whiteface

just a quick note to debi enker of this article. blackface refers to a specific cultural tradition, related to things like minstrel shows in the US. i would not limit it to that, i know that australia and i’m sure all sorts of countries have certain related traditions, that have native flavours, but would do well to be called blackface. the hey hey example clearly falls into this long line of derogatory caricature. daubing boot polish on your face is not an attempt to ‘pass’ as black people, but rather to ape them. (the fit of this verb is almost too perfect). now completely setting aside any political judgement on john safran’s upcoming show (i actually find him to be a little off sometimes, politically), he does not, as you say debi, ‘don blackface’. what he dons is quite a sophistocated cosmetic costume aimed at actually passing himself off as an african-american. again, let me stress that i am not claiming this exmpts him from any political implications, but rather that this does not constitute ‘blackface’. blackface is not a condition, its a tradition. barack obama does not suffer from a mild case of blackface, just as i do not suffer from a debilitating form of whiteface.

heist.

Lifting babies (we have none), walking through the mallee,
we break into scuffles and make up. The stories are old.
I made a cross-section of the body and then made those
sections smaller. I cut every body part, icicles form on the inside.
On viewing, we are more than we can see. Black swan dives
from such heights that we lose sight. I pay a fleet of
workers and if they take one pencil, so help me. String
them up, saliva extends from my lips and the most violent
things are framed things. This portly man and his dog (sausage)
I imagine stacking successively larger numbers of them
and stepping up to reach the tallest shelves. mirrors make animals
of us and we look away. The following is the beginning of a set.
Is the bath full?
Every pencil has its own number and chequers out.
Stack them neatly and make a hurst. We play monopoly
without the board, lift it up, check underneath.

publication productivity poetry

publication ≠ productivity. this equation is made instantly self-evident through the crabs epidemic. we can publish endlessly without ever producing a thing. at uws the other day, i was reminded of the discussion of two years ago (here and here) around poetry, the internet, publication and the post. unfortunately, again, we’re going to have to talk about space and the page, the eye and the brain, the bureaucratic organism and the writer. responding to a question about publishing opportunities for young poets/writers, i said that i almost* don’t see the point in publishing work on arbitrary ‘online journals’ unless i’m getting paid.

unlike higher research degree panels i think the evolution of creatively critical communities is more important than a list of publications. peer collaboration is as important as peer review. practically, at this point in time i regret not having ‘published’ more work during and after my undergrad. but i was part of a community that made things public all the time. in this context publication is an abstraction for which a public which must be reified by some sort of bureaucratic recognition. a book is published and then pulped, while friends of friends post pingbacks for a blog post. the published work without a public and the public unpublished piece.

the thought of doing a degree in an english department terrifies me and i feel relieved to have been spared it. a trad english lit approach to the internet cannot achieve much online. as is pointed out in the previous debates, i’m not a new media enthusiast – if only because i know nothing about it. but i guess i’m saying that engaging with online publication (read literally: making things public) must come to terms with some of the ways in which the internet is neither a really long book nor a really large library. this is confusing, since the internet has pages, but still it is not a book? unfortunately not. it is tempting to think that since the internet has pages which cost less money than the pages of books, and postage for email is cheaper, that the internet is the best place for niche publishing. i don’t pretend to understand the first thing about the potentialities of the internet as a truly communicative medium. i’m imagining cross-cultural, multilingual, machine-generated and automated dialogues and self-aware machinery, but these are (to me at least) pure imagination**. in a much more basic sense, from the point of view of someone who is between the generation of people for whom new media is new and people whom the internet predates, there are certain terms that should be addressed. a short list might be: curation, design/function, spatiality, dialogue/critique, traffic, light/dark, image/text. basically, the making-public of text online has a lot more to do with the role of the curator than the role of the editor or publisher. this could quite gratefully be carried over into a lot of print media. last week’s grumbles about the responsibility of editors to actively instigate and cultivate a culture of critical writing around poetry is relevant. curators don’t sit around and wait for submissions to arrive. neither do good editors, good editors are pro/active, but i think there’s something about the practical ease of posting (physical world) written work and a conception of writing as something other than a visual medium that leads to the creation of online journals that might be pieces of paper stacked one upon the other. where these journals already exist and function, great. keep them going.

when i say that publication in itself exists as a bureacratic category, i mean that the only people for whom volume of publication is paramount are academics (or aspiring academics), journalists (and aspiring) and grant-seekers. these three groups (don’t think i’m being critical here, the only one i have no intention of becoming is a journalist). for the organisms that govern these three groups quantity is a far more important criterion than quality.  as a young poet productivity is of more import to me than publication. obviously publication is important, but you won’t find me asking online magazines to let me write reviews of cds. if i want to come to terms with something i will write about it. and if i feel that there is a good place for that working through (piece of writing) then i would approach whoever organises that place. and i would compose something for someone if they wanted something from me that i wanted to do. i guess that’s the point; publication is valuable insomuch as it encourages productivity (which i’ll define personally as the creation of interesting, new, worthwhile work). from what i can see the internet is a place for collaboration, curation and archiving, networked spaces developed through the collaboration of people with varied skills and interests. that, or the work of people with a genuinely intuitive sense for what might work in an electronic setting. but to keep this close to things that closely resemble publication, i’d refer to things like ubuweb, triple canopy, or a project i’ve been involved in, when pressed. these environments  deal with the elements that i mentioned earlier. ubuweb is on the side of the archive, triple canopy of the magazine, when pressed perhaps closer to the gallery. or might be. when pressed is still coming together. it needs wider involvement, more commitment from the people who take on the curation (than me, for example). the networks are still embryonic. i think it will function best when it operates between the journal, the archive and the gallery space. submissions are sought along themed collections, but the space benefits from remaining open, i think. adding more work and rotating its focus. breathing.

