Bloody Mainlanders

A physical system can have as many resonant frequencies as it has degrees of freedom; (according to wikipedia)

Kharon: Have you watched the bubbles in the water, gathering and dispersing? And the bubbles gather into foam. Some last for only a short time, some burst as soon as they are born, others a long time. In no other way could it be. So it is with men.

Hermes: You comparison is not inferior to Homer, when he compared men to leaves.

Kharon 19.1 ~ Lucian of Samosata.

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Hobart had recovered from the heat and had returned to that raw river front feel that we all know and love and admire. I check the news in the morning to make sure we had not gone to war while I slept.

I had not planned on writing about the Colin Stetson show on the last drab gray Sunday afternoon of 2014 mona foma. But then I read in the Guardian that “his thing seems to be to play, at deafening volume, a few notes over and over, drench them in reverb and the repeat relentlessly for what seemed like hours.”

A little harsh I thought. While Colin plays a few notes (more than a few!) over and over, and while they were drenched in reverb, and while it did repeat relentlessly, to make this criticism is like saying than Jimi Hendrix just played a bunch of notes real fast, or that Bob Dylan writes a bunch of rhymes. True, but missing the depth. And of course I understand that not everyone can like everything.

So if Colin Stetson plays a few notes, adds filter (directly to sax and man), and repeats what can we say about his music. The first thing we most note, is that he meant to bring two saxophones to play, but the bass sax was misplaced coming out of Sydney Airport. Bloody Mainlanders, always trying to sabotage Tasmania! If he had the instruments there would have been more variety.

To me this show captured the mystery and power of music. A puff of air, a vibration, carried by electrickery, waves shaking the thin eardrum film of skin, nerve impulses surge and spread that mass of hot blood loving brain fat. And this puff of air has the power to transport, to transform. This puff of air can recall memories, can inspire dreams and tears, can move one to abandon, can drop one into despair.

For myself I was carried away with this strange, bubble popping sound, this flowing Dantesque soundscape of wailing cries in the distance. I was standing off to one side, and could look behind the performer and see out the industrial windows to the harbour outside. The wild wailing of the sax, the occasional sweeping roaring rush of agony or ecstasy (for at a distance, with no context, they can be confused) released from some sort of unknown depths surrounded me as I watched the birds circle and hover. The birds were reflected back and forth, up and down, darting, sweeping, moving through the air. Like the waves of sound formed from a puff of air, rumbling down the shiny metal tube, glowing yellow red in the false light of radiating waves, the birds split the air and swam in a atmospheric sea of freedom we can only dream about, only for a moment touch.

And he played one tune called “Dream of Water,” and all my dreams of stepping into rivers and the bubbles forming foam fell and tumbled. A sound track to dreams. A column of air. As many resonant frequencies as degrees of freedom. The birds circle and then -- that is all.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2014/jan/20/mofo-festival-concludes-with-john-grant-mylo-and-death-metal http://ancarinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/brass.jpg

Nothing is True

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So as one who has spent his entire career on the fringes of the poetry world, I am more than a bit amused at the recent plagiarism scandal in the poetry world. In the same way that opposition to the ETS is actually a symptom of a deep seated fear of change and of science so too is this plagiarism scandal the symptom of a much deeper problem. There are others words that we dare not say as well, words such as incompetence and monotony, and the most dread of all words ownership.

I look back at some of the events in my life and I have to laugh. Many years ago while living in Brisbane and working in some soul destroying proletarian sort of job an academic knocked back my submission to an anthology of poetry telling me that I did not speak the language of the working people. Too stunned to reply I could only laugh. Later I entered the Vogel Award, not that I am a novelist of any sort, but I wanted to see if I could write a full length novel. I have no bitter feelings for having lost for my book was not very good. But the point I want to highlight is that this was the same year that the award was won by the execrable The Hand That Signed the Paper. A remarkably nasty little book that went on to win the Miles Franklin award! As a side note a previous winning novel Jack Rivers and Me was not written by the claimed author.

So here we can see a pattern of foolishness.

But enough of my nonsense and moving right along. It was with great amusement when I jumped onto the computer and saw a series of posts and comments about the most recent scandal in the poetry scene. Every single post attacked the individual involved. Some saying that the poet refused to travel the searing road to find his own voice, others, like protesters in front of Scott Morrison's office chanted shame, shame!

Now it is not my intention to defend the poet, Andrew Slattery, as I do not know him from a bar of soap. But rather I wish to find any deep seated failures that allow this to happen. For like anything else in our world, the poem is not a thing, but rather a relationship between people.

