Prose Archives | Page 2 of 5 | Giramondo Publishing

Your basket is empty.

Prose

The cat surged down with no preamble, startling Mooks, whose set-up tumbled to the ground. Robertson leant down and snatched up the thing before it could go for the filters, and Mitch watched as a single ginger cat hair descended with cosmic slowness into the open tub of hummus.

Today my Auntie Lien and I are appearing on the television show of the famed psychologist Dr Phil. The Dr Phil episode we are appearing in is titled ‘What are you really mad at?’ and Dr Phil is asking Auntie Lien and me about how we deal with anger.

Much of the language of cyberspace...seems strung out on an axis between opposing desires, for both embodiment and disembodiment. Margaret Wertheim uses that most physically explicit phrase, 'surfing the net', as an example. We have 'visiting a site' and 'hit'. The body is 'meat', or 'wetware'. Having your persona destroyed in some interactive games is called being 'gutted'.

Jola and Mirek are generous, hospitable, and the only remotely bourgeois people we will meet for the entire two months we are in Poland. After a forty-hour journey from Australia, a sumptuous meal and wine, the talk flowed, and I learnt my most enduring lessons about Poland. The Jewish question is vexed. The Polish Pope Jan Paweł II is sacrosanct; by extension the current German Pope Benedict XVI is highly regarded. And, as Mirek said, I have gay friends, but I do not want it rubbed in my face.

On a soft, sunlit morning in March 1959, just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I stood at the rails of an Italian liner, the Fairsky, and after a five-weeks sea-voyage that had taken me via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Aden and Port Said, saw the Bay of Naples open before me, and utterly familiar in the distance the dark slopes and scooped-out cone of Vesuvius – all just as I had always imaged it, like the breaking of a dream.

Several years ago, a group of Canberra sex-workers applied to the Australia Council and were granted $6,280 to write a film script. The organization WISE (Workers In Sex Employment) was involved. A local writer ran some workshops, characters were developed, a plot outlined. But the project caused a stir, and resulted in a good deal of bad publicity, most of which used the argument that funding prostitutes to write a film script was a waste of public money.

opening the staffroom fridge and finding the seven-month-old yoghurt still there. Oh yoghurt, old friend, I wonder what’s going on inside that plastic opaque lid.

When I met Pramoedya, whose work I had admired for fifteen years, in Jakarta in March 1998, two months before the overthrow of Soeharto’s thirty-two-year rule, he was as I had imagined: unassuming, nervous, fearless.

My whole life, I had woken in earnest and with an uncanny conceit about my place in the world. In the world, if people were distinguished by their night and morning sensibilities, I would be a ‘morning person’, by which I mean that I rarely hesitated about the importance of getting out of bed.

It takes him a while to find the words, but this delay doesn’t seem to suggest any discomfort with the message, but rather an uncertainty about the use of language itself. Waiting for him to speak, Nat is intrigued, albeit slightly indifferent, as if what he was about to say – or propose, since it’s obviously a proposal – didn’t concern her.

Today I watered the front garden by hand. Maybe not the most efficient method but efficiency has its limits. I decided to pick three long stalks of feverfew daisies growing near the nectarine tree as they had started to lie down. They have an intense and complex scent half-mint half-chrysanthemum. It is an insect-repelling herb.

Boxing is indivisible from the marketing machinery which surrounds it, just as the art world, the literary world or the world of pop music contain within themselves both the nobility of the enterprise and the crassness of its exploitation. Indeed their nobility is framed within and defined by the structure of reward and recognition bestowed by their respective milieus.

On that day in Canberra we had been together thirteen months. Steady, happy months. We owned Ikea furniture together, had combined our books, were joint owners of a Turkish kilim, a record player, and a vibrator. Maybe we would start gardening. Maybe we would get a dog. Maybe we would have a baby, a girl, with curly, black hair.

I’m chasing after something faster than me, that refuses to be pinned down. I find myself getting lost in its contradictions and capaciousness. How to write about something that is made for no one, but imagines, or hopes for, an audience anyway?

There was a dim lantern filled with dead insects near the amphitheatre, and the moon was hidden by the top of an old apartment beside the station. Moths made silent sweeps at the flickering lantern, and Liam placed his open guitar case underneath, so that anyone wandering down the winding path could pay their respects to his work.

The roastery was a cover for the accommodation rort our landlord was pulling. The whole warehouse was divided with heavy curtains into small rectangular spaces where we all slept in single beds. Every space looked the same and it was hard to tell them apart. Our landlord called them pods but it was more like a battery.

←
1
2
3
4
5
→