Activist Poetics

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.

Launch of Niall Lucy's Pomo Oz

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).

 

Pre Post-Net Declaration

By John

Well, it’s a long time between blog entries for me. I’ve got to get a number of poems up on the blog to link with a Niall Lucy essay that references them, and that is just appearing in the journal Derrida Today, published by Edinburgh University Press, so I might as well say a few words at the same time. I have been doing a lot of rethinking lately — not, as some neocon critics would like to see, to reform myself into a trudging maker of poem-artefacts that echo with creative-writing-encoded purity, but rather as extension of my views on environment and textual responsibility.

Some time early next year, I will be going off-line pretty well. I will have to maintain some computer access through my university research fellowship, and to communicate with students, but otherwise I am reverting to snailmail and a much diminished use of computer technology. I have been writing poetry in pen and on a manual typewriter since I was a kid, and once wrote entirely in pen and on a manual typewriter. I started using computers at a very young age and, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, used the first computer installed in a school in Western Australia (during the school holidays while it was being set up — in fact, I helped set it up), and started using computers for word processing back in the eighties. Anyway, it’s time to step off the techno bandwagon and revert.

A post-Luddite reaction? No, I am not advocating the smashing of computers (or anything), but ignoring them — the new weaving machines will simply vanish through neglect. I recently discovered, through Tracy’s genealogical researching, that my great-great-great-great-grandfather, and his father before him, and so on, back on my mother’s side, seem to have been frame-makers for weavers. The French heritage in the family comes via the frame-makers. Or maybe it was Flemish?

So, offline (largely), I guess I will tap Tracy for news of web goings-on as she will be remaining online. Next year, we hope to convert entirely to solar electricity for all household functions, and will likely have our own water supply. I will have a second manual typewriter and hope to start making my own paper of a reasonable enough quality to type on (and to last). I made paper with a mate back in the late eighties, but haven’t attempted to do so since then. As it’s law to keep the firebreaks done, I intend to mow them fairly wide and use the extensive cuttings from that as fibre for the paper-making. This shift in my relationship with the broader world will make a difference in my ‘literary life’ as well.

Some friends see it as a new form of eremitism, especially when combined with my abandonment of air travel (I will only now travel by car, bus, train or freighter — whichever is feasible and the less environmentally exacting), and reduction of travel in general. Tracy and I have even made steps toward reducing car usage in moving between country home and university (a long drive), but that’s another story. Maybe Tracy will talk about that on here next year. We’re adapting a different approach to movement, let’s say. There’s a long way to go, and it’s fraught with contradictions, but steps have to be made. It’s all very well writing about an ecology of place and of text (for that matter), but for me it’s essential to carry through to the pragmatics of day-to-day living.

A few asides. Just read Stendhal’s Lamiel, which despite its draft and unfinished status, is one of the strongest portraits by a male fictionalist of a female character ever written. (For Stendhal is a fictionalist — he NEVER wrote "novels" that were novels alone, and NEVER wrote pure non-fiction to my mind: his plagiarisms are a glorious extension of this ambivalence and textual undoing... and allowing myself to live in-parenthesis for a while longer, I will say that this post-modernist before modernism had taken hold, this engager with technology [the telegraph], this de-subjectifier of subjectivity, would necessarily have enjoyed the publication of his works in their incompleteness) I celebrate Lamiel!

Next year I am going to work on my new novel, Protest. Both Post-colonial and Morpheus will finally be appearing in 2009 with Papertiger Media with introductions by Nic Birns. Morpheus was written when I was seventeen-to-nineteen and resurrected (the word?) from manuscript archives by Paul Hardacre at Papertiger, and Post-colonial was originally drafted back in the mid-nineties after my time living on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, but reworked many times since then.

The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is out in January 2009 — took most of this year and half of last year to sort. An exhausting but fascinating project.

The poet I am spending most time with at the moment is George Herbert. I returned to his work via ‘The Starre’.

Oh, and finally, I am going to post a couple of long poems I wrote four or so years ago when in Ohio. These poems are diatribes and are more about content than function, but nonetheless, I stand by what they’re attempting to do. And given the title of this blog, I thought the ‘mutual aid’ aspect of them pertinent!


