Friday Night in Macao

I roll the dice - Contemporary Macao Poetry.
This anthology represents the first serious effort to collect Macao poetry for the English-language reader. A collection of poetry from and about Macao, it contains works by more than one hundred poets. Mainly translated from the Chinese, the volume also includes more than twenty Portuguese-language Macao poets as well as a number of local poets who have composed their poetry in English.

The Association of Stories in Macao (ASM) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of writing and other artistic expression in and about Macao.'Promotion' includes a range of activities, from publishing (on-line and in print) and the organisation of events, such as book launchings, to poetry readings writing workshops and art exhibitions.
Click here to visit ASM's online journal Poetry Macao

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I’ll be at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne this coming weekend to see Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd. But in Sydney I’d be going to Rae Desmond Jones’ book launch in Summer Hill.


click on the launch notice & other images to enlarge : click on bolder grey text for links

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New Publications

Martin Edmond’s latest book The Supply Party is about the journeys of the 19th century German painter and scientist
Ludwig Becker who died at Cooper’s Creek in Queensland
whilst participating in an expedition led by Robert Burke.
Click here for further info and an extract.


Adam Aitken’s new collection of poetry Eighth Habitation
will be launched by Marcelle Freiman at Gleebooks
in Sydney at 4pm on Sunday 5th April.




  Adam Aitken, Jane Zemiro & Martin Edmond, Breakfast at Blackheath, December 2008

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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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                       Some poems of mine are included in new editions of
                       Roger Humes’ Other Voices International Project
                       Anny Ballardini’s Poet's Corner - Fieralingue

                       And at last, and only three and a half months late,
                       Jacket Issue 36 is complete and ready to read.

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                       cleaning up - from the fridge door -
                       

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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.

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                             (PB with apologies to Chester Gould)

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In mid-December I read some poems into the telephone from my recently published book True Thoughts and was interviewed for Writers Radio by Cath Kenneally. To listen to the broadcast click here.

                                                Cath Kenneally

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         Very best wishes to US friends from the deletions
         at this historic, momentous and wonderful time.

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                      American Memories, Melbourne    

                                        (not quite after Hope Mirrlees)

                                       I   want   a   panorama



                                           SOUTH - WEST

                                         CACAO  BLOOKER

                                           GOG & MAGOG



                          green art deco bakelite in the national gallery



                                     FITZROY (ST ASPEN SHIRAZ)      

               BRUNSWICK (SQUAWKING MAGPIE SAUVIGNON BLANC)

               PARLIAMENTARY MUSEUM (HAZELGROVE PINOT NOIR)



            creak chug creak chug creak chug under Princes Bridge on the Yarra



                                       CASTLEMAINE ROCK



                   Greek woman tearing the gig posters from the lightpole

               outside her son’s bar

                                    Going down Madam ?



                   follow the commemorative brass plaques in the footpath 

                        a golden mile must be almost two kilometres



                     ne rien faire     walk slowly     doing nothing

                               for approximately two hours



          WARAKURNA ARTISTS at Alcaston Gallery in Fitzroy until Saturday



                   discover why Melbourne is called ‘marvellous’



              a grey mouse running through green & purple wisteria vines



                                 TIN BOX BUILDINGS

                     attached to creaking weatherboard cottages



                       the awful HARD art of the minimal

                                 strikes here and

   strikes again in Montréal, actually strikes TWICE in Montréal

             at the Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Musée des Beaux Arts

                                                                   too!

