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In Prague recently, I had some conversations about what living in the Czech Republic is like nowadays for women, for unemployed people and for Romany gypsies. I am grateful to Bernie Higgins, Louis Armand and Vincent Farnsworth for their information and insights. Vincent provided me with a couple of web sites (in English) that publish reports of some of the many problems, especially in relation to the Romany community :
Aktualne : Czech News and Romea : Romanies
Romany Music Festival in Prague, 2008
A Romany house in Vitkov that was attacked by arsonists on April 18th. Three members of a Romany family, including a two-year old girl,
were badly burned.
"Enough is Enough" demonstrations are planned to occur across the Czech Republic on 3rd May 2009
Dobrý den from Malá Strana
Meanwhile, this week back at the Sydney theory ranch, John Hawke’s book Australian Literature & the Symbolist Movement will be launched by Jacket magazine editor and poet John Tranter.![]()
The promotional text says :
Australian literature was never all billabongs and stockmen.
Ahead of other English speaking cultures, Australia absorbed the Symbolist message freshly worked out in Paris-initially in Brennan's Bulletin pieces of the 1890s. Symbolism introduced a metaphysical, intellectual strand throughout the 20th century, visible in the work of Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright and Patrick White, and in the reactions of Hope and McAuley.
John Hawke follows this rich and complex tradition into recent poetry; he compares the impact of Vitalism, promoted by Norman Lindsay and manifest in such poets as Slessor, Francis Webb and Douglas Stewart.
His book also investigates fascinating dialogues involving P.R. Stephensen, Jack Lindsay, A.R. Chisholm, Randolph Hughes and others, and the extremist views which grew for some of them out of their positions on the Symbolist aesthetic.
This reappraisal of literary tradition shows the landscape of Australian writing in a completely new light.
John Hawke is a Senior Lecturer in English at Monash University. He completed doctoral studies at the University of Sydney, where he received the University Medal and the Dame Leonie Kramer Prize. (not that Dame Leonie [one of Barry Humphries' greatest characters] had any personal involvement in the award choice). Between 1997 and 2006 John taught literary theory at the University of Wollongong. He is also a widely published poet.
6pm Thursday 30th April
gleebooks,
49 Glebe Point Rd,
Glebe, Sydney
RSVP: 9660 2333
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Minding mice at a crossroads: Mike, Jill, Phil, David, Louis, Annette, Maurice, Mary, Pam on the way to BrnoTrevor Joyce has put his photos (including the above) from last week's Czech Poetry Micro-Festival: Prague & Brno up on the web - to view the pics, that include photos from every reading, click here
Here is one of my photos of Trevor at the reading at Sklenena louka in Brno on April 16th :
The festival organiser, Louis Armand, has posted photos tracing the progression of the poetry events on Facebook here. 
Louis Armand, after the last reading at Shakespeare & Sons, enjoying a glass of smooth South Australian red provided by Dianne Cornell, the Australian consul.
I'll be posting more on Prague, Kutná Hora and Brno soon.
A person looks at a work of art called 'Relief' by Jan Fisar
in the Czech National Gallery in Prague
(Foto by Michael Farrell)
I’m off to Prague to read poems and check out the Czechs, nashledanou, ahoj!![]()
To see some of John Tranter's photos from the heady party at the opening of the avoiding myth & message exhibition last Monday night click here. ![]()
The intersection of Australia’s literary and contemporary art worlds is the subject of a new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, opening this autumn.
avoiding myth & message: Australian artists and the literary world presents works by 28 contemporary Australian artists whose practice has been informed by literature.
later,
& like any poet
avoiding myth & message
to fake a flashy ode, consider
what model of Australia as a nation
could match the ocean, or get your desk
to resemble a beach/
The exhibition title is a line taken from John Forbes’ ‘On The Beach: A Bicentennial Poem’ (extracted above). Curated by Glenn Barkley and running from 7th April until 12th July 2009, avoiding myth & message takes up major themes within the Australian literary and visual traditions; themes which often overlap, such as landscape/interior, text and image, urban life, politics and the personal. Predominantly an MCA collection-based exhibition, it will include ephemera, publications and media-based works produced by artists and publishers from 1968 onwards.
It includes artists who have worked in an illustrative mode; artists who use words and texts within their work; and practitioners who adopt a more poetic, narrative-based approach inspired by literature’s ability to create a visual world based on language.
