Steams and Exhalations

Status of My Life Address [27/04/2009]

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:55:48 +0700

[1]. Today I am 27 years old on the 27^th day of the month. 27; the number of current amendments to the US Constitution, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the age at which Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Alain-Fournier died. There are 27 bones in the human hand and 27 member states in the European Union. I was born when my father was 27 years old which makes this the only remaining year when his age will be exactly double mine (unless he lives to be 108). When Dad was 27 the Falklands War was just beginning, he was working as an electrician installing emergency lights into the stairwells of skyscrapers in London, and he listened to Dire Straits on Capital FM. At age 27 today's news covered the outbreak of Swine Influenza in Mexico, the United States and New Zealand, I am still studying for my PhD and I listen to the music that I've most recently downloaded.

I have been feeling a bit apprehensive about this birthday. All birthday celebrations have something of the apotropaic about them, a mealy cake offered to the hungry world as bargain for the birthday-ee's continued safety and luck, but this 27^th seems particularly charged. A distinct geometric motif speaks to the feeling - that this is a hinge year. A corner is coming up fast and I've no idea if the momentum means to push me nose-first into a hard plane, or turn me out into some new landscape. The edginess of things.

[2]. I am living in Perth, in the house on a steep hill that belongs to my parents. The incline makes it difficult to get out of a car. Postmen weave up the centre of the road throwing handfuls of mail in the vicinity of the houses because if they stop, their bikes roll backwards and topple. The plants I grow slip two inches down the hill every year, peeling back fresh garden-bed at the top of the block in Spring. I had intended to move out on returning from Holland last year, but with my PhD thesis due in December and no sensible share-house room becoming available I have negotiated a compassionate rate of board to stay here until the end of the year. I have partially converted the upstairs bedroom that used to belong to LG into a kind of study space and I am sleeping in the basement. During the day I work with an eye cast to the garden and the blind collie we keep, who walks into walls and fights ghost-cats. I talk to her through the open window and she flicks her brow the way dogs do, searching for the hand that matches the voice. Her sense of audible distance is impaired now too.

In some ways this the ideal work environment - insulated and isolated. In other ways, it is a lonely place. The dog doesn't like to be inside anymore and usually there are no other people walking along the suburban street during the day. Routines establish, decay and re-establish. A month ago a dry windstorm came down the coast during a green-waste collection, when all the heavy litter was laid on the verges. I was trying to hose the front lawn (useless, backwards water-flowers) when a child's playhouse, what used to be called a Wendy House, came hurtling down the street as if it were on coasters. It crashed into a electricity pole near the bottom of the hill in a spectacular chrysanthemum of splinters. But no one else was there to see it with me, except the unseeing dog. All night the stumbling of air currents, the wind with its feet stuck in its trousers. These are the sorts of days I like here. Today is a bright still day, the sky a colour only nature has language for. Clouds come in like rays in the evening. Last year the weather was colder.

The Important Things from 2008

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 12:01:45 +0700

A room of The Important Things for 2008 is here The Important Things from 2007 The Important Things from 2006

Daub on the First Page

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:29:56 +0700

I've been doing a bit of painting over the last few weeks, trying to create something to accompany a piece of written work titled 'The Water Library' appearing in the splendid anthology 'First Page', an upcoming release from the publishing wing of Love Is My Velocity. I wanted to make it seem as if water was welling up through the pages of the book in breaks between the text, whilst at the same time the viewer got further and further away so that in the end it appeared that you were looking at an abstract river-delta from a plane or satellite. Of course, I'd completely forgotten just how long it takes and how meticulous you have to be when hand painting, so I only managed to do three works plus the title page. I really enjoyed working with a visual medium though, and am now thinking of making some collages or taking some photographs in the future. Such a therapeutic few weeks; Iron and Wine on the stereo, ultramarine and phthalo green under my nails and in my hair, the feeling of achievement having completed it. It might not look like much, but I'm happy with it. In this one you can't really see, but the white parts are cut-out using a scalpel. First Page will be launched on August 2 at The Bakery. I'll post more about the book and its amazing contributors then.