                                             

                               DUCRAY  ICTYANE

                  créme émolliente hydratante     blow wind blow 

                            buy Magic Gloves at Dollarama



                       red wine and voodoo at RUBIS ROUGE



         in the USA public toilets flush automatically which can be alarming

                      all announcers have Spanish accents

                   the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry is really realism

    Ron Silliman’s VOG is Voice Over Guy, Voice Of God, Very Ordinary Glory

                                            Vital Organs Grim   …



                                on the SILVER STAR 91

                from Philadelphia Pennysylvania to Richmond Virginia

           (Dixie Hummingbirds, Cab Calloway, Ruth Brown, Amos Milburn)



                                   the suitcase keys

                                         are in 

                         the alternative medicine pill bottle



                                GREAT DISMAL SWAMP



                                  Henry ‘Box’ Brown

                               mailed himself to freedom

   in a big box labelled ‘Dry Goods’ - from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849



                           on the NORTHEAST REGIONAL 94

               from Richmond Virginia to Washington District Columbia

                    (Elizabeth Cotten, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye)



                   innumerable     Stars & Stripes    innumerable



                           Famous American Female Poet :

   ‘What you might need to know is that you might not make it

    But if you do, you might have needed an astrolabe

    or a two-bit smile or smirk, this is a style

    that could get you a cup of coffee’



                            AMERICAN coffee ??

                                                  old worms in the woodwork

                                                  old hooks on the hat rack

                                                  old bottomless cups depleted



                              TIPPING drives me crazy -

                                   quoted price

                                +Value Added Tax

                                       +15%

                              bring a pocket calculator



            As Portentous As The Opening Chords Of A Big Bob Dylan Ballad

                           the prescience of the dead

 

         Yours truly, Your paranormal host,

                                                             Adelaide



            hooray    at last       here’s the panorama       coming up now



                  discover all the charms of ELEGANT and CONTEMPORARY 

                                         melbourne 



                     cross the west gate bridge for AMAZING city views 

                      observe the yarra river's BUSTLING ACTIVITY

                        see queen victoria market, fitzroy gardens 

            and albert park, home to the australian formula one grand prix. 

                       visit the HISTORIC shrine of remembrance

                      stroll along southbank's waterfront precinct 



                    this city has it ALL   -   discover it for yourself



                           pour boire, merci, thank you, tip



                                        taxi to lax



                         KOONS    RUSCHA       CHEECH the CHICANO

                          JaMaiCan LeMoNaDe   woo  you never know

                                       HeY HeY VLaMinCK !

             Maurice Vlaminck’s portrait in oilpaint of Guillaume Apollinaire



                            white women smiling into the air

                             Michael Jackson and his monkey



            NO POETRY MEETING TODAY  -   EVERYONE IS WORKING 



                    greasy screen at the mex internet café grill

                                     too dangerous

                                     to walk south

                               down the SAN DIEGO freeway



                    Almost Completely Finished With Pop Art Finally

                                  call the paramedics

The quote from the ‘Famous American Female Poet’
is from Above The Leaders by Alice Notley (Veer Books, 2008)

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Another year has begun and it's definitely time to begin it, so I've been sorting through some box files and folders and throwing out old clippings, photocopies, maps, pictures, postcards. Allow me a little personal indulgence - here, from the piles of files is a tiny sample from hundreds of bits and pieces. Remember, if you click on the images you can enlarge them. I'll start with a set of the card game 'Happy Families' I made, with my mother Jean, when I was seven years old. You can view the entire pack here. Clunkily cut cardboard, dribbly watercolour - I wasn't anywhere close to being even a 'budding' artist but there were hours of fun up ahead playing cards.


Little images or notes found or clipped or kept, like one of my father's military notebooks, or a scrap of paper, a ticket, a jigsaw piece, a label popped into a pocket, placed in a notebook and later saved in a box file :












                    click any of the images (except Her Grumpy Majesty) to enlarge them

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Now now now

The Now now festival is on again this weekend.
For further information and tickets to events click here

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                                                   Cover illustration by Julia Wolfson.

Ekleksographia is an independent international poetry magazine edited, produced and published by Jesse Glass, Daniel Sendecki and a revolving panel of editors. The publication revolves completely around their efforts and therefore maintains a somewhat irregular publication schedule, averaging about 2 issues a year. Ekleksographia employs a 'revolving editor' system—the magazine retains a panel of editors, each of which edits one issue every so often.

Ekleksographia is published as an Ahadada Books cooperative publication. Editors and contributors are asked actively to contribute both their talents and their time to the publication.

