Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: funny how

  • alone at last

    I have this really long poem which I have rewritten decisively – indecisively – thoroughly over about four or five years. It’s five pages long and it’s called Reaching for the Remote – about our longing despite celibacy for gods. Did I say celibacy? I mean atheism. This poem is one of three reasons the book I completed six years back cannot yet be published. It’s infuriating. I love the book. I want to hold it in my hand. Its title strikes me as genius, listen up: Comb the Sky with Satellites, It’s Still a Wilderness.

    The other two reasons are a poem called We and Yet We, about colonialism, which I rewrote yesterday and think I may finally have wrestled to the mat, and the cover, which is made from salvaged cement bags, which I have sourced and designed and all of that only I cannot find anyone who can print in full colour on this brown-paper surface. Anyway today I dragged out all six major versions of the poem. I set them all side by side on my tiny screen. I made a big pot of tea and banished the cat. I set to work. Mumbling aloud and compiling slowly like an ant dragging large crumbs of earth these ideas which stand larger than I do, weaving them all in the way they seem (today) to best speak for each other. Like a entire school called before the headmaster and no one will dob anyone in. Anyway I’ve done it. I read it three times. My eyes are swimming, my brain is numb. I think I have completed it, I’m so pleased and relieved, now the book can go ahead. Or it could be just today. You know how you need to leave things several weeks to be sure they aren’t playing tricks on you.

  • drawing from life

    Went to my first life drawing class in eight years. Boy, was that challenging. For one thing, the models were clad rather than naked and I had never tried to draw drapery before. Also, they were never still. The organisers of this local class had asked a hairdresser who operates across the road to bring his barber’s chair and give someone a haircut, on the dais, so that we could sketch them. He had mutton chop whiskers down the one side of his face and on the other temple the tattoo of a flame, which very much resembled a matching sideburn. When he took his shirt off for the longer poses people gasped. Rioting pin-up girls and 50s bathing beauties disported themselves on shoulders and back. I fingered my unpierced earlobes uneasily. How do people get up the nerve to do that to themselves?

    Our barber seemed to regard tattoo decisions as some kind of impulse buy. He pointed out one and another that he had thought better of; one arm was almost entirely blacked over to rid him of some ‘tribal’ tatts he no longer wanted. He’s going to get it drawn over again with white ink. I didn’t know you could do that. His hair was immaculately waxed and the volunteer, once done, looked natty too. Gorgeous boys. I was drawing and drawing. Trying to get the hang of it. Remembering snippets my last teacher had told us: like, Don’t draw the outline, the outline doesn’t exist. Draw the bulk, the heft, the volume, the weight. Because we were seated in the round people ended up as backdrops in one another’s drawings. At the break everybody got up and circled, pointing out pieces they likes and taking photographs. Slowly it dawned on me some of our efforts would be mounted on the group’s Facebook page. Last time I drew, phones were not smart. Facebook didn’t exist. There was no one to hear you in space when you screamed with frustration at the immense difficulty of the line, that doesn’t exist, the weight and the heft, which must be almost felt as much as seen, and the flicking sound one’s eyes make reading the page and then the figure, the figure then the page.

  • fight for your right to part ways for the night

    My boyfriend and I had a huge fight and I went storming into a bar and ordered a dirty martini. I was wearing a big scarlet onesie with a Danish flag down the back, had jumped out of the car and wasn’t dressed for city life. This blonde girl came up to me, drunk on her swaying heels. “Excuse me. Are you a musician?” I started to laugh. “Is it the ugg boots?”

  • eBaying at the moon

    Hooray, I just perfected a new & absolutely unexpected skill. You know when you have to write blurb for a festival or a book release and it is so so painful to describe Oneself, One’s Own Work, argh, and you end up with something stilted, awkward, embarrassed & bland…. Well I just listed some old fur coats & suede jackets on eBay for the first time, cos I’m living in the tropics and will never get to wear their sweet soft savoury selves again. Wahh. I put it off and put it off and put it off again. Then tonight I opened an account and did them all in a rush & I’m so proud! Turns out I have a flair for cheery & honest descriptions of old clothes. How bizarre. Check em out:

    * This inimitable jacket saw me through a freezing February in New York City. Recording my album I felt I was channeling Janice Joplin. People came up to me in the street to talk about the jacket! New York men adored it. Wild and hairy, from real sheepskin, unlined, undyed, hand sewn, raw and untamed. It is open down the front and in great condition. Hip length on me and I’m 6 foot tall.

    * I love this little cape. It fastens snugly round your neck and hangs free over the shoulders. Lovingly hand sewn by some 1960s fashionista and aspiring superhero who just loved sequins. Splashed across the lower back is a spray of gleaming flowers in crimson and cream sequins. It is dashing. And no matter how far you look, you’ll never find one like it. Ooh la la!

    * Probably made for a man but it looks ravishing on cool girls, this suede jacket in rich cinnamon was styled by the then no doubt famous Simon Kessel Australian Design Collection. Gorgeous labels in good condition still stitched into the nutmeg satin lining. Handstitched pockets with a faintly cowboy feel are perfect for slouching about it. This baby will take you places. Grab your fedora and shine up your Cuban heels: when you slip this on it’s gonna feel like you’ve worn it forever.