Status of My Life Address [27/04/2008]

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:48:55 +0700

a. Today I am 26 years old; the atomic number of iron, the age at which you can no longer be drafted into the United States armed forces, the number of the letters in the alphabet if you don't count capitals separately. Sometimes when I reflect on this age I feel quite young and green. Other times, when I reflect that it has been a decade since I turned sixteen, I feel quite old. I wish I'd written a S.o.M.L.A when I was sixteen so that I could remember what my dreams and aspirations were then. b. I am currently living in the basement of my parent's house, having moved from my home near the park about a month ago. The reasons for the move were threefold - the priority reason being financial (so that I can save enough money to go and visit my sister in Holland later in the year), secondarily concerning my studies (the downhill run of my postgrad thesis) and thirdly to re-centre after twelve intense months. Here I live with the geckos and the centipedes underground. Last night I found a beetle the size of my thumb between the sheets. I like all the small life here, the crawling and the clicking things. A legless lizard lives in the shower and a jumping spiders inhabit the drawers. Where ever I work now it seems that the outside world wants to get in to see me. Within the first week of moving here my father broke the big window that looks in on the study upstairs and so I worked for a week amongst the finely shattered glass and the weather. At my old house last winter the air-conditioner just fell out of wall as I was typing, leaving a gapping hole. Sometimes I think I should just take my laptop and sit in the dirt. It is quiet here. It is not a suburb made for walking. All the verges run down to the road. The phrase 'speed traps', a locution from my primary-school years, comes to mind as I wander around the contorting streets. There are many new houses being built. They start with the basements, deep pits in the ground set with cages of electrical wiring and thin water pipes. The roots of the houses going back into the earth. Later come house-skeletons with coils of insulated cable hanging from the rafters - all the loose vein-work. I miss living with MMM, DL & SB by the park for so many reasons, but I can see the advantages of being sequestered off in this (bricked) basement. I am trying not to be a child here, I am trying to better my relationship with my parents in adulthood. I do not think I am doing a good job in that respect. I often wonder how it would be if we could not live in the same city, if I didn't hear a passing 'how you doing there doll?' once a week. One advantage to having returned home after such a long period living elsewhere is that all the foibles of your family you assumed were solely meant to aggravate you have actually been going on in your absence uninterrupted - so you can accept them as nothing to do with you. My parents are renovating the front of the house at the moment. In the middle of the day I open the garage door and discover workmen sprawled asleep like road crash victims on the concrete. c. I am currently sitting on the sofa in the front room. It is a ship of a sofa; wide and deep. Outside the clouds are hairy and threatening rain. This morning I ate breakfast at Aubergines in Fremantle and then drove up to the brainsick house in Beard Street, and quickly past it twice. I wanted to take some photos but I'd forgotten my camera. My neck is stiff and seems to creak if I move my head too sharply. Probably this is from laptop over-use. There is old French jazz playing in the distance, which I am enjoying. I am wearing black tights, a dress with orange leaves on it, a thick scarf and the bird earrings that twin a pair L has in Holland. My toenails are painted plum and my hair is newly dyed a chestnut/auburn. I still have all my limbs, all my digits and the ganglion in my left wrist.

