Gain Management System

1. The Art of Seduction

I am standing with my ear pressed to my security screen door. On the other side of the door, about thirty people are standing in the driveway that I share with my neighbours, who are at this moment selling their house by auction. I like my neighbours enough – enough to tell them certain things I’m doing, but not enough to tell them that I’m listening to the sale of their house. Later, I also don’t tell them that I’m writing this. I prefer this sense of social transgression to empirical candour, prefer the feeling I am violating something private, even if privacy isn’t really the word for what’s there. Won’t the price be loudly sung at the climax of the crying? Won’t the price fetched fast become public information, perhaps in tomorrow’s breathless headline: ‘Brunswick bidding war erupts, professional couple emerges victorious’? Won’t my neighbours tell me?

Part of the reason I don’t seek permission to write this, later on, is because the auction turns out to be a dud. The auctioneer, a friend of a friend of my neighbours, seems slick enough on the outside but he can’t really manage his words when the moment comes: opens his mouth and finds no silver tongue. When I tune in, he’s ad-libbing (dying, really) on the reason for sale. ‘The family has outgrown the property,’ he insists, ‘and that’s the only reason, the only reason they’re leaving.’ Uncertainty creeps in with the repetition of ‘only reason’; a silent question circles the driveway. What is wrong with the place?

All kinds of things, I could tell the prospective buyers, if only they’d grant my witchy foreboding an audience. I could strike a pose in my door frame and deliver a terrifying anti-masque of hard reality, though reality in this setting is that category of discourse barely heard, and rather swiftly banished by the masque, proper, of fantastic bidding. Nonetheless, I am a coward, and so leave the screen door closed, and with it my thoughts of the non-regulation, and seemingly problematic, renovations carried out by the previous sellers (I often think of that classic-meets-modern bathroom slowly, inexorably leaking through the structure upstairs); the non-existent insulation (for the hottest summers or at least, the most phenomenal power bills you ever sweated); the contaminated soil from when the knitting mill once ran(-off) here (nothing ever grows in our garden); the A-grade hoarder at the front of our block’s troika. And, if I’m honest, me, us, our house – with all our stupid abundances and deficits, all of which land as they live in time, with neither rhyme nor reason. Through the very thin, shared bedroom wall, our neighbours would have recently endured nights of vicious debate about whether we, the adults of the house, possess a ‘communication style’.

2. If I Could Turn Back Time

Technically, or is it theoretically, I am a teacher of poetry. Sometimes I have a go at teaching my students what poetry is on a technical, or is it a theoretical, basis. We might begin our semester by looking at something like apostrophe – that tendency in poetry to address absent, ideal, or otherwise irregular auditors (‘Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy’, writes Ben Jonson in ‘On My First Sonne’). We will keep talking about, or rather around, absence over the next twelve weeks, and at some point I will talk about Freud’s grandson, and his fort–da game with the wooden spool: the infant throws the spool away from him and then tugs it back towards him, thereby attempting to mimic his mother’s departures and returns, but in a way that he can control. Crucially, he puts the game into words – ‘fort’ is German for ‘away’ and ‘da’ is ‘here’. I say to the students, that’s poetry, staging a game in language so we may feel we have some mastery over absence (farewell, thou child), that is, loss – though no thing, not even a lyric by Sappho, can truly forestall loss or survive spoiling by time. Hence that crazy Elizabeth Bishop line: ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’. Poetry is thereby a loss management system, and the poets are those who are prepared to lose everything on language’s gaming floor (the page).

‘Absence persists,’ writes Roland Barthes, ‘I must endure it.’ Cher cannot turn back time (though she’s looking barely north of sixty), but her sublime lyric, which knows its way around time’s non-turn-backableness, plays a paradoxical game of duration, as if one could postpone the moment (like Dickinson: ‘Oh Sumptuous moment / Slower go / that I may gloat on thee—’). ‘If I could find a way,’ sings Cher. And Barthes, he also wonders if he finds his way: ‘Hence I will manipulate [absence]: transform the distortion of time into oscillation, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the stage of language.’

If my students have been listening during these classes, they could walk away with the idea that loss (and its attendant stagings and manipulations) is the paradigm of poetry. This would please me, for this was my major hope for the teaching. How irritating I find it, then, that my current project and its central allegation – that real estate language seems to me to be a poetry, and, worse, possibly Australia’s major poetry, and, furthermore, one to be understood as poetry for our collective benefit – evidently occupies a completely different and rather obviously opposed paradigm: gain. What could stand in more utter opposition to the art of losing than a gain management system? That is, the auction – whose etymology in the Latin auctionem (to increase) tells us the compressed hyperspeak for selling houses has something fundamental to do with projects of getting, gaining. I feel here a flagrant violation of my core sense of the object of poetry as ‘losing’. Why should I do this project (project into this project), then? Why should these things, things like the auction, be conceived of as poetic? Well, I think, these things are poetic because I notice, every time I look at them, the hands (or grubby mitts) of poetry, that’s why.

I become hopeful again for my theory when I read in the Oxford English Dictionary that the word ‘auction’ makes its first appearance in the English language in the work of a poet – William Warner’s 1595 translation of Plautus’s Menaechmi. But the source itself is rather obscure on the matter – auctionem appears multiple times in the parallel Latin text, but the Warner translation reads like this:

Men. Tra. Brother, will ye now go with me to Syracusis?

Men Cit. So soon as I can sell away such goods as I possess here in Epidamnum, I will go with you

‘As soon as I can sell away such goods as I possess’ is not the same as ‘auction my goods’. My wish for a little academic rigour, now and then, is, in this instance, dashed. Oh well, but maybe there’s something a bit poetic in this, too. The false attribution to a poet has provided the idea, if not the reality, that poetry enabled the migration of the word to English. It lends itself well, even with its spuriousness, to the idea that auctions have something to do with poetry.

Nevertheless: OED, what the hell?

Manfully, the OED offers me some harder empiricisms. Auction comes to English directly from Latin, and not, as words of this origin generally do, by way of French. Auction’s frequency is pegged to the general vibe, which is to say, economic energies of modernity, going from one occurrence per million words in written English during 1750 (eloquent Samuel Baker professionalised auctioneering in 1744; James Christie established his now-awed auction rooms in 1766) to eight occurrences per million words in written English by 2010. Is that much, is that a lot? Well, it is a gain, and not a loss. A veritable poetry of gain, pegged to the development of modern capitalist economy.