Mutual Aid: a counter-epic (Parts 1 & 2)

by John Kinsella


'...[A] lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler's idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This suggestion -- which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man – seemed to me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in 1881.'

and later in the introduction:

'The importance of the Mutual Aid factor -- "if its generality could only be demonstrated" -- did not escape the naturalist's genius so manifest in Goethe. When Eckermann told once to Goethe -- it was in 1827 -- that two little wren-fledglings, which had run away from him, were found by him next day in the nest of robin redbreasts (Rothkehlchen), which fed the little ones, together with their own youngsters, Goethe grew quite excited about this fact. He saw in it a confirmation of his pantheistic views, and said: -- "If it be true that this feeding of a stranger goes through all Nature as something having the character of a general law -- then many an enigma would be solved.'

from Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution — Peter Kropotkin, 1902

1.

The suggestion is modernist aesthetics — in part —
with pre-modernist technology. Hand-made paper,
enough wood to build a dwelling,
food grown communally.
To compose on the computer
would become vestigial memory,
an archetype separated from its separated
signifier. Science would be abandoned
in favour of science: local, specific,
healing. Curiosity would be tethered
instead of the beast, though a sunset
or a flower in its short display
would provoke endless contemplation,
even discussion. Dandies on the pavements
would take the tracks between fields,
paths through forests no longer felled
by machines and men who claim
there’s no other way to make a living.
The tofu-maker, the soap-maker, the broccoli
and sugar snap pea grower, the paper-maker,
the storm-fallen wood collector, the composter,
the recycler, the forge for small works of iron,
people pulling their own ploughs on shared lands
where no one is master or mistress,
where belief is without power
to make others believe,
where the smoke of fires
for cooking and warmth
won’t finish off the atmosphere
because no factories no cars
are pumping out their crap, and only
the odd train or ambulance makes use of tracks
and roads kept up like gold, once worshipped
as just a glimmer that fuelled false economies
that could never add up. In letting the edges
of things grow out into the waste spaces,
and the cow and sheep become the cow and sheep again,
occupying their respective spaces and not vast
areas of land that should never have been cleared,
where an animal is an animal and not a pharmaceutical
laboratory that prolongs human life so it can collectively
witness the collapse of the entire biosphere,
living long enough to enjoy the apocalypse
whichever prophecy you live by, deny, or ignore.
Try walking the plough lines without fences,
try gender liberation without General Electric
who did much more than all of French theory
or American liberationists who only existed
because of General Electric, try sharing out time
and work and thinking space without power sources:
liberation will be genuine and not exploitation
dressed up as something better. Try any form
of social progress without the “contribution
to the modern nation” which never holds up anyway
and is quickly and not-so-quietly rebuffed
or repressed or even consumed
by a moral majority: another lie of democracy
that represents only those doing the representing.
The majority’s false majority making degrees
of separation a perversity, an irony
when it’s the majority who hate perversity
so much. Try it without armies and police forces
and yes, even traffic lights. Try it without weapons.
Flights of birds are worth noticing. As are anemones
on reefs close to shore, as you walk onto the kelpy
wash, just leaving things be. The light is revelatory
here at any time of day in any kind of weather.
Light is pure physics and the distance
from the sun, the play of other cosmic forces,
is an active part of our day, our looking.
If the scrub and dune growth are left untouched
the sandhills won’t drift inland in the same way.
There is something to be said for a co-existence
where natural barriers protect you from the worst
of things, often. The body predicts the weather
if you listen closely. Rings around the moon
are common knowledge in the small community.
Etymology is the growth of the word
on the fringes of communities,
an exchange of languages.
The song is carried across
lines of distance like red sap
down the craggy bark of eucalypts.
Observations taken from high ground resonate
through a district, and field trials
don’t glow more than the sky around the hills.
Bats hacking air around the caves
rise up like prayers without conversion,
and neighbours are not tamed by them.
Slippage of snow and desert sand
is anecdotal and tough in air-conditioned
modernity: people are still, and moving,
and both pass by each other
as weather and conditions
change. Erosion on the tree-line
that seems so bound when clearing ends
and salinity is in retreat, is noticed
by the child visiting day after day into old age.
Lacrimae rerum is music
in leaves mapped to this place:
roots adjusting, at their own pace?

2.