The Bombmaker's Lover

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:22:18 +0700

From Cottonmouth last night The bomb-maker has her hot heart, shining like a new tomato, in the cage of his fingertips, and he is binding it into a trap of wires. Cruelly casual about the crust of sawdust it slips, and it skids and he, [gasp] catches it in his shirt. Her delicate aorta a mortar to be handled glass-ishly. It is small, plum-sized her heart. Watching her lover red-handed she considers that it would pump an ocean if left to its own devices. The unshelled crab of her heart would nosedive from the work-bench, crawl over the linoleum and seek a Pacific of love. Her heart swells, when she sees him leaving the bathroom in the morning carrying the spine of a bell pepper that he has eaten in the shower. But in the twists of the fastenings it just seems so stunted, such an undernourished organ. There he says as he slots it back between her ribs I have reinforced your heart against all known shockwaves, you are built against many types of modern violence. At quiet night, inside her body's muscle clicking blood nicking chorus, she notices that the alloyed heart softly ticks, like a old record left turning after the song is finished. The bomb-maker has her teeth, unusual mineral sharps out in a line on the mattress and he is setting in tiny detonators. He looses a molar, forgets their order sucks absently on an canine as if it were a boiled sweet. Her kiss will list to one side of his face, the incisors have their claws down. But she thinks, my teeth will sing, bleaching the sheets in the sun. She thinks, they will ring like tuning forks when I tap them together. my mouth will be full of song and sparks my palette will split bright syllables and my children will be born with egg-teeth. Like snakes. Her mouth sizzles with the unstable electricity of just-woken bones in the morning. And when they are lip pressed in that dim hour she is avoiding the dark dreams that have fallen into the back of his throat overnight. Here he says screwing the teeth back into her gums Each of these is new polished, sequin obscene smile your laughter will be radioactive, leaving no one un magnetised. Drinking green tea one morning she burns the fleshy node between her two front teeth and discovers diamond-shrapnel hidden there. The Bombmaker puts helium in her food, fills her with the noble elements makes her back crooked with welding and combs dynamite dust through her hair in the evenings. With each small repair she is aware that he is making her minutely more perfect. Her fingernails are grenade pins. Her footsoles are landmines. All the batteries in the town drain down. They count bus-stops, they swim between the sea-mines. Small nuclear clouds clutter the air like the pastel ghosts of jellyfish. And here's what the bombmakers' lover knows: that clinical strikes and spasm wars, and sensory deprevation are just other words for us, And that in love we are all a cluster bomb. They light a fuse. They blow the lights out.

Some Night Thoughts from the Rooftops of Contemporary Fried Food Eateries.

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:01:59 +0700

Storm Clouds by Kasi Metcalfe

Here accumulate the drifts of seeds and dust carried by the desiccating wind. The gutters are heavy with felty weeds and plants as sharp as shattered glass. This week I read that in Shegeg Karo, Darfur, they are eating the burrs. Subsisting for weeks by consuming a sparse barbed-wire salad that they scrape up from the ground there. The children suck on prickles for hours; mock-lollies that crosshatch their tongues with lacerations. How plush then, this accidental hanging garden on the concrete rooftop in Perth. What opulent nature - almost obscene, the turfless grasp of plants. Wild peas seem to be growing in the window seals, everlastings clinging to the brickwork. There is grass, plush around the chimneys and spreading out a green, fraying rug. A lawn grown deep on airborne chicken fats in the effluvium. Commercially sized tins, Long-Life Deep Frying Oil, are stored in stacks. I consider for a moment whether that means the oil is long-life or if, once battered and fried, the label applies to the underlying product. A crispy giblet in the shape of John Lennon’s head under a bell-jar on the mantelpiece. Bullet-proof for years. Batter artefact. Crackling token. Shall I kick these tins to see if they are full? There is a dry electrical storm gathering the skeins of cloud. The sky is bronze foam. My fillings buzz inside my mouth. Tapping my teeth together causes car alarms to go off. At home my bedroom has only a skylight and no windows so when the first vein of lightning quivered through the sky, the transparent part of my ceiling flashed white and turned everything into a photographic negative. For a moment I thought there was a hole in the roof. Or a huge aluminium bird flapping about up there. The second time I could see through my hands and the walls. 2 am, after a night spent getting narrower and narrower in thoughts, sleepless under the wash of the pedestal fan. So with the weather performing a nice act of anthropomorphic fallacy, it seemed only right to go out walking in the tiniest hours of the morning. OH PATHOS! howled the sky. A Shakespearian night, “blow you cataracts and hurricanoes!. THIS WAY IS UP! Screamed the clouds. SINGE YOUR HEADS! Was I actually still asleep? What dramaturgy is this?

The Important Things From 2007

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:43:00 +0700

The important things from 2007 are here. 2008 remains an unknown, but promising quantity.

