April 19, 2008 at 12:46 pm · tag/s : art, blog, death, doubt, loss, people, reading, writing
a much more engaging and humble piece by alex james in the independent about the suicide of his friend angus fairhurst (4.10.1966 - 29.3.2008) than the annoying self-serving piece by tracy emin which i linked some time ago to in ephemeral.
unlike his close friends damien hirst and sarah lucas, fairhurst was full of doubt. a few weeks ago he went alone to scotland and “with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.”
March 27, 2008 at 8:08 pm · tag/s : blog, holocaust, reading, text, writing
Published in 1975, Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Holocaust is a collage of witness testimonies from the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
“By using the language of others he attends to the “object” of genocide without imaginative or philosophical flourish, and by reciting it again in his own rhythm he becomes a second witness to its truth. Ultimately, the reader responds not to the poet but to the testimony itself.” writes Kathryn Crim in the Boston Review.
read more »
February 6, 2008 at 9:58 am · tag/s : computers, melbourne, software, writing
and so we write and that is all we do. and there is nothing on the screen except our writing. in fact the only pixels that are switched on are the ones necessary to show the writing and as i type, more pixels switch on to show the new words and they’re green and that is kinda cute, and somehow it is much more relaxing to see just the words on the screen and none of the other distractions.*
and so write is all we do. that is the default position. and none of it is of any interest to any one else. at least not yet. or maybe it never will be. and maybe this doesn’t matter.
essentially i have bought a year to write. there is just a little bit of this and that, here and there. but minimal. so a miracle : i have time. to write, two more things are needed : a method and a rhythm. oh and rain helps. thank you. but it is not essential. and if the greek next door would shut the fuck up as well and people would stop slamming their doors and cuntface upstairs would stop dropping marbles on the floor that would help. but it is not essential. all i need is time, method and rhythm. and it seems i have them. now and now and now and now.
and now it is raining too. bucketing down as it happens. at last. and cuntface has gone out. and the rain is masking the sound of the greek next door.
it seems in this new life that i go to bed grumpy when the feature creature is away, except this morning i have woken up grumpy too and after an hour or two of grumping around i realize/decide that i have a headache and that a pain killer is appropriate, and some toasted grain bread from dench (have you tried their donuts?!) with peanut butter and some of that nice french cherry jam and a big pot of strong tea.
oh yeah.
and so i can write. and that is all i need to do. and the second cup of tea is nice and strong. that’s the advantage of a smaller cup : by the time you get to the second cup it is nice and strong.
ss officer to the jew : i will release you if you can guess which one of my eyes is made of glass.
jew : it is the left one.
ss officer : correct. how did you know?
jew : it looks more human than the other one.
renowned holocaust historian yehuda bauer told a version of this story in his speech to the german parliament on 27 january 1998. one of the roles of the historian he says, is to tell true stories. (i had been wondering about the use of fiction.) but he prefaces the glass eye story by saying that he doesn’t know if it is true or not. it is worth telling anyway, no? one wonders where it came from. is it at all possible that it is a joke? told by one jew to another? in the lager?
* ok. so i am a slut. after i wrote my daily 500 words today i discovered that jesse, the ceo of
hogbay software and the developer of
writeroom which i am testing and which gives me the clutter-free screen described above, will give
a free licence to people who post a review on their blog. so i thought why not post them? but since i didn’t write these words
in order to get the free licence and he may well have judged this post to be too crude and rude, and too vague to qualify as a review, i was well prepared to be unsuccessful. so i may be a slut but i am not a whore. :p anyway i did get the free licence. thanks jesse. if you want to
try writeroom gentle reader you can use it free for 30 days. if you want to keep using it after that you’ll have to
pay $25… oh. you’ll need a mac. is it even necessary to say that?
October 26, 2007 at 11:51 am · tag/s : blog, people, web, writing
Here is an interview with web guru Mark Frauenfelder, blogger, Wired editor, writer and publisher of bOiNG bOiNG, from Michael Bank’s forthcoming book, Blogging Heroes (Wiley 2007). He is also the author of one of the fullest, most unreserved and unconditional public apologies it is possible to imagine : An apology to Ursula K Le Guin … Last I heard it hadn’t worked : Ursula is still cranky. Jeez. What does a bloke have to do?
August 30, 2007 at 6:32 am · tag/s : reading, writing
i found this advice for writers on a blog called Making Light which is kind of huge and interesting and has the rather nice byline Language, fraud, folly, truth, knitting, and growing luminous by eating light.
“The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it—to remember, to keep in mind as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain—to the end of the story—and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you’re going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.” —Frank Conroy
