It is the beginning of summer. It is hot but windy, as so many summer days are in London. It is that strange period between the first and second national lockdowns. COVID-19 cases are not as ubiquitous as they were in the spring, but they’re on the rise again, and no-one is paying any attention. It is 6am and I wake up with a start at my partner’s house. I lurch forward in bed and try my best to catch all the vomit in my mouth before it escapes onto his duvet. I run to the bathroom, only I limp,… [Read more]
Meanjin Daily Reading: Back for 2021
We’re delighted to let you know that our daily reading email newsletter is back for 2021, starting next Monday, February 8. Sign up (if you haven’t already) and you can expect a fresh piece from of Meanjin’s rich 80-year archive in your inbox every weekday morning. A gift of words for your day.
What I’m Reading
The last book launch I went to before the pandemic was for Ellena Savage’s excellent Blueberries. This is also the last book I can clearly remember reading. Earlier today, I opened the notebook where I recorded the titles I read in 2020. After Blueberries was Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy; Jenny Offill’s Weather; and Tara June Winch’s The Yield. After that, Svetlana Alexievich’s brilliant Voices from Chernobyl. Then nothing. I remember reading Voices from Chernobyl slowly. At the time, I thought it was because it was such a harrowing book that I was inadvertently pacing myself. Now I suspect that it… [Read more]
Where Your Cabaret Comes From
November 1996, Kooky down at Club 77. I’d been away for almost a year. John Howard had been elected and a pall had drawn over. Groovii Biscuit did a drag performance in a three-piece suit with big messy eyebrows and clunky glasses. The song was ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, spliced with soundbites of Howard. Behind Groovii/ Howard was a map of Australia covered in stickers of Aboriginal flags and trees. S/he pulled off the flags and threw them to the ground. S/he pulled off the trees and threw them to the ground. Across the middle and top of the continent,… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
The New True Crime: a case for empathy over voyeurism …the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. – Edgar Allan Poe I am swimming in a deep dark sea of terrible stories. I’ve been doing a deep dive into true crime and 2020 has found me buried in books, physical and virtual, plus essays, journalism and podcasts (so many podcasts). Bound up in brutality, violence and other people’s trauma, I’m beginning to wonder: what are the consequences of immersing in a genre obsessed with dead women and girls? \\… [Read more]
O say can you see (a plea to Old Glory)
O say can you see By the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed At the twilight’s last gleaming The American poet is beseeching us to stand on a high hill And honour sun and moon. Oh yes, we do, we honour the grandfather and grandmother every day. Whose broad stripes and bright stars Through the perilous flight O’er the ramparts we watched Were so gallantly streaming Oh yes, the fratricide, that most horrible crime. And the rocket’s red glare The bombs bursting in air Gave proof in the night That our flag is still… [Read more]
The Gift
One of the first ways people encounter poetry in some form is often through nursery rhymes. At this stage, poetry paves the way to language acquisition through word play, focusing on rhyme, repetition, and rhythm. As we grow, we leave these rhymes behind, learning to use direct, imperative language to communicate our needs and wants efficiently: I’m hungry. No. I’m leaving. The childish poems fall away with the vulnerability and play of the early years. If we do not grow up in households that read poetry, or households that read at all, often the next time we encounter poetry is… [Read more]
What I’ve Been Reading
Perhaps thanks to Joyelle McSweeney’s Dead Youth, or, the Leaks: a play in 4 acts (2014), which is also a closet drama a la Goethe or Gertrude Stein and thus perfectly amenable to the theatrophobic—pertinent to our interrupted spectacle?—I have been excavating for leaks. It is hard to believe that this poem, or play, is pre-Trump-era, pre-Covid-19. Wait a second. That isn’t hard to believe at all. DEAD YOUTH 2: What a day at the races. DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s hard work, this afterlife (25). Everything accelerates in late capitalism. What oozes comes from what is; whatever is contained nonetheless transmits…. [Read more]
Searching For The Melody
My memory strains. My sister asks, ‘Remember that cake you made last Christmas?’ Nope. 2019 Christmas. I don’t remember a thing. She shows me a photo. ‘Oh, that cake.’ Vaguely. Not really. My words tangle. ‘Bussel spouts for dinner, looking for a par cark.’ I am dimmer. Christmas cracker jokes pass undeciphered over my purple paper crown. Hand the pork crackling. I’d fail a mini-mental test. Person, woman, television—how did it go again? 2020. What was the name of the Monty Python guy who died? And Black Panther, the famous basketballer? Reach for my phone. No small forgotten fact emerges… [Read more]
Armie Hammer and A Very Meaty Sexual Fantasy
Elbowing its way through last week’s COVID/incursion/ COVID/impeachment news stream, was the completely outrageous ‘what in the weird’ story alleging that Armie Hammer is a cannibal. What? Indeed. But let’s rewind a bit. Armie Hammer is the heir to the Armand Hammer oil dynasty. Armie played Oliver in the lovely Call Me By Your Name and both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network. And in recent days women have branded him a cannibal based on their exchanges with him on social media. Not a cannibal in the emotional vampire way it should be noted, but an actual human flesh gnawer…. [Read more]