Ekleksographia is an exercise in asymmetrical publishing, and is a shoe (or even two!) thrown at the spotlit shrug and yawn.

This issue was curated by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. Jane's third book of poems, EXHIBIT C, has been published by Ahadada (autumn, 2008). Her other poetry books are Skin Museum (2006) and Aquiline (2007).

Contributors to Volume 1:
Frances Presley | Cyril Wong | Pam Brown | Michael Rothenberg
Cynthia Hogue | Joel Chace | Elisabeth Frost
Takako Arai (trans. Jeffrey Angles) | Alan Botsford | Harriet Tarlo
Samuel Day Wharton | Michael Crake
Yoko Danno | Kyong Mi Park (trans. Lianna Kushi) | Paul Hoover
Philip Rowland | William Allegrezza | Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

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I am reading Loiterature, happily not an obsessively-linear book, by the only Australian member of OuLiPo, Ross Chambers, who is currently the Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and is a Visiting Professor at Louisiana State University.


The cover image of ‘Loiterature’ is a detail from a photograph by Montague Glover

                         Montague Glover’s photograph

Loiterature's Chapter I   Divided Attentions (On Being Dilatory) begins:

I’ve been giving up caffeine for years now, but a caffé latte steams at my elbow. Midsummer:

    Wet heat drifts through the afternoon
    like a campus dog, a fraternity ghost
    waiting to stay home from football games
    The arches are empty clear to the sky

These verses might have been written (or composed, or generated) only a few yards from where I sit, at the intersection of N. University and S. State in Ann Arbor, the suture point (in my personal myth of the city) where the campus meets the town. No campus dogs in evidence (expensive animals on leashes don’t qualify). Times change. When Frank O’Hara came to Ann Arbor in 1950 he was amused by the Midwestern candor of the cafeteria signs that read, bluntly, FOOD; today they’re more likely to read cappuccino, and it’s hard to find a cafeteria:

              (la forme d’une ville
  Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel).

Sitting lazily at this much frequented intersection, I think about intersections and I think about belatedness, my regret for an Ann Arbor I never knew (and wouldn’t have liked), the stab of Baudelaire’s midline exclamation point at “hélas!”, the image of abstention - better still, of anticipated abstention - in “waiting to stay home from football games.” Being belated, one foot in 1950, the other in the 1990s, is (like abstaining and anticipating) a form of divided attention, the “distracted” attention Benjamin thought characteristic of modernity (was it Benjamin? I must remember to look it up). One foot in campus, one in town; one in 1950, one in 1994.....

Loiterature's back cover notes give a pretty good summary of the contents :
The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance.

By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear—values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand.If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature’s digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.

Read Laurence Porter’s review and a ‘preview’ of the book here

Books by Ross Chambers include The Writing of Melancholy, Facing It : AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author, and Room for Maneuver.

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no velvet on the word

I’ve been reading ‘Dementia Blog’ by the Hawai’i based poet, academic and editor of Tinfish Press, Susan M. Schultz. We published an extract from the blog in issue 35 of Jacket magazine. The complete ‘Dementia Blog’ was recently published by Singing Horse Press.

*

Susan writes -
Dementia Blog was written over the course of six months during the worst of my mother’s dementia. In August 2006 she was still in her home; by January 2007 she was settled into an Alzheimer’s home. The blog, like all blogs, moves backwards from the present into the past. Because it moves back, the reader has no sense of cause and effect and often does not recognize what has happened until reading further back. This form struck me as appropriate to a meditation on memory and self-loss.

*

Coincidentally, and perhaps with some unintentional sense of precognition, six years ago in 2002-03, Susan and I collaborated by email on a poem called Amnesiac Recoveries, written for the Department Of Dislocated Memory for the web project International Corporation of Lost Structures. The poem engaged with daily life in Sydney and in Kane`ohe in the face of the then imminent invasion of Iraq by the USA, UK and Australia. It was also concerned, more loosely, with the role of social memory in those countries.



