lost in the gloss

…Vinyl Record Day hopes to increase awareness that economics prevent record companies from transferring everything recorded to compact disc. Educating the public on why and how to care for a record collection is seen as an important step toward preservation. Responsibility for preservation rests with the public, not record companies. It’s up to you and me to preserve and care for our record collections. We’ve kept them because they represent an important part of us and now with time we have become the custodians of our recorded heritage. It is up to us to assure future generations will not lose an important link to recorded history

Happy Vinyl Record Day. The founders suggest you throw a party to celebrate (’heck move the furniture and make room to dance’). I drunk tea and listened to the Aislers Set by myself.

Thanks for your time

the promotion of the self

A review, written by me, of Jen Hofer’s chapbook going going has appeared within the latest issue of the excellent Galatea Resurrects.

& while I’m at it, another review / how to guide / article on two collections by Sarah Riggs appeared on Jacket a couple of months ago, in issue 35.

I read over Walter Benjamin’s killer ‘The Critic’s Technique in Thirteen Theses’ a few times as I was writing these. Number 6 in particular nagged at me: ‘Criticism is a moral question. If Goethe misjudged Hörderlin and Keist , Beethoven and Jean Paul, his morality and not his artistic discernment was at fault.’

BAD technology

Who was it that said it? You pick up the newspaper these days and everything looks like a Dead Kennedys album cover… The Olympics are here again, or will be soon, and what a strange, joyless spectacle they are. I have a rant in me about segways, but at the moment there are more beautiful things to be thought about. The moon is heavy and low.

work poem

The Mexican navy has intercepted a 10-metre homemade submarine.

A skydiver has plunged into an army band in the US.

Rome authorities have banned eating near famous monuments.

Nicole Kidman says she can’t stop staring at her new daughter.

Curtain’s up

I’m very excited and nervous to say that we unveiled When Pressed this week. It’s a project I’ve been working on with friends and conspirators Nick and Pat, with help at various times from Tom and Astrid, for the last year, and so it’s a bit hard to believe that it’s now public. I think the design is gorgeous and open (thanks Pat!), and the work is all quite wondrous. In particular, as Nick said in his launch spiel on Tuesday night, it is a privilege to be able to feature so much of Amanda Stewart’s work. I’m only now beginning to realise the scope of her work, how much she’s been a part of poetry in Sydney, and the interesting way she is able to work across the digital sound and poetry scenes (two scenes which I’ve thought for a long time can learn so much from each other). I’m also mightily impressed with Dan Disney’s poems, particularly for how they changed from earlier drafts of them that I saw.

I had a minor crisis trying to write the introductory material (which we were still trying to finish off on the day). It sounded too blurby, too glib. Lines I wrote have come back to me and made me wince this week. This highlights one of the advantages of publishing online: you can tinker. I toyed with the idea of not writing an introduction at all, or writing something in the spirit of Derek’s verse introduction to 4W (’away with prosaic frontispieces!’ I believe was its directive). I talked to Vanessa about it & she said she had always appreciated those introductions that try to talk about the themes that run across the work within an issue, to speak of it as a whole, knowing that, of course, this always destined to fail at some level.

Reservations aside, I am more excited than nervous; ideas for new collections are blooming, conversations are rich and plentiful…

ARK LOSE TILL HER ICE NATIVE PAT

I discovered that you could go inside South Sydney Oval not long before it was demolished. When you passed through the entrance you were in a scene freshly exhumed from the 1970s: bleachers with coloured seats and decrepit ticket booths whose stillness issued the sounds and excitement of Saturday games past. It felt very still and safe. Now thanks to that man with the demanour of a slightly pissed plumber, the whole park is fenced off and there’s nowhere to walk or lie on the grass in Redfern.

Ark lose indeed, but how to decode the rest of this message?

will one book be enough to read in non time…?

Microphones Hidden in the Trees

a sally across town a slug
of water a head freshly shaved
beside reclaim the night if
you dug deep enough into walls
they would bleed green and gold
myers repurposed as a printing
press places where acoustic
guitars sounded best tunnels
toilet cubicles five different
ways to send a cassette through
the mail art gallery of western
australia afternoons single lens
reflex carparks sides of freeways
papery weeds walk for days and
not hit another sheet of lead slipped
into a hang glider’s jumpsuit glide
above the city like the end of an
op shop novel finished in a park
at dusk hold an orange work
footpaths as if you learnt patience
from this boredom the length from my house
to honey’s deli sylvanas to the moon
rolling a car through lathlain late
for somewhere to talk i would move
through it now invisibly the directions
consist of when you get to the end
of the desert you will find
a small city recording itself