So besides the terrible word plagiarism, the first word we must bring up in relation to this “scandal” is incompetent. First I have to note that it has been almost three years since he won the Rosemary Dobson Prize. Three years and nobody from the judging committee noticed! Even more shocking to me is this sentence from the SMH article that leaves me shaking my head. An entire poem was lifted from the philosopher Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Have none of the judges ever read Beyond Good & Evil? Surely one of the most unique voices in Western philosophy and the doyens of literature in Australia did not notice. This is surely a level of incompetence that makes the sins of the poet pale into insignificance.

In my travels as a poet I have at times had a foolish or unreasoning fondness of the idea of the gloss. Submitting my poems to various journals and what-not, I was informed (again by an academic) that to use a gloss was an example of pretentiousness and that modern poetry could not be pretentious. I retorted that if pretense is from the word to play, who if not a poet could be pretentious. So the gloss is no good, in-text citations are clunky and disturb the flow. Foot notes seem better, but to my mind the best thing to do would be to mention in a bit of a proem that this is a cento with lines from XYZ poets. But would the poem then pass the muster of the academy? I think not, I am happy to be shown wrong. All of this lifts the cover on the sleeping lump that is poetry in Australia. That it is too closely bound with academics, and we can note that academic is close to the word anemic. For that is what passes for poetry in Australia today, a bloodless, lifeless regurgitation of the known.

The third and final point I wish to make concerns the idea of intellectual property. Did the Homeridae even care about intellectual property? For is not the literal definition of rhapsode a stitcher of words? This was noted by Pindar
In the same way as the Homeridae,
Singers of stitched words...

Did Shakespeare feel he was plagiarising when he used, for example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as the basis for Romeo and Juliet? Did the medieval balladeers feel they were plagiarists when they recycled lines and tunes? And what of the works of Eliot or Joyce, to name just two?

Or to quote Pound with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly.

Plagiarism as a crime (or sin if you prefer) rises with Capitalism, for the ancients had no problems with the idea of recycling and reusing works. In our bourgeois world (and I would invite my readers (however few they may be) to join me in recreating bourgeois as a word that expresses contempt) where the individual is risen above all, and the very idea of the co-operative spirit is brought into doubt what are the pressures on the author? It seems to me that copyright and intellectual property, while sounding helpful and fine in theory are used by big conglomerates to control thought, and art in our society. One only has to look at the shameful acts of the Disney corporation in ripping off fairy tales and then claiming ownership of the idea of, for example, Snow White. Or the equally shameful and bogus claims of Men at Work and the Kookaburra Song. So keen where they to defend their rights that tehy did not even know, until an unfortunate episode of Spicks and Specs. Examples of publishing companies abusing copyright can be extended seemingly endlessly.

So here we have it, my thoughts on this topic. The words that can not be spoken are, incompetence -- the incompetence of judges. Monotony, the stranglehold of writing held by academics who seek only to reinforce their own position. And of course the vile words of ownership, which seeks to make money at the expense of art.

Could this all have been avoided? Yes, the author could have noted the use of other writings, but would it have won? With the storm spreading across facebook, I doubt it, for too many seem to place an individual originality above the work of art. But from my point of view, this whole imbroglio was worthwhile as it allowed me to do some research into the ancient idea of the cento. Was the poem good, were the ideas good, did you enjoy and learn something? So we must finish with a half-forgotten quote from Ezra Pound, “it is a poor critic who talks of the artist and not the work of art.” For now we know more about Andrew Slattery and very little about the actual poem written.

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painting from http://www.kounterkulture.co.uk/blogs/charlotte-bracegirdle-and-las-meninas

swarms of wild animals

Like the authors mentioned in a journal note by Kierkegaard most of our critics write with so little individuality that almost any citizen of our sun-burnt commonwealth could sign their name to the work and be done with it.

Most authors write with so little individuality that almost anyone in the kingdom could be the author of what is written, and since the name becomes a very trivial accessory, one perceives that anonymity has significance also in a poetic sense; on the other hand, authors who have individuality have no need of appending their names. (S. Kierkegaard IIA 412, May 6, 1835)

So we see this type anonymous writing coming from the fertilising heroes of the IPA. One such individual wrote a piece about a recent art installation/performance in Melbourne. The art work was called Goldene Bend'er, the critique in one of the major daily fish wrappers was titled “Should you foot the bill for execrable waste of human resources?” The title of the critique being a nice bit of rhetoric, clever pun, for the art work under discussion had the performers sitting on transparent toilets and defecating.