As Susan says, her blog entries about her mother’s dementia were made over six months in 2006-07. It is profoundly moving to read this book but she also sustains a unique thoughtfulness, a complex poetic perspective and a connection with the world-at-large via her children and her own vigilant awareness of the parallel gradual disintegration of the United States government and its involvement at war in Iraq.

Susan relates how her children, Sangha and Radhika, experience the displacement and uncertain memory of the adopted child -

I show Sangha photos of his aunts in Cambodia. He says he remembers the smaller woman on the left in the pink shirt. The significance of photographs in adoption narratives.Their sister was your birth mother, I tell him. She died. Those who remain to be photographed do not smile. Their faces are tired, foreheads creased. Speedboat on a river in Takeo province. Field beside the water. The sisters appear again. “You could not remember her,” I say; “you were a tiny baby.” Then let go. If he says he remembers, he does.


*

Susan’s poetry has always connected the culture of personal life and its context, the political world. Her concern with memory is a significant thread through earlier books. In 1999 she published a series of single cards in various colours that were extracts from a work called ‘Memoir’ which developed, the year after that, into the chapbook ‘memory cards (the happiness project)’, and then the following year, that chapbook combined with another sequence to become the book ‘Memory Cards & Adoption Papers’ (published by Potes & Poets Press in 2001). The first section of ‘Memory Cards & Adoption Papers’ is called ‘Mother’ and the book is dedicated to Susan’s father. ‘Adoption Papers’ is dedicated to Susan’s adopted Cambodian son, Sangha. There are often intensely personal paragraphs throughout 'Dementia Blog' that are reminiscent of her writing in general and there is a consistent self-conscious analysis of writing’s context-

Poetry or poetic prose. Sequence or unraveling of. Prose or text message. Forward, then back. The writing dances, a child beside the canal, its green water not yet inviting. Failure to thrive. Two of them died right after they came. She did not. Failure to fail to thrive is life. Life is a happy place.

#

To write about others without making of them stick, stock figures. The one who learns language, the other whose teeth sprout, the third who shepherds them to school. She who writes about them loves them, but in the writing loses feeling. Words are not to be touched, not here on the screen. There is no velvet on the word. It is dark and hard and composes itself letter by letter, the kind chiseled into lead or pixellated for your reading comfort. He laughed that I did not know “Pilates” as exercise, rather than Roman King.









*

The layered writing in 'Dementia Blog' slips between dualities like the sometimes childlike behaviour of a demented person and the experiences of an actual childhood. There are also diegetic moments that mimic the states of confusion that can accompany both memory loss and the writing process -

I don’t know how this section relates to the one that precedes and follows it


*

When she is clearly not going to be able to live there any more there is the problem of putting Susan's mother’s house up for sale . These entries are tacit and, for me, utterly poignant. Here are some extracts from that section -

The house. Read it as her autobiography: dark wood, crumbling wallpaper (dark again, checked squares of brown and white), the paintings (representational, a mill in the woods, some storm-tossed ships), the 1970s style modified shag carpet, parquet floors (dark), fireplaces (three of them), front and back yards needing to be mown. How did she come to this?

#

The “home”. Read it as biography. A porch outside the Country Lane, picnic bench, umbrella, a brightness next to the window. Outside inside. Remember your corridor by the décor. The artifice must present nature, or a loving intervention in it. What you remember shall comfort you and what you do not is simply not here. This sanctuary is not only for the birds.

#

…This is about the problem of what is private and what is public, what ought to be shared and what must be. The process is not fiction, but enactment. Easement. When the property is sold, it can no longer be taken as the story of her life, or of mine. Interpolated, perhaps. But the quotes have gone missing.


Concluding with -

There is an offer on her house, for it “as is.” The closed house is yours. The open one will not be.


*

At times there is a kind of intense exhaustion that leads to an informed, acerbic cynicism-

Better the sins of empathy than its lack. Key words in this text include: “privilege”, “gender”, “race”, “institutions”, “narcissism”. “Empathy” must not elide any of these terms, for fear of their erasure. I must feel empathy for my own kind, lest I bend categories, ignore my privilege. If emotion is itself a privilege (what hungry person has time for it?), then interrogate it. Critique, intellect, idiolect, locution, execution. The seven Chinese brothers were a perfect Adam Smith machine. One did the seeing, another the hearing, a third the crying, and the others were strong. When in doubt, drown your enemies in tears.

