Tag: Gerald Murnane

Poets in Cars, An Interview with Nicholas Powell

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by Luke Beesley …turn on that dishwasher John Ashbery, ‘Wooden Buildings’ My old mate, poet Nick Powell, visited Melbourne last week with his family – it was his first trip back to Australia in 4 years. Nick’s partner, Laura, is Finnish and he has lived in Helsinki (with short stays in Australia) since 2008. We both spent a large part of our childhoods in Beaudesert, a country town south-west of Brisbane but we first met in Toowong (hilly and green inner-west Brisbane) about 15 years ago – Nick moved into the same apartment building, which became the headquarters of Men’s…

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Followed by Patrick Modiano’s Dog: What I’ve Been Reading, Last Part

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by Luke Beesley Having just finished Cesar Aira’s Shantytown, which in the end was probably my least favourite Aira, I’ve just begun Beauty is a Wound by Indonesian Eka Kurniawan, mostly because of how much I enjoyed the tinge of the absurd in these two sentences, on the second page, which follow other sentences about a character, Dewi Ayu, who has just risen from the grave: “A woman tossed her baby into the bushes and its father hushed a banana stalk. Two men plunged into a ditch, others fell unconscious at the side of the road, and still others took…

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Ardent Dentists and Artists’ Cupboards: Raymond Roussel and Gerald Murnane in Days of Heaven

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by Luke Beesley John Ashbery apparently went into a bookshop in Paris in the late 1950s and said something along the lines of what’s the craziest French writing around, and the shopkeeper had no hesitation in handing him a book by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). Ashbery brought Roussel’s writing back to New York and showed his friends and not only did they sit wide-mouthed as they imagined the temerity in Roussel’s commitment to a beautifully strange literature, they named their new poetry journal after one of his novels – Locus Solus. Ashbery and Schuyler later went and wrote a collaborative novel,…

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Superb Mornings, Drunken Swallows.

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by Christopher Cyrill I despise the word blog. I mean no offence to bloggers anywhere and mean no criticism of the concept. I just don’t like the word. I don’t like the word frangipani either. After keeping a writer’s journal for many years I found rereading them a kind of torture that I expect to be reserved for my postdays. (My purgatory, my perdition – read what you wrote down about fiction and process at the age of twenty-nine…now push this rock up that hill, forever.) I view all of my work to this point as juvenilia. And I can’t…

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The Gerald M. School for The Improved Reliving of Personal Memories

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A fictional interview, by Tom Lee It was in August this year that I first heard about the Gerald M. School for The Improved Reliving of Personal Memories. M. had been a favourite author of mine for a number of years, so when I discovered the school on an Internet search I was intrigued. The ‘About’ section on the school’s website discusses the genesis of the idea. Apparently M. learnt of a design project (http://www.materialisingmemories.com/) aiming to create strategies to assist in the navigation of the vast amount of digital images that people take in order to capture a moment,…

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