People can belong where they are. They
can belong in more than one place. Place
need not be damaged by their belonging;
nor people in that place displaced.
None of this is mutually exclusive.
Culture is the contrivance of marginalisation.
Democracy makes culture of other peoples’ spaces.
Nocturnal animals in the forest
are hard to track — they mostly keep to the branches.
The researchers out with their spotlights
give themselves employment. Research
is consumerism and the sci-fi “urge” that excuses
all investigation. Rumour has it,
they defined their humanity
by differing versions of colonisation.
You’ll listen if you want to hear it,
unless the language persuades
that language is enough,
against personal preference.
What moment in childhood
made you go like this?
Stamp collecting? Buying
your first weapon — a Norica air-rifle?
The smell of soldering flux
like cold teeth and accidents;
the intense itch of buffalo grass
and the wondering why
next door had softer grass;
jagged splinters from climbing
the grey wooden picket fences;
unearthing tiny potatoes
from a vegetable patch
left for years; smoking
rolled up newspaper;
crushing cans in a vice;
the work-in work-out
motivation of a pedal car
grinding across blue metal
hacked out of the hills
leaving a massive wound
that will never be healed;
the chemical structure
of glow-in-the-dark ghosts
when they first hit the market;
doing bob-a-jobs for cub scouts
and wondering why you’d want to worship
your Auntie Jackie as head of the pack;
turning your bookshelves
into a library and getting entangled
in the Dewey Decimal system;
being fascinated by lichens,
toadstools, mushrooms, and puff balls;
unravelling the wirework
of those corner bush generators,
the magneto flowers of the banksia,
apposition of gnarled bark and sublimely
intricate stamens; the possibilities
of test tube, florence flask,
conical flask, u-tube, eye-melt
of magnesium ribbon,
the dissolution of flowers;
the dynamics of a Coke bottle
with possible prize printed in crimped lid
exploding in the freezer;
indelible pencils and fountain pens
with swirls of plastic representing shell
and books of Malay written in these
in the bottom drawer of the kitchen
built-in cabinet; the Mettler stove;
the Wonderheat; the slabs of glass
slices of heat blackening
in the jarrah burn-off,
the bite then split
along the seams of the forest —
pit saws, water-spray backpack
with canvas webbing;
records of the growth rates of trees;
Sidchrome spanners; grease guns;
jacks for trucks; an oil pit;
a well without a pump: so deep
you remember it being dug;
sheep killed and frozen.
a kangaroo eating the phosphated grass;
a guinea pig bitten by a redback
with hair against the grain
no matter which way you rubbed;
quails in aviaries with their perfect
grounded eggs; parrots
caged from the northern wheatbelt;
shell grit, cuttlefish, squid jags;
the smell of the visiting Craven A
cigarette salesman who didn’t smoke
himself; Airfix glue and Humbrol paint
cocktailing biorythmically,
making the heart faster
in the dark: spitfires, mustangs,
stukas in the ethical mosh-pit;
Sly and the Family Stone,
Elton John’s Crocodile Rock,
Nana Mouskouri and black and white rags,
Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata,
Elvis Presley, poster-boy;
Das Kapital; God and the State;
back door-handles turning
at night; a boarder’s easy skankin
Bob Marley; gun-cotton and the colours
of burning; whale-oil-soaked burley;
spear-fishing? Sex on the roof of a Simcar?
Combat and war movies watched religiously,
and Charlton Heston as large as life — later —
around Columbine. He is aware that the Hawks
want to go into Iran, might already be in Iran
according to the article about to appear in the New Yorker,
who laments... almost wistfully, his Moses
off-side for a split second... that the civil rights
battles of the 50s had to be endured at all.
Age is no deterrent. Michael Moore
is also a victim of his own patriotism.
The growing of feed is an aid to futurity.

Philip K. Dick Interlude

By John

Been reading (or mis-reading, as I do all Dick’s work) Philip K. Dick’s novel We Can Build You. Have probably read over half his novels now and many of the short stories. Starting to shape chapters of the book I am writing on his work, but there’s still a long way to go — I need to read everything, and then again and maybe again. I am, by nature, one who needs to read a writer’s whole oeuvre. Before Dick it was Stendhal, right down to his so-called Three Italian Chronicles.

