New poem: ‘We are all space-junk’
October 14, 2009
Here is a very short piece I very recently sent in for a facebook friend’s themed mini-anthology re: weeds -actual and figurative/discarded/unlovely. An excerpt from a different one (of mine) was preferred, so decided to give this one another outing:
We are all space-junk
‘Atomise them all!’.
‘But…Commander! Those ships…
are all in working order!’
‘We lost the critical war, colleague.
All of this around us is space-junk.
WE are now space-junk.
How can you fail to see this?’
****
38 words max, or 36, counting ‘space-junk’ as one compound word each time; 40 words was the limit.
Recent poem: ‘Daydreams and Detour signs’
October 10, 2009
(i)
Three low-lying hills
mark the boundary of a realm;
a dark, cold lake of unknowable depth and beaten-metal surface
is ahead of me;
on an island in this lake,
an ancient tower suggests a history of wizards.
There are no dragons in the sky. Yet.
(ii)
I take a few steps backwards,
then look to my left side again: there are Detour signs,
construction-site notices on temporary metal fencing
and on the surviving patches of worn grass, some small dunes
of cement rubble, piled up by workers demolishing the familiar path.
Looks like it could be weeks before the fence is gone,
so I turn right and head towards a park and another realm
best seen in daydreams.
********
The lake-shore footpaths and park areas in the centre of Canberra are great for daydreaming, especially during quieter late afternoons. The poem above is based on some notes made during a weekend-afternoon walk about a month ago.
Recent poem: ‘It all comes down to this’
October 10, 2009
It all comes down to this
long corridors and short stops
to let the late joiners catch up with the group.
A guide’s voice floats over me,
carrying another story to a tapestry
that has already soaked up too many words.
I half-close my eyes so I can see some of those old words
leaking onto the intricate patterns on the floor.
“This last room was a special salon –
the original chatelaine spent nearly all her time here
and only allowed her closest women friends as guests.
It has a rare set of design features adapated just for her
and an even rarer positioning within the chateau -so rare it is famous,
even among all the chateaux in this region.”
It all comes down to this:
the women who used this salon
were all left-handed.
A coincidence?
Not for them.
****************
After many tours of castles, chateaux, stately homes etc and seeing them in documentaries and movies, I’ve occaisionally thought about how really unusuual, difficult design features affecting the entire building were accomodated in the construction process. Probably only a tiny proportion of castles were ever genuinely and completely designed for left-handed people, as the orientation of rooms, stairwells, inner defences etc were designed on the basis of 90% + of people being right-handed. Related to this is a question about how specific areas within a grand residence might be customised even more if particular people due to live there managed to ‘get their way’. Over an extended time, how might this specialised space affect the way they lived in their home and how they related to others?
New flash fiction: ‘Helena’s Tasting Party’
October 10, 2009
Helena’s Tasting Party
Helena is here: at a gourmet food-tasting party, hosted in an expensive apartment with lake views on two sides. She is dressed for cocktail-style social action but surrounded by people she has never mixed with before. The “slightly weird” colleague who offered to get her an invitation is over at a table stocked with rows of small bowls full of colourful dips and designer sauces. Someone engineering this production really pays attention to catering: so many details are included, so many options provided, but there is no clutter anywhere. Waiting staff have a spooky knack for anticipating guests’ choices.
She is annoyed to note that despite not being even nearly as sleek or conversational as her, Glen is obviously at home in this settting. In their office world, she has overhead him talking about role-playing games. It stirs strong suspicions.
‘So, can I get you a drink? A plate of samples?’ A strong, young voice; still, she struggles to not assume that the man who owns it is trying too hard.
‘Not yet, thanks, but can you tell me how my colleague over at the dips table fits in here?’ Helena likes her drinks neat and her answers even neater, whenever possible.
‘You don’t have much time for fantasy fiction, do you?’ Dafydd the stranger likes to test reactions of anyone who looks over-confident about their ability to interpret unspoken social cues. He hasn’t met an example like Helena for a fair while. Helena just wishes she’d accepted a drink.
‘No and not interested in starting now’. [‘Good thing Cassie isn’t here now -she’d nag me about being unforgiving.’ ]
‘If you were, it could help explain a little about why Glen fits in. He’s not naturally “one of us”, but it’s good to know him.’ He leaves that with her as he goes to get her a drink, taking a chance he’ll get it right after being trained by the waiting staff.
Glen is back beside her seat, with a full plate, extra fork and servietttes for both of them. ‘Thought you could use some of these morsels. Sorry for being away so long.’
‘No matter; thanks for the food’. She finds some flavours that promise to improve her workday lunches if she can get them at a deli.
‘Looked like Dafydd was throwing you a surprise question or two’.[‘Wtf? When did Glen the role-player in disguise become a sharp reader of body language?’ Helena really wants that drink and wishes she’d never let one of her closer friends talk her into saying yes to this…event. ]
Too late for any more answers or questions -the host, even weirder in his own way than Glen or Dafydd, is persuading everyone to move out to the balcony for his sunset-viewing ritual. Two minutes later, with a drink even she admits is a perfect choice, Helena finds some relief in the natural spectacle and takes a micro-holiday from being critical.
Back indoors after dark: Helena and Dafydd are enjoying a mutual-irritation/flirting contest and Glen is keeping out of range while he also tries to assure the host that they won’t involve anyone else.
Helena suddenly crosses an unknown personal boundary by simply not knowing enough about these people. Glen hasn’t managed to intervene in time – he saw the essential warning sign but has missed the chance. He also missed every earlier chance to drop any discreet hints about the presence of genuine mysterious capabilities and some disturbing secret lives.
