January 2012
5 posts
2 tags
Joan Didion's Packing List
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts 2 jerseys or leotards 1 pullover sweater 2 pair shoes stockings bra nightgown, robe slippers cigarettes bourbon bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil
To Carry:
mohair throw typewriter 2 legal pads and pens files house key
This is a list which was taped...
Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight, by Jane...
I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.
Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.
I heard myself thinking, It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.
Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.
Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.
2 tags
Worst suburb names in Brisbane
Beenleigh
Bald Hills
Browns Plains
Cornubia
Boondal
Runcorn
Deception Bay
Geebung
Shailer Park
Burpengary
December 2011
10 posts
NYE
Polka dots, polenta chips and fish cakes, Absinthe, friendly taxi drivers, primary school alumni all grown up (but still playing in schoolyards), a paper folding fan, secret passwords, positive/negative body language, three graces lovely from afar and obnoxious up close, “78% NARCISSIST!”, romance in the veggie patch.
2 tags
Home for Christmas
My elderly black cat is turning red.
Solstice
It is possible to walk around in the sunshine well into the evening. A man seated on the tram catches me looking at his cone of ice-cream. He has been holding it aloft and ignoring the vanilla drips as if to convey it was somehow accidental that he bought a soft serve and then boarded a tram.
Strolling up Brunswick Street is a mature Christmas elf dressed in a green dress with a full skirt. She...
2 tags
“[Christopher Hitchens] became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in...”
– From the New York Times obituary for writer Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).
2 tags
3 tags
“It came to me when I was reporting the mad uproar over Bill Henson’s photographs...”
– David Marr, Panic, 2011
November 2011
7 posts
4 tags
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond,...
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your...
2 tags
2 tags
“Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The...”
– From Ann Beattie’s “Seven Truths About Writers, Rarely Discussed”, via the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog.
1 tag
3 tags
“Sonnet” literally means “little song.” The sonnet is a heile Welt, an intact...”
– Rita Dove, from the foreword to Mother Love (via W. W. Norton: An Intact World)
5 tags
“I remember learning German—so beautiful, so strange—at school in Australia on...”
– Anna Funder, Stasiland (2002)
3 tags
“[R]eaders want to be engaged even more than they want to be seduced. When purely...”
– Author Lionel Shriver in defense of unlikable characters (via Slate).
October 2011
18 posts
Two young men (one with moustache, one without) on...
Youth 1: ... it's a great essay, he's really going to like it. Every other class, I hand in pretty normal essays. But for him, I always hand in my outstanding essays.
Youth 2: Hey, I've got the first pages of my short story on me. Do you wanna read?
Youth 1: Maybe not on the tram. But I will.
Youth 2: You know what drink I'm really getting into? Macchiato.
Youth 1: Baristas really respect double espressos.
4 tags
“You give into distraction as if it is a murderer. You lay there, waiting to be...”
– Miranda July (via NEXTNESS & somethingchanged).
4 tags
A Young Poet, by Jane Miller
For begging beauty
one can hardly blame the artist
sleeping like butter in the sun
taking no action for action
some prefer being a yellow rose petal
I learned when I traveled
the young poet saying a prayer
is a form of panic
3 tags
4 tags
“There was an exact moment when I decided to quit. I was sitting on a man’s lap...”
– Miranda July, on shoplifting, in the New Yorker.
3 tags
“I read so many short, easy things. I read the label on the shampoo bottle, I...”
– Miranda July on books. (via somethingchanged)
1 tag
“Masters of narrative have the power to expose the act of fabrication without...”
– Robert Pinsky, reviewing Cain, Jose Saramago’s final novel, in the NY Times. (via thebronzemedal)
1 tag
1000!
Symmetry.
1 tag
3,353!
I looked down at my arm and saw crimson smudges. Turns out it was just ink.
1 tag
Only 4,008 words to cut!
And two more sleeps…
2 tags
6 tags
The Novel as Manuscript, by Norman Dubie
—an ars poetica I remember the death, in Russia, of postage stamps like immense museum masterpieces patchwork wrapped in linen, tea stained, with hemp for strapping… these colored stamps designed for foreign places were even printed during famine— so when they vanished, so did the whole Soviet system: the Berlin Wall, tanks from Afghanistan and Ceausescu’s bride...
2 tags
3 tags
“With the passing of [Steve] Jobs this week, we are also mourning a man who...”
– Melissa Gregg, “How Steve taught us to love our Jobs too much,” The Conversation
September 2011
6 posts
6 tags
“Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we’re
made of,...”
– Amy Clampitt, from “Nothing Stays Put” (via proustitute)
1 tag
A list of preoccupations*
thesis
a Completion Seminar
Surrealism as pernicious cosmopolitanism
post-settler Australia
the German Präteritum
“elective affinities”
narrative
discipline
sweet things (despite best efforts)
polka dots
to-do lists
the nature of work
*in lieu of/to excuse recent lack of posts and contact
2 tags
Hipsteur
- noun.
A stroller or rambler through the streets of the world’s most livable cities; observer of gentrification; usually chronicler of inner urban activity, e.g. with Moleskine or iPhone, or Moleskine iPhone app.
3 tags
“[W]e increasingly talk about “zero” tolerance. But in case we think this means...”
– Christos Tsiolkas, “On the Concept of Tolerance,” from Tolerance, Prejudice, Fear, 2008.
(Altered excerpt available on ABC’s The Drum.)
August 2011
17 posts
4 tags
Travel writing | ABC Radio National Book Show |...
Ramona Koval: Tom, in your piece from the Columbia Journalism Review, it's an old piece from 2001, 'The Roads Not Taken', you talk about the travel section in some kinds of journalism, but there's a funny bit about the typical travel piece. Can you remember what you said about the kinds of things you find in a piece? And you almost could say fill in the dots, it doesn't actually matter where it's going to be, it's about someone and their marvellous travelling companion usually, isn't it.
Tom Swick: Right, it's the writer and the companion and they're basically the only people you meet in the piece, and they always have a very nice time and they always are in picturesque places and they stay in very comely hotels and they always vow to return someday. It's kind of like living happily ever after, and there's never anything terribly real about it. You don't get a sense that they really experience the place in an authentic way.
Ramona Koval: And the land is always a land of contrasts...
Tom Swick: Yes, that's one of the biggest clichés of travel writing.
3 tags
The Hurricane, by William Carlos Williams
The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.
3 tags
4 tags
“The necessity of being up-to-date in order to obtain recognition explains why...”
– Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 2004 (trans. M. B. DeBevoise).