3. All Auction Speech Is Allegro

I’m standing behind my security screen door, my ear toward the neighbours’ auction. What is this river of words, this particular and strange experience of language, arranged and expressed by a form so fixed that, for this moment, I cannot avoid the temptation to call this an oral tradition, nor avoid the fantasy that the auctioneer, in his little suit, is oral tradition’s heir? Working during the 1980s and 1990s, the linguists Koenrad Kuiper and Douglas Haggo go to significant lengths to establish precisely this point: ‘A stock auctioneer is also heir to an oral tradition.’ In a way, I am standing here because I have an expectation that this will be a special river of words and, before the thing even starts, I’m transfixed in anticipation of an aesthetic experience (perhaps, like any good citizen of Naarm on a Saturday, I’m simply waiting for my fix of spoken word poetry). Most of all, I am on alert for that classical shift in this river’s course, the moment it turns from the description of the house for sale towards an opening search for the first bid, and then, the bidding proper. Kuiper and Haggo, in their study of the modern English language auction, or Proto English Auction Speech (PEAS), express this shift with the formula, Rule 1: auction -> description + opening bid search + bid calling + sale + epilogue. By Kuiper and Haggo’s account, there is an inviolability to Rule 1 that is particular to English. Dutch auctions, to cite one of their comparisons, proceed by descent. Yes, down! A high price is set by the auctioneer, which incrementally lowers until a first bidder accepts the selling price. There’s no bidding war.

One way that the PEAS might not be a poetic experience, I have to remind myself, is that those who have come have come to buy (at least, to all appearances). They would be, therefore, the empirical addressees of the prosody they hear, whereas, in lyric poetry, the addressee tends to be – as I mentioned above – an apostrophic entity: absent (Jonson’s dead son), or otherwise virtual and irregular. Then I listen closely to the auctioneer, as he continues to describe the residence, and suddenly remember ‘pinch yrself’, a poem by George Mouratidis:

birthdays w/out disappointment, family xmases drunk-argument free, twin cars that run on wellness & lattes respectively, doors that don’t slam, soundproof sad-proof bedrooms, self-cleaning kitchen & bathroom that smell like apples or cinnamon, your choice, & in-laws that think you’re the greatest living being since our don bradman – no money down!––&

Birthdays without disappointment, soundproof sad-proof bedrooms. Hmmmm. Not so different from ‘You’re gonna be very very very very happy, with where the growth takes you, I can assure you of that,’ or ‘I’ve not met anyone, who’s bought and sold in Brunswick, and not had a big smile on their face afterward,’ phrases that I hear delivered in the ‘description’ phase of my neighbour’s auction. Is this speech not itself apostrophic in its hyperbole, in this shooting for the virtual stars, that is, turning to the virtual ears of that ideal auditor (‘ideal’ in the sense that such an auditor does not actually exist – this is the fundamental condition for apostrophe’s addressibility)? Maybe. Or maybe something stranger is happening. If marketing’s ideal consumer doesn’t really exist, then its prosody addresses an absence. Yet, clearly, everyone at the auction exists, and one or two of those out in the driveway have big plans to make their empirical reality join with the ideal voiced by apostrophe. The bidders exist. And yet … they might exist a little more if they win the auction. The sellers, too, might exist a little more if the result brings a big smile on their face. The second of the auctioneer’s statements is really good because months later, my new neighbours tell me the husband-and-wife vendors were ‘sooooo pissed off’ by the auction result, and barely looked at each other, nor looked the new owners in the eye, during the finalisation of the sale.

I remain uncertain as to whether the audience is truly empirical until the auctioneer transitions to the opening bid search, the second phase of Rule 1. In the movement away from the perfect customer to actual flesh and blood, cynical-and-so-sick-of-searching, or else loving-to-be-here-tyre-kicking-in-the-inner-suburbs-on-a-Saturday, I feel in the presence of a Proteus. Perhaps he is not a very good Proteus, but I still perk up when I feel the change:

Happy to start at the bottom of the range
[silence]
I call the bid three times and that’s the end of bidding
[silence]
960 is the bid, seventy I seek [960 is the vendor bid, intended to act as stimulant to the true bidding]
Ten in the rise to get you in front
[silence]
Ten in the rise I seek

The auctioneer’s ordeal is that, because no one is bidding, he can’t turn the engine that’s supposed to drive his linguistic vehicle. Speed would be the key to it, and just one bid is enough to start the humming bidding journey (or is it war song?). And this, in turn, as the implicit logic of the form holds, would solicit further bids (or, at least, give the illusion that bidding might be happening). In my preparations for writing this, I was compelled to watch a bit of The Block. In the finale episode of the 2023 season, I encountered the power of the single bid in the capable mouth of the crier:

At 2 951 000.09 at the back end. North of there? Good buying here. 2 951 000.09 a [I’m?] bid now. 951 and 51 a figure and 2 951, 51 a bid back there and nine cents, a bit of a look on now, and nine the figure. A bid now? Two? Three? 51 a bid now, there quickly at 2 951 000 bid in there and nine. At 2 951 000 a bid now. First time called at 951 and 51 a bid back now. 2 951 for [sure] there. At 2 951 million million a bid there. Second time?

Not all the auctioneering was like this in that finale episode of The Block; in fact, Auction 4 was the only one that hewed closely to the norms of PEAS outlined by Kuiper and Haggo. Reading over the transcript above, we can see how the repetition of the bid (that absurd value of $2,951,000.09) shapes the script with an urgent kind of internal rhythm; we can also see the way those stock phrases, which oral tradition scholars have called ‘formulae’ – ‘a bid now’, ‘a bid back there’ – make pauses scarce. It is the lack of auditory space that makes the speech sound faster than it is. The presence of these formulae also links this auction form quite directly to the oral tradition (much is made of this by Kuiper and Haggo). If you watch an Australian television show from the naughties called Auction Squad, you’ll hear an extraordinarily concise list of real estate formulae, played in the collage-y spoken word theme variation of a shout tune:

Buyers, bear in mind: position, location
[...funky tv intro music…]
This is an absolutely, fantastic family home
[...funky tv intro music…]
Fair warning all round
[...funky tv intro music]
First call … Second call. …
[...funky tv intro music]
LAST call
[abrupt silence]

Unlike his colleague on The Block, the unfortunate auctioneer next door can’t turn the engine and get over the speed hump, but, because he’s sprinkled some formulae in, I’m listening to him. Is it epic?