Object Lessons.

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:08:52 +0700

If you are skull-dragging and out of inspiration this week, mosey over to :: Object Not Found :: and check out the museum of found letters, postcards, photos and wall-writing kept there. The glass-cases are dusted down by curator Damien Frost of Sticky Gum, who might even let you upload your own objects if you’re nice to him. My personal favourites are the notes to future readers scribbled down on the inside covers of second-hand or library books. “Yo Dunc. A perfect book for the blind. Be informed that I am a ghost from a well-known cemetery. And is that a whole goanna pressed between the pages? Looking at the site I suddenly remembered that under the floorboards of an old house in Wembley Lucy and I had stowed a time-capsule with imagined letters written by the ghosts of the dead children of the future (it was probably found on the first termite inspection - our open alphabet, the childish A’s and E’s, giving us away). “To whoever finds this. You have uncorked a ghost" I think it said. Mind you, ghosts in a bottle are a dime a dozen on ebay these days. We liked to leave our traces as children, to bury trinkets in the alley or hide our objet d'arts (invariably made from toothpicks, grass knots and old toast) in the crooks of fig trees. The love notes on the Object Not Found site still hold their voltage, evidence of abandoned intimacies and broken trysts. Next time I write a love letter I don’t mean to send I’m not going to hit delete or screw it into a fist and put it in the household bin. I’m going to leave it, folded neatly in some inconspicuous public space. Maybe between the slats of a bus stop bench, or buried in a coffee sack at Kakulas. Imagine all those words that we have in our repositories – too charged for us to keep, too confidential to let go. Rip off the by-line I say! Free-range objects set to inspire their finders.

Alchemy (with props to Kevin Stein’s ‘Tract’).

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:15:21 +0700

William Lesch - 'Wave Five'.

This entry’s subject is the burnt beach, under a cut ginger sky, at 7 pm last night. You saw it. The front came in over Scarborough, irriguous with wet ink and moving towards the city. Dry lightning crackled through the smog, wrinkling over the foil of the sea. Fish that were electrocuted in middle-distance showed their bellies like a flotilla of illegal medical waste. This entry does not concern itself with the latent goods of that scene; with its tumescence and augur. All the author wishes to convey is that it was good weather for sharks. A hundred heads in the wash and inside every head the silky shadow of a hammerhead. A hundred shark-fictions cutting channels in the glass facades of waves. The author held her breath beneath the breaker and distilled some thoughts about human nature. Pushing off the seafloor those semi-transparent sharks bumped her, tipped her, nosed her under. She felt their rusting skins against her skin. She took their wood-grain grazes, their stinging abrasions. This entry does not draw parallel between these skins and boundaries, or littorals, or the promise of death in the amniotic fluid of the sea. Out on the beach objects holding their heat were starting to sigh, shrugging off their body temperatures and de-anthropomorphising. For which there should be a word. The air thrummed like a bloodstream. Boys, shadow-board Kings, ran around the Araucaria trees – four-lettered howls when their soles met the sharp nuts in the grass. The backbones of grape clusters and chip packets the strewn wreckage of their lunches. The author ate apples as hard as cats’ hearts with a salty mouth. This entry does not care to draw attention to the essential democracy of the beach, to the socio-political potential of suitless, uniformless, hard-hatless people, or the way that their hottest thoughts boil off while the sun sets and their talk opens out, finding different tributaries. All the author wishes to convey is that the smell of sunscreen mixed with the marrow scent of an unbroken storm is a dense aphrodisiac. Cicadas unzipped the night. Darkness came up like silt. A slow granulation of the scene from beyond the horizon. An atlas of sand stuck to her calves and each step broke continents into new archipelagos. The streetlights were soft areola, hazed with insects. Reader, do not ponder what it means to feel wholly contained within a landscape. To see it for one moment as an ultra-sound of all that has yet to come for you. This entry’s subject is only the burnt beach, under a cut ginger sky, at 7 pm last night. Marginalia: 1. ‘Grey Nurse’ has to be one of the most evocative names for an animal ever brought into English nomenclature, don’t you think? 2. I’ve been trying to find a link to some footage I saw on the SBS news the other day of a bushfire that encircled about twenty people, including the camera man, and forced them to walk out into the ocean. It’s a really eerie sequence: they’re standing at hip-depth, in their clothes, and the fire is right on the beachfront, sending out rolling waves of smoke over the water. If anyone knows where I might see that again, please jot me a line. Ta.