Works range from Vernon Ah Kee’s vinyl wall piece ‘Many lies’ (2004) which has been specially reconfigured for the exhibition cascading down an 11 metre wall, to Sandra Selig’s ‘Surface of Change’ (2007), a work created using pages from a children’s science book that have had words removed, leaving a new kind of poetry.
Destiny Deacon, Rosalie Gascoigne, Shaun Gladwell, Robert Macpherson, Noel McKenna, Ruark Lewis, Mike Parr, Imants Tillers, Jenny Watson and zinester Vanessa Berry are included.
Two works from the early 1970s by Mike Parr, ‘Wall Definition’ (1971) and the seminal conceptual artist’s book, ‘Black Box of Word Situations’ (1971–91), will be displayed as they were in Inhibodress when first exhibited in 1971.
Key collaborative book works and journals such as A Package Deal Assembly Book, Magic Sam, Surfers Paradise and Cocabola’s Funny Picture Book will be included in the exhibition, as well as individual writer and artists’ texts and publications, performance footage and works that trace the emergence of feminist, multicultural and gay voices within the literary and artistic scenes. This historical (1970s) section of the exhibition will also include a number of texts reproduced straight onto the wall, as well as works and publications by major figures within the Australian literary and artistic worlds, such as Rudi Krausmann, Tim Johnson, John Forbes, Ken Bolton, Tim Burns, TTO, John Tranter, Anna Couani, Vicki Viidikas, Pam Brown and Micky Allan.
MCA Public Programs are an integral part of the exhibition and many of the works have a performative or interactive component, with a number of poetry readings and talks scheduled to take place throughout the exhibition.
(I’ll post further information on the winter series of events co-ordinated by Morgan Smith of gleebooks closer to the dates in June and July.)
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The latest issue of overland includes some terrific poetry thanks to the energised selections (poems by Stuart Cooke, Trisha Pender, Chris Brown, Berndt Sellheim, Jessica Tyrell, Michelle Cahill and others) of the recently appointed (well, last year) poetry editor, Keri Glastonbury, plus there is the wonderful PRIZE WINNING (do italics still signify irony?) poem emoticon by Tim Wright. The prize was awarded to him last weekend in this funny looking building in St Kilda, Melbourne. It's a poetry centre. 
Calling Laurie Duggan,
Give me back that copy of The Herd CD I gave you.
You you you traitor !!
Two years ago I read George Stanley’s selected poems from 1957 until 2000 - A Tall Serious Girl - and I became a fan of his writing.
His recent book, Vancouver : A Poem, in which he moves through urban Vancouver noting changes and seeming to talk to himself as he lets his reader eavesdrop, is just about the best book of poems I’ve read in ages.
There is more here than memory
∇
Reading Paterson on the bus, back & forth. Across the city. The 210.
A man & a city.
I am not a man & this is not my city.
In the bar, George Stanley instructs himself to
Write carelessly &
stop focusing
where a pal's maudlin griefy tears can be shed into Benedictine, where
The mind
edges away
from compassion - imagining
itself compassionate -
leave it to the brain,
leave it to the big boy
to feel, even if it
makes big mistakes, it’s the big boy,
it’s the one
must
(& I will not say die
I’m in the bar,
I’m happy but I’m lost whenever I come
to this point
of embarrassment as if to take over
knowledge that not yet
exists, is, write carelessly, write
at the brink
(like a skateboarder I just saw on TV -
wake up! what time is it? -
crash into the oblong
bales of hay - set up -
He aims
not to be a man
to be a thought
This is the publicity description of the contents of the book :
The Lions [the twin mountain peaks visible from the city] bare of snow, crowded express buses, a giant red turning letter W. 'Vancouver: A Poem' is George Stanley's vision of the city where he lives, though he does not call it his own. Vancouver, the city, becomes Stanley's palimpsest: an overwritten manuscript on which the words of others are still faintly visible. Here the Food Floor's canned exotica, here the stores of Chinatown, here the Cobalt Hotel brimful of cheap beer and indifferent women.The poet travels through the urban landscape on foot and by public transit, observing the multifarious life around him, noting the at times abrupt changes in the built environment, and vestiges of its brief history. As he records his perceptions, the city enters his consciousness in unforeseen ways, imposing its categories and language. Skirting chestnuts on the sidewalk or reading William Carlos Williams's 'Paterson' on the Granville Bridge, the poet travels along the inlet, past the mountains, under the trees, interrogating the local world with his words.