Ten in the rise to get you in front
Ten in the rise I seek

I have been perking up ever since the first transition to formulaic auction speech dropped. I am enjoying it, and I don’t even mind when the manifest content sounds a little desperate (‘happy to start at the bottom of the range’), and I stand a little straighter at the delivery of each subsequent formula. I feel my pupils dilate when he cries, ‘seventy I seek’ – what crazy syntax is this? And ‘ten in the rise to get you in front’? Wow. This gets me going.

Ten in the rise to get you in front. I stop writing for a few days to think about this line. Could I say more about why I like this staccato sequence of nine, monosyllabic words? I give it a scan (not my strongest point): dactyl, spondee, anapest (maybe?), and a final, flat, single syllable, ‘front’. Hmmm. This doesn’t ring any formal bells. I pause at the ‘ten’ itself. Ten is at the beginning of the sequence of words, but is itself not quite a word, or at least, not a word in the same way as the others. It is the word-name for a numerical value. According to π.O., the legendary Melbourne poet and self-styled number man, a different part of my brain lights up on hearing the ‘ten’. Something about the number, itself, excites me. ‘Ten’ connotes the maximal (‘He’s a ten!’ or ‘In maths, your child got 10/10!’). In a base-ten numerical culture (ours in the West; I think the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians used base-twelve), ten also feels fundamental, and thus, though perhaps in a strange way, quite humanistic, as we have given ourselves over to the decimal system. Siting ‘ten’ at the top of the line makes for a paradoxical beginning, as ten – listen to any small child pause for a breath of relief once they count the last of their ten fingers – also feels like the conclusion of a cycle of numerical thought. It is a beginning that speaks of maximalness and fundamentalness, of conclusion and Pythagorean completion. Beginning with satisfaction (‘Ten’) at the outset of desire (‘to get you in front’) suggests that the satisfaction of desire is not only possible, but presupposable.

Ten is also, according to a numerology book I consult briefly, a masculine number. Ten lords a-leaping to the butch Ten Commandments. (In contrast, eleven must be feminine, or at least, masculine with a feminine addition – I appeal to the authority of Shakespeare’s only hendecasyllabic sonnet, Sonnet 20: ‘A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion’). In a base-ten culture, ten feels whole, it sounds like all. In Greek, a Greek former student once told me, the word for ‘all’ is ‘man’ – inconveniently, I cannot find this in any Greek–English dictionary. But conveniently, back in English, my ears tell me, ‘ten’ rhymes with ‘men’. The rhythmic structure of the line is priapic too, rising in the first half, ‘ten in the rise’; falling right after that literal ‘rise’ with the second half of the line, ‘to get you in front’. The ‘get you in front’ suggests male competitions of measure: it is a (perversely) nice line for what’s rising here this afternoon, which is not much, and I love it when the first bidder, a quiet, uncertain man, makes the first move:

960 the bid, seventy I seek
FIRST time we’re calling, vendor bid at 960 thousand
SECOND time the call now at 960 thousand
‘970’
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s your highest bidder now, we don’t need to take another vendor bid
970! There’s your competition if you’ve come to bid and buy!
There’s your competition! It’s transferring; that’s why we like an auction!
At 970 now—

A sir now, is he? Placing the bid has changed this ordinary Melbourne man into a gentleman – ‘it’s transferring’, as in, an upward-boundedness. This speaks of a transfer of class, of entitlement; the occasion itself a physical instantiation of class mobility (those who bid are on their way to becoming landed). A recent Jacobin article bearing the title ‘An Island of Little Landlords’ reports that droves of TikTok-inspired Britons are forsaking the nine-to-five grind for rent-seeking – the latest piece of evidence added to my stacked file on landlording as the height of Englishness.

Let’s get back to that Auction 4 from The Block. This auction has pronounced speed, even when it hasn’t any momentum. The $2,951,000.09 value of the bid doesn’t budge for four more pages of the handwritten notes I made while transcribing the auction. Speed alone manages to convey the gaining. Examining their field recordings of livestock auctions in New Zealand in 1984, Kuiper and Haggo suggest that some of the faster stretches of auctioneering – 244 syllables spoken in fifty-three seconds – ‘must be very close to the maximal rate of articulation’; ‘All auction speech is allegro,’ they conclude. Even though ‘allegro’ is in theory simply a technical designation of musical pace, I feel in the word something too cheerful, gambolling and, let’s say, innocently spirited, to define the auction tempo.

Enter beloved German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who once attended the 1986 World Livestock Auctioneering Championship in New Holland, Pennsylvania (good on him!), where he clarified, towards the end of the documentary he made about it, the affective experience of hearing the hyperspeak of competitive auctioneering:

Sometimes I think that this here could be the last remaining lyrical form, [though] what frightens me personally is the idea that our system has managed to produce a language that almost surpasses the boundaries of extremity… Sometimes I ask myself, ‘…and how did our economic system spawn this language?’

The last remaining lyrical form. The classicist Bruno Snell once suggested that the first lyrical forms – those brief, personal poems of Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon – furnished literature with the first glimpses of the human soul. More recently, writers including Bhanu Kapil and Sundeep Parmar have questioned the Eurocentric presumptions of such reckonings, criticising too the presumed whiteness of the tradition of the ‘universal’ lyric I. Nevertheless, I feel myself get heavy hearing ‘the last remaining lyrical form’ remembering that it’s kind of amazing that any lyrical forms, if they do have anything to do with glimpsing humanity, might persist in our current political and economic circumstances.