Adopt-a-Vortex

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:20:43 +0700

In the aftermath of tropical cyclones Floyd and Glenda in the Pilbara last year The Chaser ran a sketch about corporate naming rights to weather systems. In the sketch Julian Morrow approaches NAB, AWB, the ALP and others offering to sell them the branding rights to the next major cyclone (‘Glenda’ being, after all, a name that conjures up canteen-lady-in-orthopaedic-shoes-and-a-lilac-rinse, not potentially razing natural catastrophe – although I doubt that anyone out on the rigs had that image in their heads during the storms). If you felt a certain sadness that the Chaser boys didn’t coming knocking at your office door, if somewhere deep in the atoms of your heart you thought how nice it would be if one day your name came up on the cyclonic register, you can wipe away that frown! You can now Adopt-A-Vortex! That’s right, for the equivalent of $AUD317.73-$477.40, you can buy the rights to name a European weather cell. The price range accords with whether you want to adopt a high or a low pressure system. Interestingly, the lows are cheaper despite the fact that they produce the most impressive weather. The guidelines for names are relatively generous and the whole transaction is concluded by means of facsimile (if the name is ‘free’ and has not yet been claimed) or by ebay bidding if more than one individual wants to claim a specific name. Once you’ve purchased your vortex you can follow its origin, course and demise on the German Institute of Meteorology website. After the destruction is complete and your vortex has devolved from fire-raining tempest into a simpering eddy on the corner of the map, you are provided with a birth certificate and a post-mortem document that diarises its short and terrible life. Nothing says I love you like the coroner’s report on a vortex named after your loved one or your favourite pet! “I made that sunset for you", you can whisper one lazy night on the beach, knowing that your personal vortex is building a soft metropolis in the sky to be torn into a storm the next morning. Think of the potential to find romance in climatic apocalypse! Swooning against your lover under skies rent asunder by your namesakes. The kiss of your low and high pressures manifest in bright bolts of actual symbolic allegory! Or, alternatively, take pleasure in seeing your vortex chew on the ruins of your enemies - lightning nests, earthquake weather, firewinds are all newly at your disposal! Unfortunately it seems that the current foster parents of vortexes do not share my vision for the potential of naming their progeny. The most recent name for a low pressure system? Lupus'. The firmament as autoimmune disease. I suppose that it could be stretched to dovetail with the whole Gaia hypothesis in the context of global warming and extreme weather conditions, but seriously, lupus? Or maybe there’s something quasi-voodoo going on there, whereby someone actually suffering lupus has given that name to a cyclone in an attempt to purge the illness from their body in the same way that cancer suffers will name their tumours ‘Egbert’ or ‘Marla’. I am, however, looking forward to cyclone Ralph and the Otto blizzards of 2008… The naming of weather cells seems to me to be just another step along the continuum of anthropomorphising the natural world and correlatively, trying to bring it under our overt control as an agent of culture. Privatising that process further impels the belief that this is possible. Just as only cartography can render local usage into international standard, the institutions of meteorology play a much larger role in universalising discourses about the weather than merely predicting its local manifestations. Is radical meteorology the next logical progression from radical cartography? Certainly surreal things are already happening in the world of government-sponsored weather modification. In Russia they seed the clouds with chemical reagents to prevent it raining in the capital on national holidays. As far back as the Goodwill Games in 1994 Saint Petersburg’s Geophysics Observatory was involved in ‘cloudbusting’, to keep the sun shining over competitors. And if you really want to read something vertigo-inspiring, sit down with a G & T and peruse “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, a report actioned by the US Airforce in 1996. It covers the hard science as to how drought might be instigated in drug-producing regions, how fog might be rolled in to obscure sensitive military activities and how storm systems can confer technological advantages on a force with better surveillance equipment. Most awe-inspiring, it looks at the uses of near-space in modifying the weather. And this was 1996.

