Woke ‘n Up In Vegas: The Nevada Primary (etc)
‘Warm the dice man, warm the dice’ —Craps player, to the designated player, Rio Casino Bernie Sanders loomed large on the screen above the ReBar, Las Vegas, looking like he always does, an aggrieved pensioner sending back a meal. Touch of the old man resting bitch face. It’s only when he starts speaking that his form integrates, and he wraps around the words, angry, forthright: ‘We want Medicare for all, so that 87 million Americans do not remain un- or underinsured, so that 30,000 do not die because they cannot see a doctor, so there are not 500,000 bankruptcies for […]
What I’m Reading
Every ugly stupid thing I am reading about the hottest woman alive across every year that I have been alive. I wish I was alive in 1988 so I could say that I was born in the year that Jessica Rabbit was the hottest woman alive. A CILF: Cartoon I’d Like to Fuck. My birth year’s hottest woman was Christina Applegate, who played a sexy teenager on TV, validating men who sat at home on their couches watching TV, laughing at pretty ordinary jokes while wanting to fuck a teenager, which is perhaps a more forceful message about times in […]
Following The Fires
I’ve got a recording on my phone from 23 December 2014. It’s called ‘Bats, Wright’, and listening to it I can still see the scene when I recorded it. It was late at night and I was standing under a bright street light that rose like a four-leaf clover from the centre of a roundabout just a few blocks from my parents’ house in one of the new suburbs of Canberra. I was listening with my bat detector to the microbats that were flitting in and out of the arc of the light’s glow, feasting on the thousands of beetles […]
Yours Sincerely, Rupert Murdoch
‘Be pretty ruthless,’ Meanjin’s founding editor advises the young Rupert Murdoch. ‘The advice on editing will no doubt prove sound’ he replies.
Essays
Walking and Being
For some time, I’d been thinking of writing about Westgate Park, an inconspicuous piece of ground beneath the shadows of the Westgate Bridge at the mouth of the Birrarung (Yarra) River in Melbourne.
Fiction
Kattadiya
Frances thought her bladder would burst; walking the extra two hundred yards to the outdoor lavatory was out of the question. The zinnia patch adjacent to the patio would have to suffice. It was nearly 9 pm, no-one would see.
Memoir
Birds and Knives
I am not allowed a knife, but the National Treasure’s son is. He has a red-handled Swiss Army one that incorporates a can opener, a bottle opener, two saw blades and a detachable pair of tweezers. He shows it to me in his back yard, levering the primary blade out of the handle with his thumbnail. ‘I killed a bird with it last week,’ he tells me.
Poetry
Burning
So, shiftless summer’s advance stills everything.
It’s the new normal. The effect of the heat the wind twists through
is like Link Wray’s slow drag of chords with his right
right across ‘Rumble’, only played through an amplified hairdryer.