Along the way, Herzog’s film attests not only to the impressive endurance of the practice of communal gathering for the appreciation of linguistic virtuosity, but also to the durability of intergenerational transmission of inspiration for the craft. The 1986 livestock auctioneering champion, Steve Liptay, describes to Herzog the way that he

used to go to auctions with my dad. We had one great auctioneer in that part of the country, there. And it used to intrigue me, how he was able to hold the attention of 2, 3, 4, 500 people at a sale… It’s a golden life…and it’s something that I’ve wanted to be, ever since I was six years old.

In giving this insight into the ‘golden life’, Herzog’s film connects the livestock auction with older, classical scenes of poetic transmission (e.g. the drinking parties where Alcaeus and Sappho sang their lyrics), and, as Herzog concedes, ‘There is real music in their delivery, the sense of rhythm these people have.’ Perhaps it is important to remember that Herzog’s fright coheres with something fundamental to lyric as such (if such a thing is possible); lyric is not only language about extreme experiences (say, of love, or death, or the highest possible price to be paid for something), but is itself an extreme experience of language. Why then does auction, this particular lyrical form, become thinkable as the ‘last remaining’; why does thought of speed make for such an uneasy thinking? Perhaps because speed might empty out that which is thought itself.

Dreamily, I recall Herzog’s fantasy of staging a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with livestock auctioneers so that it could be heard ‘in under fifteen minutes’, something I readhe always wanted to do after attending that Auctioneering Championship. I can find no evidence this ever happened, so, one lunch break, I press 2.5x on an audio recording of the play made by the BBC. Heard this way, the play sounds kind of ‘fun’, or more precisely, its acoustics have been prised from the text’s depth and ponder. The play is now a tragedy without the brakes; perhaps, what I’m hearing sounds like reality without brakes (this is how Donald Winnicott once defined fantasy). Aldous Huxley, probably thinking of such leave-taking from reality, names speed as the ‘ideal intoxicant’ and, moreover, ‘the one genuinely modern pleasure’. Listening to Hamlet at more than double speed, it is difficult to get that iconic pause between ‘yet within a month—’ and ‘let me not think on’t’. This is the pause that, at normal speed, gives the thought Hamlet wants not to think of (his mother having sex with his father’s brother). Speed, when I press the 2.5x button, succeeds in banishing the unpleasant idea, and for all that Michael Sheen lends his brilliance to the role, his performance cannot survive the external force applied by my accelerating finger. With speed, a now smooth-talking Hamlet, formerly sensitive and contemplative, can successfully say nothing: Hamlet can, after all, hold his tongue. He sounds like he could be fun; maybe he could, at last, ‘Be as ourself, in Denmark,’ and sit ‘smiling to [Claudius’s’] heart’.

Speed is not just the tempo setting for the auction-poetry’s performance but its substance. It is for Herzog as if our language – the standard-bearer of our humanity – has been metabolised from variously expressive movements into the pure rate of movement: velocity might be the truth of form, finally emptied out. Speed becomes the identity of the form; paradoxically, perhaps, speed might be felt to be present even if the auction is not sung at speed. Or maybe that’s not what he’s saying! Possibly, and less terrifyingly, the absolute insanity of language pushed to its physical brink might reflect a society poised at its emotional, psychical, metaphysical brink. Either of these ways, indeed what terrifying songs these bards sing! Not cheerful and gambolling at all. Later, in Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Herzog reflects that,

I was fascinated by livestock auctioneers and had the feeling that their incredibly fast speech was the true poetry of capitalism. […] there is something final and absolute about how auctioneers speak. How much further can it go?

I want to spend the rest of this essay with an idea that there is a true poetry of capitalism, and that English language auctioneering is this poetry. (One of the reasons Herzog might have used the subtitle for his film ‘Observations of a New Language’ was because the PEAS procedure holds utter novelty to a native German speaker. As the record suggests, the English auction is not necessarily new, but, consistent with Herzog’s thought, it appears with the onset of British mercantilism.) I have heard Herzog’s impressive idea as a kind of conceptual ‘bid’ and now wish to raise it with my own. Part of this wish revives an old wish of mine, quite faded now but once fervent, to write an answer to David Malouf’s essay Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance. This essay is quite the paean to Australia’s linguistic and literary inheritance, our Englishnesses, and it continues to strike an odd note for me:

all that is contained in these sacred texts and in what, over the past three centuries, they have gathered about them in the way of speculation and interpretation and commentary; all that they have shaped, in that great span of time, of what happened in the world through their extraordinary hold on the mind and the magnetic force of their influence. This is what will survive down here [he is talking about the vaults of the Folger library] should the surrounding empire, like so many before it, crumble and blow away.

‘One time I even thought I would respond to David Malouf,’ announces the speaker in my own poem, ‘The Malouf’, which appears in The Open (Cordite, 2021). Okay, here is my response. In a fundamental way, it proceeds with similar assumptions: the idea that we did inherit and that this inheritance continually shapes our collective imagination persists. But it comes with an entirely different valence – perhaps, this is my counterposed repulsion, offered as an alternative to Malouf’s (admittedly compelling) rhetoric of attraction.

 4. Not So Fast

While I want to take seriously the idea of the auction tune – poetry of gain, the gain management system – as the true poetry of capitalism, I also want to take seriously the fact that, when I tune into the auction behind my screen door, the river of words I hear is not allegro. It’s not even andante. My neighbour’s auction is surely largo. Or, it is lento. Is our bard any less terrifying? No. In the same Hamlet lunch break, I experiment with the 0.5x button. In Act 1, Scene 2, I encounter what Huxley calls the ‘compensating drawback’ of too much speed-pleasure: the horrible intensity, simultaneously fearsome and boring, of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, slowed down. (Hamlet seems to me a fabulous play for Herzog’s purpose – the consideration of the sensational aspects of language spoken with obviously manipulated speed – with speed itself occupying the fundamental category of Hamlet’s protest: ‘Oh, most wicked speed!’ After the death of his father, his mother has married his uncle too soon; Stepfather Claudius suggests, conversely, that Hamlet’s mourning is taking too long – and as such is ‘unmanly grief’. Hamlet is the play whose driving question is ‘what is the correct speed’ for doing things, and seems to bear my manipulations well.) Like Herzog, I feel a bit frightened in the face of this speech, but not because of the speed (for there is none) and perhaps not even by the lack of it. What is happening? Is this an instance of what the poet-architect John Hejduk once described as ‘[a]rt, be it painting, literature or architecture, [being] the remaining shell of thought. Thought manifest[s] itself by its shucking or shedding of itself, it is beyond its confinement’? Is it that speed – if it is constitutive of the form – may shed its identity and still convey itself, by its very lack, by its slowness? Does the lack of speed somehow still emphasise speed as the form’s fundamental feature? Why else do I press my ear to the door, if not for the promise of the sensation of language at the brink, or the expectations established by the notion, partially of my own imagining, of an oral tradition? Or, am I listening precisely for something downplayed and laconic – prepared, perhaps, by precedent, if we accept accounts suggesting that settler Australian poetics lacks flash, dash – that instead, dullness abounds, which would account, for instance, for that fantastically boring opener to our constitution: ‘Whereas’.