TNC Issue 6

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:38:15 +0700

Hey, you know how in Mawkish Things I used to accompany the launch of every New Critic edition with a quotation? Some people have asked me whether the quotes relate to the editions specifically. The answer is no, they're just little fragments of what I'm reading at the moment that have been pencil-underlined for being somehow relevant to some other current event or internal argument I'm having with myself at that point in time. Thanks for asking though. Glad to have cleared that up. "We know about the social and political void preceding election day. Every initiative is postponed, the bets are made, rien ne va plus, society is already frostbitten in advance. ... Every political power tries hard to freeze society through this electoral suspense, the ecstasy of the ballot or survey." Baudrillard, The Anorexic Ruins from Looking Back at the End of the World, which I had cause to re-visit yesterday looking for another traunt essay of his. New Edition of T.N.C is here. We're currently interviewing for Editors to round off the panel in DR's absence, if anyone wants to raise their hand? You will need to be in some way associated with the U.W.A academy, have a background in the liberal arts and have the time to chase writers, and be willing to do it as a volunteer. We're also, as always, looking for writers who are willing to do longer works on matters of public import.

Friday Morning Book Porn.

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:38:18 +0700

There are small moments of delight along the long, stony road of my thesis. Today I thought I would share with you three of my favourite second-hand book treasures that I have rescued from the furring shelves of dark rooms over the last month. See how they mew and ask to be thumbed-through?

National Young Writers' Festival / T.I.N.A Newcastle 2007 (Diary Extracts)

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:16:23 +0700

(i)
So swiftly we are inducted into the eccentricity of this long weekend! We arrive in Syd., eyes crimped and bloodshot like nocturnal marsupials tipped out of a sack, and within an hour we are nearly involved in a drive-by booking. The sudden rubber-shriek of tyres catapults my heart up my oesophagus to nestle like an unshelled crab underneath my brain. In my peripheral vision I register that someone has pitched a fat paperback at high velocity out of a car window. It hits a pedestrian in the ribs with a loud SMACK. He collapses on the pavement with the book hugged to his chest. The asphalt currents roll us forwards, our heads swivelled back, trying to ascertain what has just happened. Was that the new Harry Potter? SW asks. No one stops to help the mark. I suspect science-fiction pulp. There’s another conference going on this week in Wollongong where they will be talking about the future of Space Opera. Perhaps this is the future of Space Opera – ‘Lessons We Have Leant from Organised Crime’. A few days later during a round-table, I am asked to name other industries that Spoken Word might borrow distribution networks or collaborative structures from. I think about offering the book-by as a model, but ultimately keep it under my tongue and say only ‘Graphic Novels’. In the kind of bizarre symmetry this week is built for, at the very end of my stay I will find myself reading aloud from Inuit fairytales at the Newtown Train Station, feeling not much like a busker and more like a street corner drug-dealer (such is the quality of these particular fairytales). Literature then can indeed take instruction from malfeasance. Expect Boomtown to be named in future writer-kidnappings.

(ii)
Is PP a freemason? As we walk past a building with the square-and-compass-logo on it (itself a curious diversion – are the freemasons in New South Wales a more commercial entity? They certainly seem to own some prime real estate), PP remarks to no one in particular, ‘the consolidation of all plots’. Then he stares off into the glassy jet-gas sky for a moment. I try to catch SW’s eye and see if he is thinking the same thing, but he is taking pictures with real film. What would it mean if PP was a freemason? Isn’t he a bit young to be a freemason? What if more people that I know, who work in the creative industries in Perth, are freemasons? I’ve never met any freemasons, although I was once a guest of Apex in Geraldton and I think that they had a secret handshake. Does that mean that I have inadvertently been employed by a sub-branch of the freemasons? When we go past Druid House PP makes a comment that they’re renting space on the top floor and that it would be a good place for a Concrete Org office. Phew, I think, taking consolation from the fact that he can’t be both a freemason and a druid. I watch him closely for signs of cultist-tendencies for the rest of the trip. Once, when he is ordering a ginger beer I think I spy a hand-gesture pass between him and the barman. But maybe that was Newcastle for ‘where is my change?’ or ‘Don’t you sell sandwiches? Where are the sandwiches?’

