The following excerpts are from three stories in The Victoria Principle (May 2025), the first work of fiction by the award-winning poet Michael Farrell.

From ‘The “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Egg’

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I had an idea that would enable me to conceptualise my long-held desire to adapt Nirvana’s song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as an artwork. The idea was that I would boil an egg for as long as the song, which was, officially, five minutes and one second, or 5:01. This was longer than I had thought: the track had always seemed to me like a thrash punk anthem – guitar, drums, chorus, and out. I supposed that it was just so good that it seemed short, unlike some that led me to check Spotify, thinking, is this the same song still going, when it hadn’t even been three minutes, and which were sometimes the spur to do a bit of spontaneous vacuuming. I didn’t have any specific song, or artist, in mind, or I would have said. Anyway, I found out on further research that the single edit of ‘Smells Like…’ was slightly shorter at 4:38. France, Belgium, Spain, New Zealand, take a bow: it was number one in those countries. There was more that I found out, but the point is, I think 5:01’s a bit long for a soft-boiled egg, and besides, the three-minute egg, as a kind of ideal, was aligned with the three-minute pop song, as a single, not as an album track. Thinking about how to present this as a work in an upcoming show, I thought of exhibiting the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ egg in an eggcup, or on a plate, with the song title written on it. Alternatively, or additionally, if the exhibiting gallery had a kitchen, I could even cook it, as a performance, which meant I could eat it, as a continuation of, and logical conclusion to, the performance. Then the title would re-resonate, associated with egg, and have a visual pathos in the remaining eggshell that was not in the song’s bravura video. The eggshell could be put in a jar as an archival remnant, or souvenir.

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From ‘Real Estate Agents Wish Government Would Do More’

It was a small agency, with three agents, David (named, by the author of this story, for talk poet David Antin), John (for musician poet John Cage), and Marjorie (for poetry critic Marjorie Perloff). The admin staff would not feature in the story. ‘I wish the government would do more for low-income earners, or LICE,’ said David. ‘You may as well call them LICs, as they don’t actually earn their income, for the most part,’ said John. ‘Yeah. The homeless work harder begging,’ said Marjorie, savagely. ‘That reminds me, I had a dream about the agency last night.’ The Palestine activist tactic of stickering Starbucks had been effective in terms of forcing some of their more nervous customers, such as Marjorie, to involuntarily boycott it, despite her having no notion of what Starbucks’ links with Israel were. Marjorie liked what she thought of as the fun coffee culture of Starbucks, it buoyed her mood for capitalist onslaught, whereas the single-origin cafés closer to the agency were a relative downer. She knew Starbucks was a bit ridiculous in its serving of drink trophies: of syrup-flavoured coffee topped with cream, like every customer was an Olympian, and not a lowly bureaucrat or similar. Marjorie, in short, was a great believer in enjoying life. ‘A lovely seven-bedroom walk-up with a toilet on each floor,’ said David, who liked to practice his descriptions before going on the job. He was not one who could stay silent for long, although both he and John were waiting for Marjorie to come out of her reverie (some kind of eyes-wide sugar coma?) and tell them about the dream, which was going to be the thing, probably, that marked the morning as different from yesterday’s and tomorrow’s mornings.

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From ‘Excuses Not To Arm-Wrestle’