There are so many ways I could have done this. One way – the far saner, though I think, also more difficult way – would have been to ‘engage’ (there’s a nice University word) with Australian poetry, directly. This is a good time to ask, why don’t I read Australian poetry into this? The question came up a few times as I prepared this work, with interlocutors at various stages of perplexity or concern. Peter Otto, who briefly mentors me while this project is under the remit of the Lockie Fellowship at the University of Melbourne (thank you Peter, thank you Lockie and, ah, hello there, University of Melbourne!) shakes his head, kindly, but firmly, when I raise, briefly, the role of the Stuart masque in all this over long blacks at University House. This was probably the last time we met. More recently, in my car on the way home from looking at second-hand books at Penny Sybers’s shop, which is in Caulfield and closing down, revered poet and short-story writer Michael Farrell sits in the passenger seat and asks, ‘Do you use Patrick White in your project? There’s a lot about house building in White.’ Not precisely national poetry, but a pillar of the prosody, we both appear to reckon, and I think about how intensely the fusing questions of art with questions of dwelling feels in The Vivisector. Hurtle Duffield stomping his goaty feet down halls, or on dirt floors. For sure. Earlier, on the drive out to Caulfield, Michael reminds me of his own book on unsettlement, which I agree is a highly appropriate book for connecting some thoughts about real estate and poetry. (‘The hand appears to be passive, abstracted: the hand of market forces, or imperialism. Despite the disruption of the poet-farmer metaphor…the ballad is written (ploughed) in regular lines or verses; and its message supports not subversion in Australia, but law and order in England.’) At some point, I think about but don’t mention the Corey Wakeling poem ‘The Gavel Foundation’, which bears the epigraph: ‘Only a fool buys real estate’. At another moment in the car with Michael, I mention the title of Emma Lew’s Anything the Landlord Touches. A few days later, I read the second stanza of the first poem in Lew’s collection,

Sky a tent immaculately pitched and noon’s
ghosts are creeping across paddocks.
Low, lame winds grow in the rushes—
the smoky pool made in its sleep. I have
found earth still adhering. I wait for storms
to crack the glamour open

Such unsettlement. The following stanza begins, ‘I don’t know the language of this country’. In the undercurrent of all this, I’m thinking, why haven’t I used Michael’s amazing story about the property managers of a Melbourne real estate company, whose (poet) names are David, John and Marjorie? This is how the story begins:

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 cafes closer to the agency were a relative downer.

Conceits of the poet-realtor figure, and other poetry-as-real-estate constructs have a strong (English) settler-colony flavour of enduring form. ‘Publication — is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man,’ writes Emily Dickinson, and though we might say, er, she-did-protest-too-much, the poet, thinking of language in the unsettled scene of her own New England settler frontier, picks up something of the poetry–real estate connection that is one of settlement’s conditions. In the same period and country, this is a connection that Henry David Thoreau also locates and upholds, rather ecstatically, in Walden:

In my imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it – took everything but a deed of it – cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends.

‘Are you writing about OzPo?’ is a fair question, and my answer, ‘Not really,’ feels feebly signed – like I’m letting my project, or the people who might read this, down – though it likewise seeks to be fair. This is a project that responds to the fact of the dominance of these motifs (say, of the house, or Lew’s sky-tent) and prosodic structures (which I would call settling and unsettling, building and renovating) in our literature. I sigh as I try to explain the state of my project to Michael because it would be impossible and, moreover, very difficult to compile such a work, as it would likely require an encounter with nearly every Australian book of poetry published since the beginning of settlement, accompanied by encounters with nearly every publication of poetry since the settlement of other English-speaking settlements, for useful context and contrast. OzPo is all about real estate, isn’t it? This is the point on whose behalf I labour; this essay is not about Australian poetry, nor Australian literature more broadly (though consider how well you know the dimensions of David Malouf’s Brisbane childhood house) in the normal senses, but an attempt to locate some of the more hidden, colonial springs that feed it. Hence the river of language (yes, what a cliché) that I tell Michael I’m trying to listen to, I’m listening for the streams that feed it, and yes, this answer still feels pretty weak, and yes, Michael is right when he says, ‘Yes, but these things change once they’re in Australia,’ as I sit waiting to turn onto Dandenong Road. (Admirably, Michael doesn’t drive. My daughter, sitting behind him in her booster chair, pulls his hoodie down from his neck and tickles him.)

5. The Masque

Next door, the second highest bidder goes into the house, where the vendors sit in an arcane state of inaccessibility, having dismissed whatever offer was made for the property by the first highest bidder. This is happening, I surmise, because the bidding itself did not reach the ‘reserve’, a numerical value not unlike the physical presence of my neighbours – arcanely, tantrically inaccessible. Does it feel embarrassing? The public failure to reach a digital climax does seem insufficiently priapic (failure to reach reserve as a kind of erectile dysfunction?). Or, it feels like insufficient magic, which is perhaps to say the same thing – the spell, that fine filament of words from the copy on the for-sale sign to the final call for bids of the cry, has not been effectively cast for this house to rise to the occasion.