it might seem that i am against publication. but i think our generation is able to come towards publication comfortably in a critical way. the happening was the unpublishable public work. documentation isn’t frightening to us because we are familiar with its partiality and is temporality. text is fleeting. publics are imagined and moving. it is for them/us that we make work (public).

*the almost here is as important as the rest of the phrase.

**really, this is an incredibly old-fashioned approach to the topic, replacing an outdated conceptualisation (the printing press) with something older (space) when approaching the online.

do you read me.

for once i start at the beggining, desperately.
shifting is all important, as is the motion, motioning
toward the paper, this is the thing. movement slopes.
Again thinking of floral things, and underneath. are you a
languageinthehead sort of person? the other day i moonlit,
chicklit, legumes, crosshatching, harvests, estapol.
These things are related. There was a generation that knew
to quote. kenneth, kent, these are names of mine, on the farm,
threshing, sluicing, holding all things dear to us – small horns grow.
Callous, streets ahead, calcium builds tension, Tennyson jackets
along. Everything is action. Watch as my glands slowly rise
pressing flowers against my throat.

first things first

people involved in caster semenya’s front page genital analysis must have their genitals on tomorrow’s front page with full medical records, images, warts, herpies, whatever. the herald is as guilty as news ltd. the herald’s advertised reported slew of awards for asia is misinterpreted. it is not a good sign for journalism and the herald but the exact opposite for both.

sport has to come to terms with the fact that what it is is in fact the inexplicable arrangement of selected human bodies around an arbitrary but delimited field of movement, assortment of objects, through an organisation of time and corporal movement. these special bodies (we call them often sportspeople) are selected on the basis of physical characteristics that will (hopefully) give them an unfair advantage (tautology) over other selected bodies. all winning athletes have unfair physical advantages over all losing athletes. the only people who might have some business in knowing about the genitalia of an eighteen year old woman do not get their information from news ltd or from fairfax.

miso seen: love poem.

centenaries, centurians doing dangerous things
for a thousand? years now, or more, likely
is to like as slowly is to slow. is he coming?
i wouldn’t have thought so. if something is sig-
nificantly like one thing it is necessarily like an-
other. people who say nike (nike-ee,) dudes, people
with too much energy in reserve but not enough
reserve, these people weigh upon all of us. this is
what we have to carry through to our future: poets
who write in a voice (oh no), i write, sure! but i sign
if i cant. lye is terrible stuff, isn’t it? privately, co-ed,
co-ego, we come together, zen does as zen wills, but
if we know what we want we will be there and waiting.

wake in fright

is wake in fright the best contemporary australian film? i would imagine that for most people of my generation the film was more or less unknown to them, given the loss of the film itself, the refurbishments, the re-release. coupled with the fact that nobody ever watched the thing over here when it was released, and anywhere else in the world, watched an edited version of it, can we creatively read the film as a contemporary film? i think that we and the film benefit from such an approach. setting aside the questions of what has or hasn’t changed, how site-specific it is or was, i think it works better to read it newly. benjamin suggests that language is offered up to language as such and linguistic works flower eternally and intensively, and translation offers us this hope in tuning the ear to variant modes of intention (gross bending and mnemonic riffing). i don’t know what films are made for. money, i guess, but if we take this film as being good for a collective consciousness, then i think this film is good for us now, we are ready for it. and in reading the film, we translate it. the scenes and the imagery that were a kind of brutal realism in the seventies, the girl at the reception of the hotel for example, are now, in their most accurate and appropriate flowering, our own almodóvar imagery. almodóvar (talk to her, women on the edge of a nervous breakdown, etc) has an amazing ability to reimagine spain, both the remembered kind and the currently existing varieities, through a rich, lense informed by camp/punk aesthetics, as well as the old american comedies that he grew up loving. watch the stylised reception scene at the beginning of women on the verge, and then the offputting, (un)erotic scenes with the jar of water and the fan in wake in fright, and we realised that we have reached the time of our own generation in australian film. most other australian films of our time might as well be beer commercials. there are more things to say about this film, but the most important and obvious thing is that it is our film (generationally).

tallows

you can bring someone back to life
by putting quotation marks around the word
“funeral”. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be great
to lie two soft things at ninety degree angles. fields
of vision often look different depending on the heat, but
imagine that, would you? I love the delicious prints
you leave. We made a custard plan. All talk
is pillow talk, after all. Old poetry has nothing to do
with rhyming, but superimposing and swapping
consonants. There you are, like the tenderbacks
of apricots, wearing fruits, tearing sheets of ice from the ground.
The lives of others have their own point systems, and live
feeds are streamed over the net. Tennis isn’t too bad.