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These were, Bill further supposed, momentarily, the best excuses for not arm-wrestling. ‘No, I’d love to, but I actually broke my arm in a wrestling match last time I tried it.’ ‘Yes, well, I’d like to, but the last time I arm-wrestled I broke my friend’s arm.’ He was the type who was never satisfied with absolute claims, however, and only used them as a stepping stone to new thoughts. He then remembered something from a book he’d read on the survival of Greek myth in modern Greece, where it was said that feats of strength brought out the dead. A credible profession of such a belief would be an awesome excuse. As he took the stairs to his office, he was a bit spooked by his elderly colleagues, and realised that he was probably a bit weak due to lack of food. He sat at his desk and reached for a protein bar and a cup of water. He looked up his query, ‘excuses not to arm-wrestle’, online, and the first snippets he saw were ‘excuses not to arm teachers’ and ‘not to join the army’. The first pertinent excuses to come up were ‘I’m old’ – ‘I’m already dead’ would presumably be another, in the superstitious Greek scenario – and ‘I have jetlag’. These excuses, it occurred to Bill, were of another category than the ones he had considered so far, following the exchange in the change room. A medical website said that other kinds of physical damage were a risk – damage to tissue, or tendons, for example – and further mentioned ‘extremity fracture’. But the student’s fracture had not been an extremity fracture, it was clearly a major break to his arm. These new excuses related to the risk of losing the bout less closely, yet they could of course be connected to physical damage: I’m old, or I’m jetlagged, therefore I’m more susceptible to hurting myself. We could add, I haven’t been sleeping well; I have a B12, or iron, deficiency. We could go on to add, I’m expecting an important call from my mother. To have to stop wrestling when your phone rang would obviously spoil any match: and the implication was that it was better not to start anything that would not end in triumph for one or another party. There was the further implication, that if you were expecting an important call from your mother, you would not have your mind on the job at hand: which was forcing another’s hand, and arm, sideways onto a table or bench, and forcing them to acknowledge your superior strength. Having a plane to catch was another catch-all excuse to get out of things, but did rely on the people that you were excusing yourself to thinking that you were going somewhere, and that then you did at least go somewhere. You couldn’t just hang around and watch the other matches, like you could with the other excuses. Some personalities were of course strong enough to do exactly what they wanted to do, and be respected the more for it, rather than being thought weak, or some other more offensive variant on weakness. Some others, of unique, or comic, personality, could get away with a completely absurd excuse, like I have to do my moon rubbings, or whatever, and would have backup plausible absurdities, if others asked them, don’t you have to go and do your moon rubbings now?

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Ahead of the launch of his second novel Bon and Lesley, an event which includes live music by Newcastle band Troth, Shaun Prescott presents a playlist of the music he loved while writing the book.

With a few exceptions, none of these songs inspired the writing of Bon and Lesley. Some of them create moods that seemed like appropriate places to start from, while others are just songs that filled my life during the years I spent writing the novel. I don’t know what any of these songs are about, if they’re about anything. If they have words, I never notice the substance of them.

Most of the time I can’t listen to music while writing, because that would almost be like trying to write a song while listening to one. But I sometimes want to capture, through writing, the sensations that music evokes for me. I mustn’t be alone in this. Music is the most powerful art form, and the best music seems accidental, like it is not just humans making it. My apologies to musicians, but it seems to me that the creators of music have almost no control at all. They do not construct the power in their works, they are noticed by strange living resonances that choose them as vessels. I used to write about music but gave it up because explaining its power lost its appeal. I just believe it’s magic now.

Akira Rabelais’ ‘The Little Glass III’ would have appeared at the top of this playlist, but it isn’t on Spotify. You can listen to it here. I highly recommend you do.

Troth – Attar of Roses

This is from Troth’s 2021 cassette Small Movements in Radiance, which I listened to while editing the final drafts of Bon and Lesley. Troth is the Newcastle duo of Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman. All of their releases are very different, but a melancholy calm pervades all of them, carried by Besseny’s ghostly voice. I’ve long admired Cooper’s label, Altered States Tapes, which despite keeping a vigilantly low profile has amassed a huge trove of strange, extremely unmarketable, and transporting music. If you want to dive in, Th Blisks’ How So? Is a brilliant place to start. Troth create the kind of discomforted dream worlds I sometimes aspire to evoke in fiction, and it is an honour to have them play at my book launch.

