2009 January « gingatao

Talking to the ghosts.

January 30, 2009 at 7:28 pm | Posted in podcast, writing | 32 Comments
Tags: podcast, writing

He holds his mittened hands over the burning drum. Sense of place as a function of uniqueness of voice, do I have an accent? I like it when they stumble down this dead end looking for Australian sentences and as any strangler of the lungsandwitch language will tell you a big part of the train ride is looking for creating discovering A VOICE! he yells into the darkness of the alley scattering the rats then whispers quoting Squires, the only thing spellcheckers and grammar machines ever spelled was the death of style.

‘I have known dogs with more style than most humans,’ says the ghost of Bukowhiskey to him. Yeah well, you and Rimbaud, they might love your pottery but they ain’t gonna invite you in for dinner and meet the children are they, hitching his trousers and spitting into the dying fire.

My fellow bums, he addresses the empty alley, it is the very fact that we offend their sense of propriety that justifies our existence. Whilst the hypocrite boojwah will always accept one or two of us into their sanitised galleries to proove their cool, we must never forget that it is their noses which decide their morality. Nothing marks you as a lesser being more than the stench of life. I’m cold, throw another piano on that fire.

(This piece has been podcasted here. (1 min 20 secs))

The Counsellor

January 29, 2009 at 6:02 pm | Posted in memoirs, writing | 12 Comments

Sorry, I am not wanting to make sureties of this headache nor partake in overtly transactionalist type behaviour modifications. I do believe, however, that when all is said and done it is better for me to invent my own syntactical arrangements then to indulge in such misinformers as ‘when all is said and done’ when such a thing is not only untrue, there is still absence, but also to be dreaded that end time when backlooking all one sees is children playing marbles and forward stretches this vast cold reach of lifeless black awaiting. Sorry, it is wrong of me of course to call this writing in any but the broadest sense, more the arrangement of curves and axes, axies, axis (plural). Something to do. Something to do. Comfort in the smallest motion of the fingers guiding the pen whilst the wrist drags across the paper like a cosmological bulldozer flattening urban space, clearing it for a delicate reconstruction through sound, a sonicscape to be erectified here. Has he left again? By all accounts the libraries are ledgers neatly divided into profit and loss, fiction and factions and none but fools do claim to know the difference. Where is she? Where is she? The sounds of that mere movement of air over his tongue and through his shattered teeth. He knows where she is, six feet deep down swimming with the fishies, limpid pools her eyes, the fright has left them now at least. Something to do, lift this breath and let it go and then again, keep a journal said the gnome but all that came was apologies, to the pen, to the paper, to the words themselves for their misuse, misusings, musings. Make a note each time the I becomes a he again, he’ld said, and then you’ll know to look for that from which you hide. I hide from fishy fish he said, from being. I am not being, I am not a being in her absence, her absence is my being.

Post Avante-guard Poetics.

January 23, 2009 at 7:20 pm | Posted in blogging, sheer selfindulgence | 18 Comments

Well that was an interesting exercise, Squires, curling up into a tight little ball, pretending to be small. Heh, it’s Friday night, where’s Bootsy? We need some walking bass, acoustic Bootsy what a concept where each note is a cat-like footfall in a street-lit night and the piano player has been drinking jumping and twitchin’ like Monk’s right hand. The drummer is cool, of course, unflappable but flapping she feels like she’s flying.

Today I thought I might make a new website. The University of Woodridge (Qld). I appoint myself Emeritus Professor of the Hieronymous Poetical. You may apply for your positions by creating a title in the box below. Each day we will post a serious article on contemporary poetics. Mine will be titled, “On post avante-guard poetics, towards a new theory of textual analysis and it’s relation to excessive verbiosity for its own sake, you wankers.” (insert link, no no, hold me back, Brad)

You see, it’s a long weekend here this weekend. Monday is Australia Day and it is time to reassert the most fundamental and important thing about being an Australian. Absolute minimal tolerance for bullshit. And jumpin’ je-ho-so-phat there is an awful lot of it about.