Still, the overall scene retains the look and feel of a standard auction’s ceremony; the corflute and flags are superfluous to the other reminders of the ritual world we still inhabit. Handsome young couples, paired heterosexually, have been standing studies of silence, shoulder to shoulder with their older, more relaxed counterparts – grim adversaries if the latter are investors, familiar foes if they are simply seekers of a downsized nest. The patronising appellation ‘new Australians’ will be applied (in this patronising context) to a couple of larger intergenerational groups, where the elders assume the role of solemn guide, seeking to assist with wordless encouragement or dissuasion as the number rises. The random arrangement of souls feels a bit like a wedding, except this is all carried out in the driveway of a three-dwelling strata, and the only guy who suited up for the thing is the auctioneer – though I note that his female assistant has her hair and makeup done in a style that looks distinctly matrimonial.

Why did those who came, come? The majority do not bid, and the two who do, do so weakly. But the majority here, the non-bidders, have not in any way failed by not winning the bid. In essence, their very coming has made a success of the thing, even as it ‘fails’. It is those who do not bid that are most required for the effectiveness of the social performance that the literary scholar Cynthia Wall describes as ‘theatrical’:

The auction, as a public place of sale, is as much a theatrical performance, a spectacle, as it is a commercial event, and the bidders are not simply purchasers but simultaneously part of both performance and audience.

Or, as Kuiper writes of the livestock auction,

All these people are celebrating the operation of the free market in which they all participate…for the most part, they show by their presence and the fact that they will buy and sell at auction that they have faith in the free market. They believe in it, and once a month they celebrate that belief collectively.

If it is a theatre, as Wall claims in her work on the emergence of the English auction in the eighteenth century, ‘The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings’, there are very few theatres of this conjunction. ‘You can all be in the party,’ one of the more recent PEAS formulae that auctioneers avail themselves of, according to Kuiper, exemplifies the specific spirit or even provenance of the theatre I begin to recognise here. I recognise the theatre, or the gestalt, of the English masque – and, because I want to be more specific, the Stuart masque.

The Stuart masque was a private court entertainment conceived in an era of intense intensification of monarchical power – its time was the apotheosis of the divine right of kings, whose era crashed (taking with it the masque) in the 1640s. In writing them, Ben Jonson formalised the masque in two distinct parts: the antimasque, played by professional actors, represents some negative force that is to be banished by the second part, the masque itself, which is some allegory in affirming parallel with some aspect of the court – the court who are watching and, including the King, who are about to join the action of stage. (The structure has the same ring of arbitrary inviolability as the PEAS Rule 1.) John Hejduk, in his entry for the masque structure, ‘Border Guards’, writes that they lack story action, crisis or ending. What is their pretext? Goodness is restored: let’s go dancing(!), though there is probably more mystery to this, and anyway, think of how it all must end, masque and monarchy, in the 1640s, with Charles I walking across the Whitehall’s Banqueting House (where many of these masques were staged and danced) that final time to the executioner’s block. I am suggesting, here, that following that final collapse, the masque’s power is then redirected in the form of the auction – the first of which appeared in England in 1676, less than two decades after the Restoration, despite, or perhaps even because, on the surface, the masque insists on the persistence of the existing order, while the auction is a theatre that upends whatever preceding order an estate sale represents. What is the assumption of power that surfaces here? How directly does the festivity of our culture map upon political life? Look at how what happens on the weekend (renos, record auction results) propels the ‘tough’ decision-making of the week (all eyes turn to the RBA). Whose head’s gonna roll?

The masque has been haunting me, which is strange, because I’m sure I’m not a theatre person. The Stuart masque was a distinctive collaboration between poetry and architecture (fantastical scenery such as giant turning globes and golden thrones), a unique expression of the then nascent modes of modern theatre. Those who devised it, Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones (who is generally considered the first major architect of early modern England) remained at odds over which element of the masque was its integral part: the spectacle, or the words. We did not preserve Jones’s costumes and moveable scenery, and though Jonson’s words remain, for most of history since these occasional entertainments were produced they attracted little scholarly attention – not until the second half of the twentieth century. Still, writers of masques themselves defended the form; Jonson praised the masque as ‘lay[ing] hold on more removed mysteries’. The masque’s spectacular and poetic manifestations were, in Jonson’s time, the instauration of a symbolic language of modern kingship. There are obvious ways in which this kingship was affirmed and idealised, not least in the very structure of the masque, by the rescue performed as the court banishes the chaotic world represented by the antimasque. (Jonas A. Barish makes the stunning observation that the masque ‘represents a society not so much aspiring after as joyfully contemplating its own well-being, the possession of the blessings it considers itself to have achieved…the masque may be taken as a kind of mimetic magic on a sophisticated level, the attempt to secure social health and tranquility for the realm by miming it in front of its chief figure.’)

I’m not sure if this is the correct answer, but I would add to this that it was a structural feature that the king himself was not seen until the end, revealing his identity for the commencement of the revels. The 1612 masque, Love Restored, shows how the form flounders in the absence of this feature, which normally facilitates the inclusion of the audience. Plutus, the protagonist of this antimasque, has disguised himself as Cupid. The god of money, who can only conceive of morality as buying and selling, masquerades as the god of love. Here is a fiscally responsible Cupid railing against extravagance:

Were not these ladies and their gentlewomen more house-wifely employed, a dozen of them to a light, or twenty (the more the merrier) to save charges, in their chambers at home, and their old night-gowns, at draw-gloves, riddles, dreams, and other pretty purposes, rather than to wake here, in their flaunting wires and tires, laced gowns, embroidered petticoats, and other taken up braveries?

(In his parsimony, in his appeal for humbleness at home, this Cupid reminds me a little of passages of Robert Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ speech.) In Love Restored, the hypocrisy of Plutus as Cupid is cast out by the appearance of the real Cupid, who, like Plutus, is also played by an actor. Critically, when Cupid’s ‘ten ornaments’ descend and take partners from the audience, the actor doesn’t join them. This is a deviation from the basic function of the masque, where the banisher would be performed by the soon to be revealed prince, who would surely dance. Without this function, as Stephen Orgel writes, the masque’s transition to the world of the court is fundamentally flawed. The masque might appear only as ‘tasteless flattery’ because ‘it praises a monarch who has never been established as a figure worthy of praise within the masque’.

