Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: funny how

  • racism vs sexism: dinosaurs attack

    It fascinates me how people invariably preface racist statements with the words, “I’m not a racist or anything, but: [other people are inferior or flawed].”

    As they say, you have to ignore everything that comes before the “but.”

    The thorough-going unseen privilege of those who feel most entitled to thus pronounce on other people’s worth goes so deep, it seems the accusation of racism is itself the worst taboo. So I can say whatever I like about other people’s inferiority, but for you to call me racist is the one insult that’s unable to be borne. One can bring – I have brought – entire gatherings to a grinding halt by saying, “But, So-and-So, that’s racist.” Everybody shuts up and heads swivel slowly, almost audibly, like locals greeting strangers in a bar. No matter what vile assertions I make about other people’s humanity, eerily they can never be as baselessly awful as the assertion that someone else’s ideas are racist. This to me is the most irrefutable evidence that white people live in a miasma of clouding white fragility and privilege. I have heard plenty of racist shit from all kinds of people’s mouths. But I’ve never, ever, once heard anybody say: “I am a racist. And because I’m racist, I believe [other people are inferior or flawed].”

    I even had one former sister-out-law explain to me, with great kindness as I was new in her family, after a revolting discussion of a family friend who had just dropped off a condolence card and who happened to be Aboriginal (“well, if they were all like that… it wouldn’t be a problem”) “Cathoel you don’t get it. He hates his own race as much as I hate his race.”

    I said, “But, Veronica – that’s racist.” Shocked gasps all round. She drew a quivering hand to her breastbone. Her voice broke. “Are you calling me A Racist?”

    I said, “I think you just called yourself a racist. You hate his race. That’s what racism is. It’s not complicated.” But the outrage that broke following that statement did not still over the next three or four days. We drove home at the end of the visit still carrying it and I never felt comfortable in that family again. Because mine was the real insult.

    It also fascinates me that people who feel entitled to preface “this or that racist assumption” with the words “I’m not racist but” will invariably feel compelled to also say, if female, “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [ya know, I just sorta have this feeling maybe women are people too?”] As a society we have learned to feel ashamed of our racism but not yet to uproot and rout it. As a society we have not yet learned to feel ashamed of our hatred of women. There were those few halcyon years in which people started to say, “…I mean, chairperson.” Then the demeaning backlash of “political correctness” descended like a storm on all our heads. Now the labour to have one’s struggle for equality, one’s longing to be recognised as fully human and valid, can be all wiped away with this one sneering, coward’s phrase. “Not to get all politically correct on you or anything, but…. [I believe and know everyone is human. Yup, each of us. No exceptions. That’s just how it is.”]

  • possum off

    Pissed on by a possum as I was lying in the hammock. Cat sprang out and stalked off, tail in air. Possum continued climbing the branch, tail in air. This was after I had already been bitten by a sharp mosquito that turned out to be claw of cat perched on nearby kitchen chair on the lawn to tell me, let me in, I want hammock, you gotta lift me up. Now the three of us who momentarily were linked are sundered: life goes on.

  • bar none

    Seems to me when you have yourself a brow bar (they only do eyebrows), a blow-dry bar (they only dry hair), and a tanning salon (they brown people) in the one block, it could be your locality is suffering what we might call First World Problems Syndrome. Meanwhile, in Arnhem Land…


  • smaller than you might think, vaster than you might imagine

    I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and I carouse the seaming waves, always looking out for something that can survive the dark salt water, that can breath underwater and emerge intact and stronger, softer, something that breeds new life like a manatee mistaken by desperate sailors for a comely mermaiden.

    I use this pen for prose, ideas, letters, postcards: everything except writing poetry. Poetry I find can tend to purple and bruise when handled too finely. It needs plainer tools. I write it like a shopping list, unafraid of whatsoever cravings might find their way onto the page there. I know that like tormented fruit plucked over by too many hands the cliche and banal trueism will rise to the surface, overnight like cream or over many weeks like flaws on a false politician, and I can pick it over and scour it out and glean from it that which is manifest, worth its weight in oranges, weighty but not too weighty, worthy.

    All writing of poetry is worthwhile, we ought never to stop ourselves in the initial act. It’s got to be good poetry, though. It’s got to be rewritten. Real and true. You have to be able to jettison those ragged phrases that wear out their welcome in the mind, the ones you tend to mumble over on the final read-through. Poetry is more infested than perhaps any other art form with pretenders who use its name to shield their cowardice, their apathetic shouting, their lame attention-seeking, their emotional lies. Overstatement, fancy language, lack of conviction, boring ideas or endless self-description buried in ornate and impenetrable prose (yes, prose) – it’s all being displayed under the name of poetry and I think that puts a lot of people off. I think if much so-called poetry were performed under the name Songwriting – a related art we mostly tend to feel far more confident in judging – people would fold their arms and tip their heads, say, “You’ve not been playing guitar that long, have you?” Or, even worse, “I don’t believe you mean that.”