we are all no keys

y/our eyes roll back in the head,
the animals that we are. And finally
we arrive to the scene, things closing,
jingling adding more, we’re either off
our heads or shot in the chest, of state,
we can’t say much. Are we here? I think
we’re here. Did I send you that email?
Did you get the stuff? We mucked it up tho.
I rolled in the aisles and my head stayed
off in the back. Imagine taking every piece
of us and placing them together, separately.
A trace of light-boxing, people fall to the ground,
hair is stroked, heads are lowered. Lowly, heady,
things come down and break apart the one
from the other. I decided to keep watch on one eye,
which left off, right at that moment. And people
go on and on about Rhodes scholars. When there
is not even a part of brightness. Wait, do you ever smoke? If you
move everything from where it sits, some things have joining
points, we call these joints, under wide sombreros, our mouths like
pupae, leaking fat scum
onto the streets. Okay, I’ll say a word, be really careful to fully speak it,
to fully bring it to voice so that it’s completely audible
and you tell me whether you hear that word or another, or whether you hear –

crabs, the rage, the undead paper.

Crabs cause extreme irritation, but Crab is a symptom, not a disorder. As nick said she certainly is the darling of the herald at the moment, which is so for a couple of reasons. The first is volume. Just as I like people who keep buying me beers and don’t expect me to buy a round in return. Things can keep on getting bigger. Like meringue, this is a fantastic thing. But imagine being sent to the world without content (canberra, but increasingly, australia) and being asked to write every day. Day-job indeed!

The reason this is possible, as the herald itself is well aware, is that it long ago left off on content. This is a publication so miserly, that it deliberately employs people to irritate, upset, infuriate and offend its readership. What we have to come to terms with is that there is no interest in provoking thought anymore. That was written off years ago. The best they hope for is to provoke a toothless rage now. The idea is, that if you assemble the biggest bunch of scumbags and give them as much space as possible – but explain that you demand nothing from them – you create the empty newspaper. The post-it adverts on the front of the paper are actually a metaphor for the rest of the paper. In fact the herald would be more proper to itself if it were composed entirely of post-its, and we could tear off each page looking for the real thing until we got to the crossword. (astute readers already read the herald in this fashion). There are of course all sorts of people who didn’t get the memo, and try to cram the goddamn thing with content, but they are in the wrong place. It’s like coming into a profiterole. Nobody wins. The newspaper doesn’t know what to do with itself since it has overseen the extraction of meaning from the public sphere. The only time I believe completely in Walter Benjamin’s description of linguistic form as being like a fruit and it’s skin, the content – attached perhaps – but most definitely encased within the skin, is when I read empty text in the herald. The apple eaten from within by the worm.

The telegraph is different, because the telegraph is always operating in or between one of two modes: firstly, that of spreading hate; secondly, taking the piss. The telegraph doesn’t pretend to fool anyone, but knows itself entirely as a kind of superficial (literally – all surface) hate-monger, and a joke. What distinguishes the telegraph, is that the writers and editors are laughing, as well as the readers. The herald on the other hand is a zombie. It is completely dead, its brain function has been invisible for a year or two and because of this it has no idea. It does, however, have the rage. It is hungry, and it eats everything. The old guard, when they appear, are parasites. Some have the disease but some are immune. Many jumped ship. But the remaining survivors are just heavy noise in a vacant soundscape. Why is Ross Gittins heavy? ‘Truthfulness’ gives no weight, he can be on the mark or off it. But he seems to still have content, which does have weight. Devine is fine because she’s out in the open. Her self-loathing is spectacular (who would write to be nothing other than an irritant? The difference that I would fabricate between irritating, and agitating, is that lots of people try to anger people in order to provoke some response, some thought, some anger, but Devine, writing for the herald, exists purely to irritate). She wants to be there only because she is not wanted. She is that person in high school who would turn up to a party they didn’t want to go to because they weren’t invited.

Crab’s a little worse because you have to run your hand along the text and knock at various points to hear that it is hollow. You see it sounds like satire. But satire is a means to an end, and her discourse is endless. Australian public discourse under K-Rudd is tinnitus after a gunshot. Nobody can hear anything or say anything, even though he is the most crude and useless populist, because we are not in a political era but rather in the wake of one. We have to pretend to get on with things because K-Rudd was unequivocally the best that we could do at the end of the Howard era. That is our collective shame that keeps us mute. He was the best that we could do and so we are going through a period of infancy (childhood/inability to speak). So Crab is as happy making fun of K-Rudd (but without critiquing) as writing forty pages of fluff about the Great Butternut Pumpkin. The two equal each other in an absolute index of individual sliminess. K-Rudd is like a newborn goat covered in afterbirth, where as the Great Butternut Pumpkin is starting to go bad in the crisper and slimy lesions have begun to come up. But if you are voiceless, incapable of bringing to voice any critique of either, what’s the difference between a newborn goat and a rotting pumpkin? That is precisely the public confusion in the world without content.