In their silence, an audience of non-bidders at auction remind me of the court at the masque. The bidders’ silence at auction today emphasises the high symbolism of the occasion, just as the silence of the court emphasised the symbolism of the masque. Together, auctioneer, assistant, bidders and non-bidders (and, I nearly forgot, the hidden vendors) are all collective masquers at the auction masque, there to reify the winning bidder as king who, like the real sovereign of the Stuart masque, would cross the physical space, transforming themselves in the process from spectator to protagonist king or queen. They are – out there – standing in anticipated function of themselves. This has turned out to be a rather impressive thing to do, to have come here to stand around the perimeter of a driveway on an otherwise listless Melbourne afternoon. ‘Standing around’ is a phrase that calls out for a simile. To notice standing around is to observe a correspondence, a likeness. ‘Standing around like’ is the formula; ‘like’ is the operative, albeit implied, word. Like what, exactly? Like courtiers? Is this the masque of poetry-architecture today? To ask rhetorically, what is going on? To answer empirically, in an ordinary sense, they are here seeking answers to that very question. They are here to find out what is ‘going on’ with the housing market, in kaleidoscopically vibrating circles of various sizes: the market in ‘vibrant Brunswick’, in the ‘hip’ ‘inner north’ of Melbourne, in Melbourne (real estate language never refers to Naarm), in Victoria, in the nation. In themselves, also. I don’t recognise any neighbours, but there would be those ‘sticky-beakers’ from the street itself, pecking around to find out the ‘true value’ of their own home (and this would be an extravagant, exciting secret, as my sneaking behind the door suggests: know thy neighbour). How many here wish they could turn back time and keep that little townhouse in, oh, maybe Carlton North, that they sold back in the 1990s…over there, just around the corner. Geez, what would that be worth now?

But do they know what’s going on in their poetry? I have been thinking about the poetry of real estate in part because the governmental and policy discourses, which bemoan the state of housing ‘supply’, have very little to say about demand. (This is one of many brilliant insights in Fiona Allon’s book on Australia’s financialisation of the house, Renovation Nation, and I note, with not a little despair, that these insights were published in response to a ‘housing crisis’ that predates our current crisis by almost two decades.) The raising of poetry could account in some part, as yet unaccounted, for the tendency of these things to happen around the house in Anglophone countries Britain, United States, Canada and Australia. These are the countries that Malouf says ‘all share it – not just the language itself but a particular habit of mind…an affinity that has been hovering in the ether for more than a century, and has twice already become a power-field’. My suggestion is that there is not only a shared economic vision arising from English-speaking history, with its linked, yet varied expressions of imperialism in each specific settler context (and their originating context), but moreover there is a shared poetry for all this, which feeds our discourse at the primary level of fantasy. ‘You can all be in the party!’ is the subliminal shout tune of our national poetics arching back at least to the masque, and speaking directly of demand, which is to say, of the dimensions of our collective desire and imagination. John Howard once affirmed that the Coalition was committed to ‘Australia remaining a great home-owning society, indeed one of the greatest in the world, where the dream of home ownership remains at the heart of the Australian experience and within the reach of each successive generation’ (emphasis added). The heart of the Australian experience. ‘So that’s what’s there!’ jibes Allon. The masque is an exclusive revelry, so no, we cannot all be in the party. But this rather particular truth is usurped by the proudest, profoundest assumptions about our sovereign selves. These assumptions surface, as they did in the Stuart masque, in our nation’s most extravagant spectacle.

Our nation’s most extravagant spectacle, the renovated house, receives an extraordinary amount of attention through our national entertainments. I’m certain it is not necessary to mention the immense popularity of ‘lifestyle’ reality television shows, whose impact we all absorb, even if we find we are somewhat allergic to these formats. It is time, now, for me to stop standing behind my door, and instead open myself to the full force of Australia’s masque, The Block. This has been a copious conjunction of poetry and spectacle – Australia, this is your masque! – the widest point of imaginable confluence, and when I finally tune in, the thing has been running for over twenty seasons. I choose, almost randomly, the 2023 season (that numerology book I consulted about the number ‘ten’ also had good things to say about ‘twenty-three’). There are twelve weeks of running about, under the guidance and censure of self-appointed renovation experts, as five couples attempt to prepare five ‘rundown brick houses’ in Hampton East, Melbourne, for sale by auction. The thing is won – it is a game format, I suddenly realise – by that couple who achieves the highest profit through this process. The Block’s precursor, Auction Squad, also had a thing with twelve: in this format, renovation experts and their vast group of labouring hands had twelve hours to ‘transform’ the rundown home into an acceptable presentation for auction. There is magical pressure held in twelve.

The Block’s final episode culminates the narrative, if the word may be applied to the series of panic-stricken renovator-events, with a day of auctions. Thinking of the structure of antimasque –> masque, we see the auction banishing the particularities of these renos, indeed banishing all particularities in the lead-up to the bidding. Anything can happen on auction day, the hosts and contestants continually tell each other. The episode, we are told in the byline, will be epic. The sale of houses, as the episodes of the previous twelve weeks has emphasised, balances on a tightrope of signs. This rope tightens, and finds the absolute limit of navigation, at the final auction stage.

On auction day, flags bearing the logos of real estate agencies unfurl: Belle Property, McGrath, Jellis Craig (my favourite: what a homophone). High pressure hoses unroll. Broadband internet connection is confirmed as working; arbitrarily, we are presented with one of the show’s producers making the call to the internet provider, himself. A contestant describes their dream: ‘I hear the auctioneer call, “going once, going twice”, then I wake up.’ Another contestant relays a nightmare that, ‘We won a Mitre 10 voucher.’ (Ten in the rise to get you in front!) In separate auctions, the first two houses are purchased by a man named Adrian Portelli, one of Australia’s youngest billionaires. He raises on his own bid in Auction 2, from $4.1 million to $4.2. ‘This is just the most bizarre auction day I’ve ever witnessed,’ says one of the hosts, Shelley Craft, ‘and we’ve only gone through two.’ (It all happens again in 2024, and we learn that fellow regular Block auction attendee, the philanthropist Danny Wallis, was seething at Portelli’s bids, telling Domain that ‘the houses were junk,’ ‘I don’t compete against billionaires,’ and ‘That [sic] was the weirdest auctions I’ve ever seen.’) The cameras turn to the contestants up for Auction 3, who say that the result will be ‘life-changing’. The cameras turn to their auctioneer, who is telling the audience the property ‘is an absolute steal at this price’. And then, he has just gone ahead and told them the reserve ($2,970,000). The contestants stare at one another. Foolish crier! The bids drop off. He is floundering. ‘Let’s see if I can get the bid back up.’ He tries to win the crowd by suggesting the potential for resale, perhaps at a similar ‘raffle’. The bidding barely rises. In another arbitrary moment, the Australian comedian, Dave Hughes, who is there, looks down the barrel of the camera and says, ‘It’s almost free at this price!’ The auctioneer is closing now:

All done
All finished
All is silent

The tightrope of signs falls flat. One of the contestants observes, ‘Our agent shat the bed today.’ They are upset; they are completely devastated that they are ‘only gonna make $30k profit at this point’.

Thinking of Siegfried Kracauer, who observed that a culture in worship of youth was a culture in desperate attempt to repress confrontation with a lack of meaning, I wonder what a culture in worship of property (the owner-occupied house as physical structure, as distinct from the amorphous ‘home’) avoids confronting, has repressed. Is it that we might in effect be a failed settlement, for it seems, increasingly, that we can’t house people here, unless they are of the cyberzombie overclass, Plutus disguised as Cupid, pedalling some paradoxical vision of ontological security. Portelli is an entrepreneur of an online rewards club. (My requests for an interview with Portelli were not answered. I would have loved to hear what he thinks about the idea of real estate gains as poetry.) What kind of reification of the free market is here, where one billionaire buys all the houses? What kind of fantastic counterpoint to the housing crisis is this, when such a man steps into the masque and reveals himself as king?

In a fundamental sense, the audience knows something of the demands of this poetry of gain. The audience knows when to bid, and perhaps more importantly, it knows when to not bid. To varying extents, they must also know that they are here to be the event. That their presence, here, presences and reifies the free market and selects the ‘winner’ (the highest bidder and new owner) and furthermore, gives the house itself its new numerical identity. Its selling price, the final number called, will become the vernacular title of the poem of the house, its auction song. Or is it that, more precisely, the presence of the audience conceals the winning bid and bidder? This identity is only revealed at the climax of the bidding, which, like the climax of the Stuart masque, occurs at the very conclusion of proceedings. The concealment and revelation of the physical presence of the sovereign has given the masque its deepest meaning.

Foolish crier, I think again, when the auctioneer ventures into the territory of the vacant block, clearly land-banked, that encircles the properties and blights most of Brunswick Road from Lygon to Ewing Streets. ‘And you know, think about what you’re gonna have. You’re, um, you’re not gonna have a high-rise next door, ladies and gentlemen. You’re going to have a NURSING HOME. You get a NURSING HOME. There ain’t gonna be parties at six a.m. There’s not gonna be a thousand tenants. There’s gonna be…a…very nice…very cool…cool, calm and collected…audience next door.’ Where is he going with this? ‘That’s what you WANT, especially when you’re in the hustle and bustle of BRUNSWICK.’ That’s what we want? Having said the quiet bit out loud, he finally throws the towel in on the nonsensical aside. ‘A million and ten I have. FIRST now at a million and ten.’ There are no further bids.

The masques of Jonson banished death, winter, and even those ‘darker’ elements of romantic love. Listening to the auctioneer next door wallow in his plight, I can’t help thinking that we might have a chance, after all, if only we let the less competent bards continue to inadvertently bring death, winter, aging, sickness, nursing homes, noisy sex, breakups, raffles (they are all loss!), and other troubling particularities back from masque’s banishment. We have survived worse poetry.

Sources

1. Allon, Fiona, Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home, University of New South Wales Press, 2008.
2. Bishop, Elizabeth, ‘One Art’ in Geography III, Straus and Giroux, 1976.
3. Barish, Jonas A., Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, Harvard University Press, 1960.
4. Barthes, Roland, ‘The Absent One’ in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments trans. Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1978.
5. Culler, Jonathan, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard University Press, 2015.
6. Dickinson, Emily, ‘Publication — is the Auction’ (788), The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin, Harvard University Press, 1999.
7. Farrell, Michael, ‘An Australian Poetics of the Plough: The Jerilderie Letter’ in Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention, 1796–1945,Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
8. Farrell, Michael, ‘Real Estate Agents Wish Governments Would Do More’, The Victoria Principle,Giramondo, 2025.
9. Hejduk, John,‘Evening in Llano’ in Education of an architect: The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, ed. E. Diller, E. Lewis and D. Shkapich, Rizzoli, 1988.
10. Herzog, Werner (dir.), How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck? Observations on a New Language, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1977.
11. Howard, John, Election Speech 12 November 2007.
12. Huxley, Aldous, ‘Wanted, a New Pleasure’ in Music at Night, and Other Essays, Doubleday Doran and Co., 1931.
13. Jonson, Ben, Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel, Yale University Press, 1970.
14. Koul, Deeksha, ‘Hideous Progeny: Aus-Con as Text-Creature’ paper for Constitutional Poetics symposium, University of Melbourne, 18 June 2025.
15. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, 1995.
16. Kuiper, Koenrad and Douglas Haggo, ‘Livestock Auctions, Oral Poetry, and Ordinary Language,’ Language in Society, Vol. 13, 1984.
17. Lutton, Ellen, ‘Billionaire Adrian Portelli’s Stunning Block Exit: Secretly Buys All 5 Houses and Quits the Show’, Domain,10 November 2024.
18. Orgel, Stephen, The Jonsonian Masque, Harvard University Press, 1965.
19. Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For’ in Walden ed. Stephen Fender, Oxford University Press, 1999.
20. Warner, William, Menaechmi: A pleasant and fine conceited comaedie, taken out of the most excellent wittie poet Plautus: chosen purposely from out the rest, as least harmful, and yet most delightfull. Written in English by W.W,Printed by Tho. Creede, and are to be sold by William Barley, at this shop in Gratious streete, 1595.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge that research for this essay was supported by a 2024 Lockie Fellowship through the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.