*

Towards the end of the book (which, because the posts read backwards in time, is actually towards the beginning of the blog, and is also why I placed the back cover image at the top of this blog) Susan writes a kind of ‘definitive’ entry -

None of this is new. Dementia is bricolage, is collage, is mixed-up syntax. It is nothing new. To describe it is to say nothing new. it cannot be analyzed, because its origins, and its ends, cannot be located. The maps are hanging from the laundry lines in a humid country; the ink that is their roads has dripped off the dark paper that had enclosed them.

*

One of the reasons I find this book so powerful is that over the past year I’ve spent every Thursday (except on the occasions I've been out of town) working with a group of elderly demented men and women at Mondeval Day Centre in Leura in the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. At first, I was apprehensive about participating, thinking that my inexperience would be a disadvantage and, also, that I could possibly become depressed or saddened by working with people with dementia. Gradually though I became familiar with everyone and I adjusted to their personalities and abilities and to the situation as a whole and I am continuing with the task. Of course, I have experienced reflective moments when I’ve wondered about the usefulness of communicating with people who, for a variety of reasons and to varying degrees, have lost their memories. When phrases, stories and responses are so often repeated from week to week and, sometimes, from hour to hour; when someone has ‘the wanders’ and continually gets up and walks off somewhere and needs to be followed, walked with and brought back to the group, the things we do can seem so habitual (although, interestingly, never perfunctory) and perhaps futile. The outcome is, after all, predictable.

What has struck me is that loss of memory, and its associated deteriorations, is a far more sorrowful experience for a relative or a friend than it is for people who work with the ‘lost one’ and quite often or, mostly, not such a crisis for the ‘lost one’ herself.

Aspects of the emotional upset or devastation that can happen to relatives coping with the onset of dementia in family members were portrayed in the recent films Away from Her and The Savages. The day centre I work in provides respite for the carers of elderly people with dementia. No one lives on the premises - the centre’s vehicle picks up the clients each morning and returns them to their homes each afternoon, so the situation is different from Susan Schultz’s mother’s and from the agendas in the films I’ve mentioned.

Early in 2008 someone I had known as a friend for over 25 years committed suicide after having been diagnosed with dementia at the relatively young age of 60. He had lived with the disease for a brief period of his once engaged and very active life as an academic, writer and political activist. He courageously decided that it was preferable to opt out before the condition worsened.

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For further information, the Singing Horse Press link is here
You can read US poet and editor Eileen Tabios’ response to ‘Dementia Blog’ here

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                           soft sunset sunday night

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the ghosts of xmasses past

This time of year usually carries some nostalgia and too much sentimentality, so let's indulge in both. 1977 was a truly great year for anti-xmas festivity. The Tin Sheds on City Road was a-hopping and a-bopping. The Lean Sisters, from the precipice of simpleton theatre, performed a Workers-Control themed santamime, the Crunk Boonk Xmashow, where Santa was portrayed as a rapacious profiteer who had already sold the rights to easter to god's agent, Gabriel, before the previous year had ended, and his 'helpers' suffered mightily under his cruelly exploitative conditions of employment. After the fabulously didactic performance the audience danced on into the sweaty summer night to the music of the rockin' all-girl band, Sheila. And on Xmas Eve, a horde of happy counter-culturalists danced into another hot and steamy night to the music of Alias, Wasted Daze and Mental as Anything at the 'Christmas-is-False-Consciousness-Eve-Party'.
I don't mind saying it - those were the daze.


                Silkscreen Poster by Jenny Coopes, Netta Perrett and Pam Brown



              If you can't read it, Che the shepherd is saying "And you think capitalism has
               problems". Silkscreen Poster by Chips Mackinolty, Earthworks Poster Collective


Enjoy yourselves this year, pals of 'the deletions', and here's to a happy 2009

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