  • how embarrassment

    Tony Abbott threatening to “shirt-front” Putin? And that meme that has the two of them side by side, Tony shirtless in his budgie smugglers and Putin shirtless on his horse? It arose the same day he made his remark and it says, “….wait.”

    I just explained all this to my immigrant boyfriend, a Berliner who has gleefully been singing out “Team Australia!” whenever he sees someone do something stupid. I acted out the shirt-fronting to show him what it was. Then I had to let him go because I was weeping with laughter. The aggression and arrogance of the gesture made it ridiculous. I am still laughing and he is shaking his head, muttering to himself in German. “Furchtbar ist es. Peinlich ist es. Unglaublich.”

    My stomach aches. My heart too, a little. “It’s so awful. It’s embarrassing. Unbelievable.”

  • a doll, soused

    In my pajamas at 6pm: pajamas are my favourite clothes. The phone rings. It’s a woman I spent a recent evening immersed in, such kinship, a friend who’s an acquaintance, we hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. We used once to live in the same tiny village, an island in the centre of town. “I’ve just scored free tickets for A Doll’s House, it starts at 6.30, I can pick you up on my way.” “I’m in my pajamas.” “Or you could meet me there.” So I dive through the shower and go.

    La Boite is in a playground of festival furniture, large swings built from slabs of ply painted black, projections onto a huge white screen, an outdoors bar. Under the stars. Too late arriving to be let in for the first act I take my ticket and wander. “Go up the back and read the secrets people have posted,” the lovely usher tells me in a whisper, “you can write your own secrets on a typewriter, get your nails done, get your palm read.” My friend has disappeared and gone inside. I buy a glass of wine in the pallet bar and carry it over to the palm-reading shed and read the wall. Some of the secrets are so lurid surely they must have been confected for the occasion – I can’t believe such a dark confluence of dramas has wandered past this tent, during the week of this festival. It’s my turn to get my palm read. I hold my hand out. “My name,” says the beautiful man in a top hat, “is Tawdry Heartburn.”

    The greatest drag name in all the world. He flexes his fingers round mine and asks questions. Strong, long thumb: do you like standing alone? Emotion line is deep in your palm – Oh, I know, I say – and it runs straight up this finger, the seam of intuition. Broad-handed people are across lots of areas of life. “It may be hard to finesse so many skills.” He drops his voice and confides something of his own. All the stars pricking their way across the roof of this white vinyl tent stand to attention like satellite dishes, I imagine, flowers in the dark sea of night. Salt sea polyps.

    Afterwards he draws out of his holster round the forearm, black leather, a brand-new fresh emery board. On the back is stamped his website name: this is his card. I go over to the theatre and go in. The stage is made from pallets and the second act is starting. My friend and I take seats right in front, where we can see, and be shouted over by the five actors who have each dyed their hair some lambent colour, as Ibsen insisted.

    Did Ibsen really write this way, a string of almost uninterrupted, seamlessly joined cliche? “They’ve rewritten it a bit,” my friend confides, in a whisper, and I whisper back, “Lord, I hate the theatre.” But the game comes down darkly upon us and snatches us away. At the high point where the spare actors rush out of the wings and turn the stage round like a carousel, breath is caught, time is hung. Then in the interval, climbing our way out of the palace of dark attention, I look back and see the immediate blue glow of a dozen screens. Something has happened on facebook, on twitter, on email while I’ve been gone. I’ll stand and suck my thumb, smallest and dearest of my own limbs. I will, I do.

    The music at the end is dense and scoring. It has a three/four beat behind four/four that drives it like a wagon. I stand up with everybody, groping our way back to our feet. Behind me is a face I’ve not seen since New York, a pianist who played on my album. We stand exclaiming, his date is impatient, I turn away and go over to the swing. My friend has gone to have her palm read, she says: I must go meet Tawdry. You will love her, I predict, fearlessly psychic now my palm is read. I lie full-length on the biggest swing under the scaffolding and let my heart hum its own earworm melody, unable to predict the night, sweet and buoyant waiting for the drive home, ready to greet myself, itching for paper, for a typewriter, a studio, for all New York. And Brisbane shines at night, that’s when it’s best and beautiful. Thanks Ibsen for the enduring ideas. Thanks West End for the villagers. I am tired and I drive carefully, the lion on my steering wheel yawns at me all the way home.