Disembowelment – Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory

I discovered this singular band only five years ago, though their sole album was released in 1993, which is hard to believe, because its marriage of dreamy atmospherics with cavernous death metal is way ahead of its time. During the early stages of writing Bon and Lesley I started listening to metal, because my character Steven seemed to force me to. I stopped listening to metal when I was around 19, and I guess it makes sense that I, a 38-year-old man, would return to it now, but only in intense weekly spurts when my mood calls for it. This particular track feels genuinely unsettling to me. Another metal song I listened to during the period I spent writing Bon and Lesley is Bell Witch’s ‘Mirror Reaper’, but it runs for an hour and a half, so it’s not a great playlist candidate.

Cross Record – PYSOL My Castle

When I finished Bon and Lesley, but before it had been edited, I listened to this song through laptop speakers and its embrace was so forceful it brought me to tears. I was sitting on my balcony late at night, and two possums – a mother and her baby – were sniffing at our cat’s dry food.

Blue Divers – Kitchen Light On

This is just a really beautiful instrumental that, due to the suggestion of its title, reminds me of the sensation of waking in the early hours to find a single light left on in the house. A comforting reminder of waking life in the dead of night. The whole album is gorgeous.

DJ Loser – beat09422

I wanted to include the song ‘beat09422’ from DJ Loser’s cassette In Order to Protect, but it’s not on Spotify, so this will do. I ordered the aforementioned cassette after hearing DJ Loser in a Kode9 mix, and I listened to it a lot while thinking about my writing. ‘Beat09422’, and this song too, feels like a radio violently admonishing me. The way everything is amplified to its breaking point results in an unlikely, tranquillising ambience.

Babyfather – Meditation

Dean Blunt is an artist from London whose work covers a lot of territory. He’s never released anything I haven’t loved, whether under his own name, as Babyfather, or as Hype Williams (a duo with Inga Copeland, not as in the director). I listened to this Babyfather album a lot while thinking about how to write Bon and Lesley. It’s a record full of incredible, atmospheric pop songs, all couched in what many would consider ‘unlistenable’ noisy collage. There’s a real sense of crisis spread across this Babyfather record, but it’s also playful and weird, and funny at times. It’s probably an old-fashioned way of thinking about cultural production in the 2020s, but I feel like this record will become a classic.

OneFour – Spot the Difference

I listened to OneFour a lot after reading about their infamy in this article. I have always loved the crisp, brazenly digital production in grime, and drill seems to be a direct evolution of that subgenre. Drill reminds me of the good Dizzee Rascal albums, early Wiley, and Trim, but there’s a somehow even greater mood of urgency, which circa-2005 I would have thought impossible.

After discovering OneFour I became briefly obsessed with this country’s underground rap, following seemingly endless YouTube rabbit holes. Sometimes I would plan to write late into the night, but instead would fall into the trap, admiring the incredible DIY spirit of these artists (OneFour is massive, but there are hordes of artists with far smaller profiles uploading material, and if you follow the rabbit hole long enough, you end up finding the portrait-orientation smartphone recordings with sub-500 views, recorded in messy bedrooms). The only relevance this has to my writing is that my novel might have been finished earlier if I hadn’t discovered OneFour. You can’t write while listening to them or their fellow travellers. You can’t even really do the dishes, or walk, because it throttles you. Despite all this, it’s one algorithmic path I’m glad to have followed.

Lustre – Part one (Dream of Stars)

Another metal song, though it isn’t heavy. It reminds me of the atmospheric, symphonic style of black metal that emerged from the ‘90s, the stuff about Tolkien, made by larping young men who probably had Gary Gygax’s portrait framed on their bedroom walls. With a handful of exceptions, metal is all texture to me, and this song really is just all texture, and it’s lovely in its own melodramatic way, especially on misty afternoons. I’m not really into fantasy novels, but I love fantasy videogames. I don’t care for the story details, the politics, the lore, the lords, kings, queens, battles, lizard people etc, I just want the visions of towering castles with snow-capped mountains in the background. That’s basically what Lustre evokes.

Kali Malone – Glory Canon III
Harold Budd – Abandoned Cities

In 2019 I went away for a weekend to a small house near Branxton, and listened to these songs on repeat for two days and nights while writing, in pretty much its entirety, the third section of Bon and Lesley. The other two parts were much harder.