Many of the first drafts of ‘Vancouver: A Poem’ were written in transit, on the bus or on SkyTrain. Others took their first shape in bars or restaurants. George Stanley has learned, he says, "more and more to let the poem write itself. Not to get in the way of the poem."
City of death, city of friends.
Even though it is not his city, George Stanley, originally from San Francisco, and now aged 75, has lived in Vancouver for over thirty years, long enough to have made friendships, acquaintances, to have taught many English classes, and to frequent a favourite local bar. He has passed by the same shops and buildings on bus rides and on foot, and he marks their various transitions. His poems observe tree roots lifting paving stones on the sidewalks, gold ink graffiti on the bus floor, the places where you can go to pee, like Pacific Centre Mall or McDonald's, and so on. When a local bar is closing to be reinvented as some other venue he calls it 'Reterritorialization'.
Seniors
Seniors know everything.
Correction: Each senior knows everything.
The others don’t want to hear about it.
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You should click on this altered image to enlarge it
and scroll around in it if you want to read the text.
Altered from a photo of the Wooster Group by Paula Court.
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Pride History Group is launching their latest booklet, Out and About: Sydney's Lesbian Social Scene 1960s-1980s. Based on oral history - interviews with women who were part of the scene - and including many historic photographs, this booklet explores the bars, social groups, dances and parties frequented by Sydney lesbians from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Saturday 28th February at 2pm
Fitzroy Room, Rex Centre,
58a Macleay St, Kings Cross
(entry off Fitzroy Gardens) near the fountain
phone for directions if you get lost : 0409446482
rsvp: phg@unwired.com.au by Thursday 26th February 2009
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It was the mid-fifties - I suppose it could have been Fantasia or something by Charlie Chaplin, films I saw around the same time, but I’ve always remembered (or thought) that the first film I ever saw was Jedda, in Toowoomba, Queensland, with my parents and, probably, although I can’t recall them being there, my older sister and brother. The cinema (was it ‘The Empire’ or ‘The Strand’?) was packed and so our seats were in the front stalls, close to what seemed an absolutely gigantic picture screen to a seven year old child. I was mesmerised and, terrified. I don’t think the system of rating films deemed suitable to audience age had yet been considered in Australia. Perhaps I’ve remembered it as my ‘first film’ because it was such an overwhelming and powerful film and it was in full brand-new technicolour too.
Urban Cinefile explains the film : “Determined to tell a story that could be told only in Australia by Australians, Charles Chauvel made Jedda, the first Australian feature film to use Aboriginal actors in the lead roles and the first to be filmed in colour.
Set in the Northern Territory, it is the tragic story of a young Aboriginal girl of the Arrente tribe, adopted by a white woman, Sarah McCann, as a surrogate for her own baby who has died. She names the baby Jedda after a wild bird and raises her as a white child, isolating her from Aboriginal contact.
But when Marbuck, an Aboriginal man seeking work arrives on the station, Jedda is fascinated by him. Marbuck takes the half-willing teenage girl as his captive, returning to his tribal lands, only to find he is rejected by his tribe for breaking the marriage traditions.
The two are hounded from the tribe and chased by the men from Jedda's home station, until Marbuck is driven mad, and falls over a cliff to his death, together with Jedda.”
Some years ago, the dvd release of Jedda in 2004, prompted journalist Paul Kalina to reassess the film in an article in The Age Newspaper.
Earlier this week the Australian national public radio broadcast a
re-engagement with Jedda on the indigenous program AWAYE! with plenty of fascinating, insightful commentary about the making of the film and the thoughts, then and now, of the Aboriginal actors involved in the production and the prevailing societal attitudes to Aboriginal people around that time. Listening to the program, I remembered the powerful effect the film had on me as a very young girl, and I thought about how extraordinary change - tinged of course with a kind of informed and reflective plus ça change - can be, experientially, over half a century. Everything has changed - Jedda the film is almost a historical curiosity, but a formidable one.
(PB with apologies to Chester Gould)
Romany Music Festival in Prague, 2008
A Romany house in Vitkov that was attacked by arsonists on April 18th. Three members of a Romany family, including a two-year old girl, 