So, since Bootsy has up and left us due to an horrendous lack of herbiage, I shall toast you, my friends, those few faithful who see through my vain attempts at writerliness to the grinning fool beneath. Have a schimply schpectacular weekend and….segue into vodpod!

The Sentence

January 22, 2009 at 7:34 pm | Posted in writing | 17 Comments
Tags: the sentence, writing

Writing is not the recording of thoughts, it is the having of them.
The words themselves create the idea.
Inscribed on this here pebble smoothed by tide.
Witch is why it works so well. Objective undefined,
an ideal of beauty, perhaps an accidental reflection
of a certain harmonious drive.

“Poets should learn how to create sentences,” said some apprentice professor.
Poets should unlearn how to create sentences.
“What time is it?” said the judge.
“Five to ten,” said I.
“Well, that’s exactly what you get.”

Perhaps there are variations in the impulse to freedom and it is that which defines the artist. They are the subset of the human in whom the impulse to freedom is never satisfied.

Air.

January 21, 2009 at 7:03 pm | Posted in writing | 18 Comments
Tags: The Philippino Nurse, writing, writing as time travel

There is a constant atmospheric pressure insistently determined to create a sense of smallness. But inside me was an equally constant pressure outward, toward grandness and the large gesture. I wanted to assert that all those names you know, Shakespeare et al, Al who?, Capone?, were mere humans but they did not live in an age where someone had crossed every horizon only to meet someone else crossing in the other direction.

It was the urge to create not merely repeat. As a young man I mistook it for destiny and then in my middle age for arrogance. This sentence should start with the word ‘now’, as in, ‘Now I…’ He coughs. The nurse is from the Philippines.

I thought it was about attaining immortality, not so much a fear of death more a dread of not existing, and as a consequence forgetting to remember would be an invaluable skill. I discovered the complete unreliability of memory. She complains that I should only push the red button if I cannot breath at all but I like to watch her walk away. I had a dog. It died as all dogs do.

There is a constant atmospheric pressure, he coughs again reaches for the oxygen mask. The nurse is from the Philippines, “Still breathing, old man?” as she checks his chart. I liked to watch her walking away.

The Architecture Of Water

January 20, 2009 at 6:47 pm | Posted in genre isn't dead yet but it should be, poetry, writing | 10 Comments
Tags: poetry, taoist poetry, writing

(There are days when it all feels like some
strange pretense. One day
I will have to accept that shuffling
sounds around in the Dali-Crowley Deck
is no substitute for actual thinking, about
…things.)

One must have an objective, cannot
expect language to reveal her secret
hidden truths tucked away
in a tangle of mangrove roots
and tumbles like platypi pursuing
a purpose in all this bizarre design
simply by allowing her her dance
and sensing undertoads and overflows.

One must have an adjective, cannot
expect her secret
hidden truths tucked away in the roots
of words sound
surround and tumbles
like platypi pursuing
a porpoise pursuing a platypi
between
undertoads and over
flows.

The Architecture Of Water.

January 19, 2009 at 6:46 pm | Posted in prosepoemthingy, writing | 15 Comments
Tags: australian sentences, if I was, writing

Dear Mr MC Paulus of gmail dot com,

Further to your letter of 3/1/09 we regret to inform you that we are unable to supply three pairs of bright green parachute pants (‘M C Hammer style’ or otherwise embroidered).

This is a staircase.

Subtitle (and/or font change like a spicy sidestep tango dip and delve.) If I was M. C. Escher to whom I would address these Australian sentences with windows through which black bowler hat shaped silences appear in a clear blue sky…

Thou accuseded me of stream of consciousness (inspirated me through unintended accusation) and whilst I confess to wetness often inappropriate, I hold to my comfortable self-delusion of linguistic architecture-hood.

If I was M C Paulus the words would be clouds, the architecture of water , ridiculously delicate and precise balancing those holes in the sky and there would be no first word just as there is no last.