Sometimes I can write to music, but the speakers need to be far enough away, ideally in another room. The sound needs to fill a space softly, and it cannot command my full attention. For that reason, headphones won’t do. It’s a hard effect to achieve at home if you have kids who might not appreciate bleak ambient music infecting their dreams.

Roy Panton and Millie Small – Oh, Shirley

When I bought this collection of Roy Panton and Yvonne Harrison songs, my then three-year-old daughter immediately latched onto it. I adore this song and have heard it roughly 500 times since 2018. That’s a guess, but it’s not an exaggeration. I am lucky that my daughter seems to share my inability to function without music, and that she loves most of the music I play her. It’s a level of companionship that I have always sought in adult friends. Another family favourite, Decadance’s ‘On and On’, isn’t on Spotify except in the form of some inferior remixes.

Bell Witch – Mirror Reaper

To avoid accusations of cowardly playlist making I have added Bell Witch’s ‘Mirror Reaper’ after all, but at the end, even though it clashes badly with Roy Panton, so that you can stop listening if you want. It’s a truly amazing creation.

Listen to the full playlist:

The award-winning Melbourne poet Michael Farrell reflects on Googlecholia (October 2022), his latest poetry book following Family Trees (2020).

Googlecholia is my sixth book with Giramondo, but its publication is not something I take for granted. The book’s title obviously alludes to melancholia, which, in the context of long-term depression, might be seen as a relatively manageable period. Elsewhere I have referred to the affects associated with using the internet as a writing resource (in a conventional research sense, rather than, what used to be called, the ‘google sculpting’ of Flarf, and the wholesale appropriations of what was conceptual poetry). 

The titling has come to seem less neutral since first writing the manuscript, as I began to suffer from screen sickness, due to severe depression and anxiety, exacerbated by Melbourne’s lockdowns. (Writers – be careful.) During this time (about eight months) I found it difficult to look at my phone – let alone make calls – use my laptop, or watch TV. I could not read or write. In my morbidity, I sent the manuscript to Giramondo more as a safekeeping gesture, than as an expression of readiness. Eventually I emerged from the worst of it, and was able to work further on the book. 

The forms of the poems themselves vary. While some appear relatively standard, in terms of type and stanza, the newest poems (‘In The Year Of Our Modernism 1922’, ‘The Big Blue Play’, ‘Where Her Refers To Lydia Davis Or Proust’) attempt to unsettle these forms; to resist verisimilitude. While experimentalism, as a framework, can defuse the impact of specific experiments, for myself, in this case, it keeps the writing alive to poetry’s possibilities: not just in terms of form (in its various aspects), but in terms of what can be said, and the range of voice deployed: the positions and positioning of voice. 

More recently I have been writing new poems, so, hopefully, the books will continue. 

— Michael Farrell

French Open

You can’t see said Chuck Baudelaire your own shoelace
Flowering flowers of New York nearly demonstrating an 
Evil can derive from doing another person’s job for them 
Flowers of evil Yves Montand Alain Delon in the stands 
Angering McEnroe with their intrusive invasive glamour

Cameras of evil with hovering operators inviting violence 
American epidermis sensitive all over in its unlikely eros 
Vulnerability of tennis player juxtaposed with his double 
Cardboard relatively innocent next to plastic grows quieter 
Photographers breathe more uneasily as game progresses

Hostility is my drug my defining structure quips Baudelaire 
When the ref chants baby over and over they’re not quoting 
Flower of evil extraordinaire petunia of evil Justin Bieber 
Bieber in 1984 is no more than a glyph in his father’s thigh 
Gladioli of evil Sofia Loren eating homemade marinara

Forking it up in the sun her glinting shells favouring Lendl 
Climate change feeling it breathing hurricaning on his neck 
Just a breeze it’s not the twenty-first century Johnny not yet 
He says bet you can’t see where the ball will be when game 
Ends with a drop shot