    I had put off dealing with this pile of clothes for I dunno, maybe two months. To have done them, and to feel I have done right by them, gives me the most luminescent feeling.

  • vegemite kid

    One’s German companion begins to assimilate. He is working his way through a jar of Vegemite, observing that it contains the exact same colouring as Coca-Cola: 150c. “The trouble with Vegemite,” he says, scraping the traces of its oily residue into his gullet to clean the butter knife, “is it kind of contaminates the knife. You really wouldn’t want it to end up in the strawberry jam.”

    “Ugh,” I say, “no,” thinking of my brother with his webbed feet who used to eat one big bite of his toast with Vegemite and then four tiny bites of his other toast with honey. But Vegemite and honey, like honey with soy sauce, is in a special class of its own. We are on our verandah where the morning sun slants across the houses and I am gazing dreamily at the near corner of our block, a shady spot under the camphor laurel, where the rusted star picket has trapped a flapping shard of paper. “In Germany of course,” he says, “some people eat liverwurst with marmalade.” I put my cup of tea down and stare at it. The milk has turned it to the exact colour, pinkish and intimate, of liverwurst. Life is disgusting and here we are in its midst, chewing and swallowing, digesting and turning everything to shit. Sitting so pretty and containing all the world in minute, pulsing, cellular form, thinking our slow morning thoughts and and gazing at the sun.

  • this cat the sun

    I think this cat’s favourite person is the sun. She believes everything he tells her and is willing to let him whisper into her belly and long ears for hours. I don’t think she realises he is distant, to her he is close. And I don’t believe she cares that he sprawls his favours indiscriminately. He is her sun and that’s all that matters here.

  • superpow

    I think maybe my superpower is interfering in other people’s lives. I pick up their rubbish. I make faces to cheer up their miserable kids. Not only do I do it but I feel like it’s my perfect right, kazam, kerpow. We went out for dumplings. The table next door were depressing. He sat sprawled in his own homeroom slump, scrolling endlessly through the blackened thicket of his fascinating phone, actually holding the device up to his face while she ate stoically from a bowl of poached pork gyoza so that the back of the phone covered half his face, a carneval mask. The girl pulled out her wallet at the end of the evening. I said, Excuse me. Politely she leaned over. The boy was in earshot. I said, You’re really beautiful. And you seem interesting. Her eyes came to life. Thank you! she said, warmly. I said, I think you deserve a better relationship than one where the guy drizzles through his phone all night while you are out with him. And I wanted to tell you that. Ok, she said, um, fair enough. Thank you. We walked home slowly in the light dark rain and passed two signs that reminded us of underpants. One was an A-frame set out sturdily in front of a kebab house, and the other hung from the awning of an old shop now a restaurant. I said, pointing, does that photograph remind you of underpants? The photograph was of a segment of Grecian columns. Yes! he said. With the… and the way it sort of… Exactly, I said, lengthening my stride. Underpants.

  • The Rover

    Last night I saw an amazing film. It uses South Australia as a post-Collapse landscape, compellingly. The Rover. Apart from the number of actors being shot dead at point-blank range with no warning, I found it beautiful and strange. The credits rolled and I leaned forward eagerly, trying to see who had made all that intricate and baffling music. The guy in front had pulled out his phone and was already deeply immersed in his messages. That the world could collapse while you’re in the cinema, in the dark, unable to do a thing to prevent it or hinder it. That by staying on top of the endless loop of chatter and information masquerading as insight, you could prevent this. Well, I guess at least if you never really live, presumably you can never die.

  • the stolid inability to learn

    Somehow I just made enough dahl for twelve people. There’s two of us. Similarly every time I make a cup of tea I pour in just too much boiling water so that when you get to adding the honey & the milk it either slops over just a little, or else you have to lean in and apply a hot, furry sip with lots of breath in it before lifting the cup and carrying it to the desk. Every time it’s a surprise, I was convinced it would all fit. I’d like to think this is my generous nature. But it could be I just lack a grasp of basic physics.

  • on not being a brand

    Had to write a blurb about myself – a bio – for Queensland Poetry Festival. Oh, the horror. Describing oneself & talking about one’s work… is there anything yukkier. I hammered out a couple hundred words, only to discover I had been too verbose (who whuddha thunk?) and they needed a brief 100 words for the website & for the programme, an even briefer 25.

    25 words! There is a reason I suck at Twitter. The deadline was rife. In a crowded wifi cafe I pulled something out from under my hat and I feel so boastful about it. Whaddaya think?

    100 WORDS: “2014 sees two new releases from Cathoel. Her new poetry collection is hailed by Robert Adamson as the work of ‘a born poet.’ The debut album of Cathoel & the New Government was recorded in New York, Melbourne, and at home, by a collective of twenty-eight jazz, folk, and funk musicians. 50s impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford on first hearing Hey, Big Splendour said, ‘In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.’ Even fresher new work can be found at houseoflovers.com.”

    25 WORDS (woot!): “Cathoel writes poetry and jazz. Robert Adamson says, ‘a born poet.’ Overland journal call her ‘a first-rate artist at work.’”