All the fun stops. Instantly. Possibly even faster than that. She can’t even see Dafydd now, but looks at where he just was…sees a small three-tailed orange lizard on his chair.
‘Didn’t see that one coming, did you?’ Even if Glen had said something, Helena’s intense contempt for fantasy fiction would have reduced it to nothing, so she is totally unequipped to deal with small talking lizards the colour of Subtly-muted Umbrian Orange tiles she recently had installed in her bathroom. She just shakes her head, stays quiet and aims a panicked look at the host and Glen, for any kind of help. No conditions, just help. A quick exit is her no.1 choice.
‘How about we try a quiet lounge bar, somewhere else?’ Glen the “slightly weird” roleplayer from her office life, finds a voice that has the right kind of helpful sound, so she follows him out of the circle of
confused guests, out the front door and stays silent in the lift. She is still silent when he leads her out to the footpath and points towards a bar across the road. A nod will do, so he gets one.
The best news of the night suddenly become clear to her: despite fititng in with the unsettling party scene and being a friend of a guy who changes colour and grows three tails when he’s really pissed off, Glen is showing no signs of changing into a lizard. He might even turn out to be a reasonable lounge-bar date.
********************************
I wrote the piece of flash fiction above earlier this week, for a facebook friend. It was written in one night, very soon after being at a national Speculative Fiction convention, Conflux6, in Canberra on the October Long Weekend (3-5 Oct.)
My new poem: ‘Am I even affected by this?’
May 23, 2009
Am I even affected by this?
A castle burns on a hill:
people and animals flee,
a sense of community is lost,
treasures are grabbed or forgotten.
There is a time of confusion:
easy pickings for roaming predators,
the end of a dynasty,
the end of so many stories.
With or without dragons, trolls, mages,
princesses, monks, lost prodigal sons
or armies of mercenaries transported by magic
from other realms,
this scene is played out
in so many ways: in old chronicles and newer content
for programs in the Television and Internet Age
…and in fantasy novels.
Am I even affected by this?
On page 57: yes;
on page 163: no;
on page 292: possibly;
Final page: yes.
Definitely: Yes.
************
Note on the poem: several weeks ago I’d written about half of it and sketched out the main ideas, relating to both a classic kind of scene in fantasy fiction and my own questioning of reading habits, the nature of an individuals reading experience and how much or how little impact a scene can have ‘outside the book’, then tried to combine those two issues and play them against each other.
Collection of poems titled ‘The Blizzard Voices’ -by US poet Ted Kooser.
It’s a set of stories in verse form, about a famous blizzard in 1880s in the Great Plains region -takes in Nebraska, Kansas and a few other nearby states – and people who survived it, remembered family stories about it. While blizzards are an annual seasonal hazard in that part of the US, this one was so extreme over a big area, even for hardened Great Plains people, that it found its way into folklore. It is also known as ‘The Schoolchildren’s Blizzard’ as it struck when village schools all over the Great Plains were full, leading to many mass tragedies and some inspiring survival stories.
They are intensely atmospheric poems(especially when reading it while weather turns to Winter in Canberra) and also have strong oral history elements. In the introduction to new edition (2006), Kooser describes some of his research for preparing to write the poems: using local historical sources, a 1940s books about it, old documents and newspapers etc plus childhood memories of older family members talking about it.
The original edition was published by an indie press in 1986 and a few years later performed as a play in a community theatre in Nebraska’s state capital city -Lincoln. The 2006 edition is illustrated with illustrations: b&w drawings and published by Bison Books/Univ. Nebraska Press.
*******
More information on Ted Kooser and The Blizzard Voices:
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Blizzard-Voices,673128.aspx
http://www.omahacityweekly.com/article/2008/09/10/%E2%80%98-blizzard-voices%E2%80%99
Heritage news: harsh cuts to museums in the US
April 21, 2009
Gloomy news for museum lovers and all those who work in/in association with museums and similar cultural institutions:
Go to: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=17148 for the full article ‘Troubles deepen for museums: layoffs, budget cuts and cancelled shows’ in The Art Newspaper online edition.
…and all that in the world’s strongest economy – I sure hope (and as a museum lover really do give the benefit of the doubt) the museum chiefs haven’t been dining out well like the bankers who asked for bail-outs then paid themselves bonuses that could keep an entire museum ‘afloat’.
“Collaborations may be a way forward” –emphasis on may be should be made, as any carefully-considered founding process of an individual museum, plus its own history and visitors’ memory of it, won’t be easily matched to an entirely different museum, even though they’re both cultural institutions. I mean, how often do people suggest merging botanic gardens as a viable option? Super Zoo, anyone?
New reading/what I’m reading now
April 19, 2009
Another weekend trip to a branch of city library, more time in a shopping mall newsagency, so have some new reading:
- Latest issue of FilmInk magazine -has a feature on star actors who ‘sank’ a whole film by bad performance and an interview-based piece on Viggo Mortensen, surely one of the more interesting and versatile A-list actors who really do deserve A-list cred;
- Collection of poems by New York-based poet John Ashbery: A Worldly Country -new poems (Ecco, 2007);
- The Writer’s Idea Workshop (2003, Writer’s Digest) by Jack Heffron -full of writing prompts and very readable style;
- Folk Tales of Pakistan – ed. L Komal
The writting book has already had some positive effect – this afternoon I kept the PC logged off for a bit longer and settled at table with notepad & pencil, did a bit of “getting it down on paper” re: making an actual record of new ideas when they’re fresh.
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