The Dick is particularly interesting in its portrayal of Pris, another of his definitive, affect-testing (of the reader!) and significant female characters. Mental ‘illness’ and the terror/effect/administration/policing of ‘treatment’ resonate through the novel’s anxieties and paranoias (so characteristic of almost all Dick’s work), but the greatest paranoia is to do with gender and role play, and the obsessive distractions of sexuality and its implications for loss of control, and also redemption.

Dick is overtly ‘guilty’ of sexist cliché at times (he always seems to describe how a woman is dressed and what her breasts are like and whether or not she is good-looking; actually, he is breast-obsessive — it’s to do with the trauma between concepts of nubility, ripeness, fertility, and a weird form of body pastoralism versus artificiality: the doll versus the flesh), but this is offset by the sub-genre de-role play of his female characters.

His brilliant so-called ‘mainstream’ novel Mary and the Giant, originally written in the 1950s (and set in California) but unpublished until 1987, years after his death, deconstructs female stereotypes of genre novels to the nth degree. It’s still ‘genre’ in that it writes out of genre methodologies. The same grammar, syntax, sentence structure as his sci-fi writing of the period. It parodies genre and mimics the ‘literary’. Creates something new in the process. Its own limitations of social perceptions are choices made to illustrate the limitations of fiction itself.

I often think Dick is the ultimate fictionalist. Fiction is a ploy, a smoke-screen for the degrees of separation we hide behind. Fiction is closest to reality, in other words. It is as remarkable as Stendhal in its sympathy for the female protagonist (Mary Anne Reynolds). It also deconstructs racial stereotypes and examines nodal points of prejudice that come out of self-protecting primary societal discourses. How ‘whiteness’ is self-protecting, and creates its own hierarchy of oppressions (reaching a crisis of ‘masculinity’ — or maybe self-masculinity — in terms of comparison with perceptions of ‘black’ masculinities) that cross over, overlay, and delete.

It doesn’t equate bigotries as exchangeable, but explores the contact points and sub-narratives of prejudices that encompass creating ‘subaltern’ figures in order to preserve their own privileged status (even though Mary is forty years younger than her oldest — white/middle class/experienced — lover, Schilling, she ultimately and definitely de-loves). A bit like conservative Anglicans in Australia fighting against the ordination of female bishops. But hey, I left the Church when I was sixteen and have never looked back. All are systems of oppression to me.

Tangentially brings to mind again We Can Build You where Louis is telling Pris (whose only friend as a child was her chemistry set, and that was as she seemed to want it) about a young bird having fallen from a nest and his going to pick it up to attempt to return it to the nest, and the bird opening its mouth. Louis sees this as evidence of the bird’s trust, of the ‘mutual love and self-assistance in nature as well as cold awful things’, Pris rejects this, saying it ‘was ignorance on the bird’s part.’ Louis says ‘innocence’, not ‘ignorance’. In there is all ‘God’, in its contradictions, and the system of language serves as well — or better — than the system of control that is organised religion.

Personally, I respect all religions and no religions at once. I certainly respect each individual’s right to spirituality, to choice of belief system, but not to a right to impose this. Obviously. Speaking of Dick’s ‘mainstream’ novels, another favourite of mine is In Milton Lumky Territory, also published long after its writing and set in the 1950s (Reno etc).

Apart from reading Dick, I have been pondering a new short story. These things take so long for me to sort in my head. The hardest genre, I reckon. I have the narrative (which is something more than plot) — derives from a story told by my brother (a shearer) to Tracy and then by Tracy to me. It’s the germ of the idea that will go into various other places. I like stories derived out of stories derived out of stories. The degrees of separation enhance the fictionalism.

Oh, some real progress was made today with the reconstruction of my novel Morpheus. Written when I was seventeen going on eighteen, it has been tracked down in its various locations (it was broken up and chunks lost etc) by Paul Hardacre at Papertiger Media, and with a fair bit of reconstructive writing by me, and detective and editorial work by him is being reconstituted for publication early next year. A bizarre and difficult task! I am sure Paul would more than agree.

Finally, Mary and the Giant brings me to music — music binds the novel together — and class. I am hearing snippets of Tracy’s latest passion (and Tim’s)... an anarchist... Georges Brassens. You’ll get no facts from this entry, just bendings and warpings. Why? you might well ask. Why?

Niall Lucy and I have finished working on 'our' plagiarism book and are now starting work on another on ersatz. Dick again... The Simulacra. American soldiers in Germany. And so on...