     

  • up in the smoke

    Something annoying I remember from the endless days of smoking and working is how ganja made me very prone to toppling off the painstaking and yet somehow effortless vertical tower of rope bridge that is composition and new invention. I so easily got sidetracked into nitty-gritty nothingry. Looking back it was as if my mind, stoned, could not readily distinguish between these two states: thus I’d be sailing along with a belly full of sailing wind, writing some glorious new tale that had never in the history of Man been told before, and my mind would go: hang on a minute, is that really how you spell epiphany? Or I would look up hours later to find I’d been bogged down somehow in the endless researches or adminiaturism, a smaller and narrower form, a kind of thinking that is usually available to any poet when they’re not stoned, when they are bored, or when they can’t actually come up with a new poem to write. It was frustrating and I’m glad not to inflict it on myself no more.

  • in The Circle

    I decided to stay home from the Writers Festival and read, all weekend, in the hammock. Yesterday I read three Mills and Boons, today I am reading a novel by Dave Eggers. The writing is so beautiful it’s almost a liquid. It is modest. It does not proclaim about itself. It’s blood temperature, so I can move through it without noticing. But every now and then I turn the page and read some startling description that has to be reread aloud, like the summing up of the book’s character Mae, offered to her by a woman sitting in a deck chair, with her eyes closed, on a boat.

    I am that woman today, moored near an island. Outside of the hammock world, which is permeable, storm clouds mass up on the horizon behind the big spiky city. The camphor laurel tree whickers and sways. A sudden gust casts down a spray of its gentle, tissuey blossoms on me, and its red-veined leaves.

    A seed falls into the seam of my book and I tilt it and shake it away. The sky is blue but clotting with piled hulks of soft-serve cloud. It’s always blue but only when lit. As I watch, it grows colder, and the blue begins to sour into a sweet daytime stay-at-home white. A lamplit day, an indoor day. I’m outdoors, slung on a sharp hilltop. Outdoors is always blue but whitening now and filigreed with the leaves’ underbellies, which churn in the wind like a school of fish, and closer to home by the large open net I am lying in. Sky in the gaps. Today my own writing is not modest, it’s first-drafty like a camp bed slung between two trees, it takes a fancy word like ‘filigree’ and cuts it right open, filleting like a fish whose screams outside the water are conveniently inaudible. The writing and the day and its transience fill me with greed and contentment. I’m full’o’greed. My thoughts are sounds that make no sense and I’m so comfortable. Outdoors, and at home, all day.

    Down the street aways two crows seem to be boasting to each other. Ark, says one. I don’t believe you, says the other. I lay the book down open on my chest. Willing to be dragged through the day by my own brain and by another brain’s writing and communion. The grey cat, who is herself a hammock, turns into herself, bristles, and sighs. Far behind the big boat of this city and its festivals I ride the churning water. A long time later I pick up the book again, wishing it was heavier and fatter. I will read to the end today, then read it again, I’m so glad and relieved that greatness exists still among us, that it won’t all die when Shirley Hazzard dies, that it didn’t all fold down into the grave with Elizabeth Gaskell and her “kindly spirit that thinks no ill [and] looks out of her pages irradiate.”

  • this wind

    Brisbane is in the grip of its Spring gales and of a morning I wake up to a back deck strewn with leaves and towels blown off the line. Yesterday sharp seed pods rained down on my head as I crossed the street. Posted out another 20 poetry books yesterday and I had the feeling if I just held them up high on a hilltop and then released them, they would fly off in all directions like rain-beaten pigeons, saving the postage.

    A hippie friend used to warn me never to try to conduct difficult conversations when it’s windy: “Too much friction.” This same person always intoned one must beware of anger because “think about it, that’s just Danger without the D.” But as songwriters point out, “Take the L out of Llama, and it’s… Lama.” I shall try agreeing with everybody about everything because: new experiences are broadening.

  • meat time

    I love how the cat comes and sits, not next to the fridge, just sort of within range… letting me know with infinite courtesy that, you know, no hurry or anything, but some people might say it’s high time for Meat Time. “Meat Time!” I say, finally noticing her where she folds like a furred god, immaculately footed. Her tail is wrapped around her legs, she is not getting in anybody else’s way, she doesn’t say a word – and not only because she has no words and little use for words, it’s because she is being polite. If I walk between her and the magic fridge, where, for all I know she knows, the meat actually grows, ready carved into fresh nibble-sized bleeding chunks, she almost falls over herself skipping to reach me – she does a little hop, like a twist, her backside and haunches still sitting on the ground while her eager front feet have set off in the opposite direction. She reminds me of comics in old movies who say, “They went… thaddaway!” pointing two fingers in two directions. I let the chunks of flesh fall into her bowl. I’ve given up moving the old hair elastic that is her beloved and her prey, which every day ends up dropped into her empty dish. I hadn’t given up wondering why she would drag it over there once she’s done chasing and torturing the poor thing, then one day it dawned on me: oh. This is her eating place, where she would drag the corpse of her intended supper if she weren’t a soft little domestic possum-murderer. That worn elastic is her prey.