Our individual loving, Voltaire quoting, free speech defending, IPA critic Chris Berg shows us this movement of anonymity at the very start, with the title of his work, with his telegraphed and unreflective turgidity of words. Let us dive into the cesspit. The title is a rhetorical question -- “Should you foot the bill?” Straight away we can see that the anarcho-capitalist, philistine, race to the bottom, purposefully divisive, quaintly populist attack on social funding of art will be a feature of the opinion. And so it continues “for execrable waste of human resources.” Here we have a multi-layered fecal pun worthy of Aristophanes. If the reader was not sure as to how to think, she is given a not too subtle joining of shit with government funding. Finishing off with a the side effect of using the dehumanising capitalist ideal of human resources; when we get to forget real authentic human beings involved in the daily production and reproduction of life and instead looks at humans as a one sided alienated resource.

What of style? What of the critic's style that -- to again use a Kierkegaardian idea -- is the author's external birthmark? What we get as style is no more nor less than one would expect; a sneering, looking down upon, faux-news style. We get to read a mocking of artists and the obligatory sneer across the bow of the art/government bureaucracy. Any number of citizens, driven as they are by common sense, could easily have given their name to this piece. Any number of tired, cynical, jaded, bitter with the world men, who feel that the world is naturally dirty and ugly could have written this critique. Any number of haters could have penned this piece. However, only a select few of those who rail against elites have the wherewithal to have such a piece published in a major newspaper. Any number of white men oppressed as they are by feminism, and aboriginals could have come up with this argument; it is an old argument. Any art work that involves excrement is low hanging fruit for ideologues. Of all those who rail against the elites, only those who have large institutional organisations behind them and ready access could have had this article printed. The great mass of drink addled, brain neutered sheep have to content themselves with beating their wives and children and crying into their beer mumbling about uppity women and the sorry state of the art world at the local suburban hotel.

But why the fuss? Living as I do in the covert wiles of Tasmania I was not able to visit Melbourne to see this work, so I have to assume that our intrepid reporter not only was at the opening of the show, but that he had an in-depth conversation with the artist in an attempt to figure out what was being done and why the work was structured in such a way. While I think that Berg's critique of this installation as being faux-radicalism may be a bit harsh; I have to agree that shocking the bourgeoisie in this manner (if indeed it was the intention of the maker) does no good. The proper way to shock the bourgeoisie is by appropriating their wealth, and overturning their power structures.


From my brief research it seems the shitting was an integral, but not dominate fact of a two hour dance piece. Reading the Berg critique one gets the impression that the shit was the main point of the show. “On a Friday night less than a fortnight ago, six dancers from a company called BalletLab performed an artistic work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art at Southbank. This involved them sitting on toilets and taking a dump.” Or so says Berg]. Looking at this article one reads this “The two-hour act saw the six dancers, masked but naked beneath sheer garments, move around a room in the gallery before sitting on transparent stools and performing - only if they were moved to do so - what is usually one of our most private and rarely discussed daily acts.”


There would seem to be a difference of aspect in the two reviews. One placing the controversial movement in context, the other designed, it would seem, to angry up the blood. With the blood angering mentions of artists and public money, one can be overawed into thinking that the bourgeoisie in Australia is waiting with open wallets and bank accounts to fund a new wave of provocative art, if only the government would just get out of the way.


But let us briefly touch on what the artist was interested in; it seems that the artist Mikala Dwyer (never mentioned by name in the Berg article -- was this done to dehumanise the artist?) was interested in “the body, transition and transformation.” Which raises the question -- what in our daily life better shows transformation than the daily changing of rich yummy chocolate cake into horrible, stinky fecal matter? Excreting is a seemingly alchemical process, fraught with wonder and horror, a transformation which in a very personal way shows the unity of change, that teaches of matter in it's various forms, a transformation that proves the Hegelian ideal of the blossom superseding the bud, not destroying, but transforming and negating in an organic whole.


I spoke to my thirteen year old, fount of all knowledge, daughter about the Berg review; she noted that it is lazy journalism to mount the argument that excrement has been used in artworks before. All art she maintained has been done before, in the same way that much science is the repetition of experiments. Why bother she continued, working herself up into a home schooling frenzy of debate, even waking up in the morning; after all it has been done before? Why indeed; here I joined in the general rebuttal frenzy, do we hold grand finals when it had been done before? Then my charming partner noted -- why bother writing an article about waste and governmental funding of the arts, when it has been said before? Said by any number of anonymous critics.