Bec's Latest Lingual Obsession: The Lion-Eating Poet in Stone

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 09:41:46 +0700

For Cathy, one of my favourite spooks, on the occasion of her leaving us for San Fran. Whatever part of the Military Industrial Complex you're about to occupy Cath, please don't go all Oppenheimer on us. I refuse to believe all this dunderklumpin-rubbish about you being only in R&D. "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is linguists' intellectual lemonade. While at work this evening I've been bathing in the sub-audible cerebral fizz, ignoring customers and trying in vain to mouth the words. Also something about buffalos, but more on that in a moment. The text is written by Zhao Yuanren and consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years have resulted in a large degree of homophony in Classical Chinese, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible when spoken out in Putonghua or when written romanised. The following is the text in Hanyu Pinyin and Chinese characters. Pinyin orthography recommends writing numbers in Arabic numerals, so the number shí would be written as 10. « Shī Shì shí shī shi» Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shi shì, shi shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shi shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shi shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shi shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì. Here I would put the Chinese script, but I suspect Movable Type doesn't support it because it keeps inserting these little diamonds with question marks in them, so instead here is the Pinyin Transcription of the Vernacular Chinese «Shī Shì chī shīzi jì» Yǒu yí wèi zhù zài shíshì l de shīrén jiào Shī Shì, ài chī shīzi, juéxīn yào chī shí zhī shīzi. T chángcháng qù shìchǎng kàn shīzi. Shí diǎnzhng, gnghǎo yǒu shí zhī shīzi dào le shìchǎng. Nà shíhòu, gnghǎo Shī Shì yě dào le shìchǎng. Ta kànjiàn nà shí zhī shīzi, biàn fàng jiàn, bǎ nà shí zhī shīzi sha si le. Ta shí qi nà shí zhī shīzi de shīti, dài dào shíshì. Shíshì shī le shui, Shī Shì jiào shìcóng bǎ shíshì ca gan. Shíshì ca gan le, ta cái shìshi chī nà shí zhī shīzi. Chī de shíhòu, cái faxiàn nà shí zhī shīzi, yuánlái shì shí zhī shítou de shīzi shīti. Shìshi jiěshì zhè jiàn shì ba. Meaning in English: In a stone den was a poet Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten. He often went to the market to look for lions. At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market. At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market. He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die. He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den. The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it. After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions. When he ate, he realized that those ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses. Try to explain this matter. Yes. It's quite beautiful and curious even in English. I think that in Chinese it works on the same basis as the "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" conundrum in English, wherein that sentence is grammatically correct if you take into account that the word 'buffalo' can be (a) the place in New York (b) the animal (c) the verb - as in to bully or intimidate. [Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [that] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo). [Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo. Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Cathy, did you know that they say that although the Golden Gate bridge towers are absolutely plumb vertical, their tops are a centimetre further apart than their bases? The curvature of the Earth. You're off to an amazing place. I will come visit soon and we can go to McSweeneys. Until then, wishing you buffalos and lion-eating poets. Yum, said the Poet

A Schism of the New

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:19:03 +0700

Welcome to Steams & Exhalations, the newest electronic scrapbook in my moving portfolio. I previously blogged at Mawkish Things, which has now been archived to here. Steams & Exhalations is hosted by The Concrete Organisation, a collective of writers, thinkers, photo-journalists, agitators and creative moguls who share a common attachment to Perth, Western Australia. So, in order to test the settings of my glittering white screen, here...is....a....post.