Duggan interview

Cover artwork Image credit

"A Nest of Bunyips", the latest issue from Southerly has been launched and the interview I conducted with Laurie Duggan is now live on the website: http://southerlyjournal.com.au/long-paddock/71-3-a-nest-of-bunyips/laurie-duggan-interviewed-by-fiona-scotney/

More good news...

Jens Ferdinand Willumsen: Sophus Clausssen Reading Poems 1915

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I have been accepted to present a paper at the Revealing the Reader Symposium at Monash next month. So that is two conferences this year now. One in Melbourne and one in Adelaide. Both papers will be on "mini-mags", poetry magazines published in Australian from 1965 to 1979. The Adelaide paper will address networks and connections and the Melbourne paper will examine readerships for the magazines. Both papers draw on the research I conducted while on the National Library Summer Scholarship at the beginning of the year and will form part of chapter four of my PhD thesis.
 
Lots of work to do now. I am 8500 words into chapter two at the moment, and I've got two conference papers to write now!

Buddah's Birthday Festival, Southbank, Brisbane

  

Kill your darlings...

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Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg. Image credit

Hot off the back of the film "Howl" (2010), "On the Road" is scheduled for release this year, and next years Beat film is already in post-production: "Kill your darlings". It is a film about the Carr-Kammerer murder in 1944 when Ginsberg was at Columbia University. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' novel (unpublished until 2008) And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks is also based on the murder.

Lucien Carr wasn’t a writer, but he was an important catalyst for Ginsberg and the Beat generation as he introduced Ginsberg to a number of future Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac (arguably the most well-known figure of the Beat generation, he named the generation and wrote one of its defining texts, On the Road) and William S. Burroughs (who wrote Junkie and Naked Lunch and coined the phrase “Heavy Metal”). These three writers formed the inner circle of the Beat generation.

A quick sketch of the murder (more detailed accounts can be found elsewhere). Carr was from St Louis and moved to New York to escape the attentions of David Kammerer (his boy-scout leader), but he followed him to New York. Kammerer had gone to school with William S Burroughs and Carr was friends (despite the unwanted sexual advances from Kammerer towards Carr) with Kammerer and Burroughs. In 1944, after a night of drinking together near Columbia University, Kammerer apparently made unwanted advances towards Carr and Kammerer tired to overpower Carr who responded by (ironically) stabbing him with his boy scout knife. Carr paniked and weighed Kammerer's pockets with stones and rolled him into the Hudson river.

Carr then went and saw Burroughs, who flushed Kammerer's bloody cigarettes down the toilet and told Carr to get a lawyer. Instead Carr went and saw Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the knife before going to see a movie together. Eventually Carr did turn himself in, but couldn't be charged immediately as the body had not yet been found. Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested as accessories. Carr was sentenced to 20 years in prison, of which he served only the minimum 2 years.  He went on to have a successful career in editing and died in 2005.

There are also some new Beat documentaries on the way, more information on Another Lost Shark.

More great news!

Image found here

My abstract has been accepted for the AHA "Connections" conference in Adelaide in July! So I will be off to Adelaide for a week to present a paper and learn more about history. I've never been to Adelaide before, but I can't wait!

First lecture

Betty the Beatnik Paper doll. Download here



I gave my first ever university lecture yesterday on Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" for a first year poetics class. It was a wonderful experience and I think it went well. I got great feedback from the lecturer and my amazing freinds, who came along to a 5pm lecture on a Monday afternoon to support me, and then took me for a drink afterwards.  Thanks guys.

About to be published...

L to R : Michael Darley, Terry Larsen, and Laurie Duggan

Image credit.

My interview with Laurie Duggan, Australian poet and all-round lovely guy, is about to be published by Southerly as part of their "Nest of Bunyips" edition being launched on the 8th of May. More information on the Southerly website.

More "On the Road" movie posters

Garrett Hedlund is Dean Moriarty a.k.a. Neal Cassady

Sam Riley is Sal Paradise a.k.a. Jack Kerouac

Kirsten Dunst is Camille a.k.a. Carolyn Cassady

All poster images from On the Road facebook page. See the offical movie website for more details.

Journaling...

A Line a Day Diary

Moleksine Sketchbook Large

I like the idea of these line a day journals for five years - I imagine looking back over the last few years of entries and seeing what I was doing on that day in the previous years - but I am not a daily writer. I tend to write in my journal sporadically, and while I write at least once a week, I don't think I am the line a day kind of person. I like to glue things in. I like to save public transport tickets, movie stubs, and exhibition postcards  to glue and sticky tape into my journals. I like to include photobooth photographs, free maps, postage stamps and other people's old receipts and shopping lists that I find in library books and while grocery shopping. I started doing this in my travel journals and it became a habit. 

That is why I have come to love the Moleskine sketchbook. I bought one by accident, I meant to buy a large notebook and picked up a sketchbook, but it was a happy accident. The pages are thicker and stand up to my sticking and gluing and my black ink fountain pen doesn't show through the pages (like it did in the notebook).  The sketchbooks probably don't have as many pages as the notebooks, but I like that they are unlined and can write as in them as large or small as I want to. 

I don't buy Moleskines because I think I am Bruce Chatwin or Ernest Hemingway (even though I love both of them), I buy them because I like the size, the weight and colour of the paper, the rounded corners and the portability. I also like the envelope in the back, the elastic close and the simplicity of them.

Do you journal? Do you have a favorite brand, or style, or size? Have you ever had a line a day journal - did it work for you?

N.B. This is not a sponsored post, I just thought I'd share my favorite style of journal. 



New in the mail...

Image from Shearsman Books

Laurie Duggan's new book of poetry, The Pursuit of Happiness, arrived in the mail yesterday. I really enjoy Duggan's poems and style - his observations, wit, breavity, and word play. I have only had a chance to glimpse the first few pages, but I have already found lines to make me smile.

cement slabs, on which

black-faced sheep forage

the explosive factory

blew up in 1916

(from "Angles 1-18")

Milan

1

avoid places the guide books describe as 'bohemian'

only the northern edge of Brera begins to feel like real people

live there

2

the sparrows are smaller than English sparrows

but the pigeons and blackbirds are the same size

3

in Veronese's 'Last Supper'

everyone appears drunk

4

Medardo Rosso sculpts

like wax melts

5

Ball's 'Dog on a leash'

just about describes the Quadrilatero d'Oro

6

the Stazione Centrale is under wraps

the futurists have abandoned the city



Reading...

Reading: A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean by Irad Malkin.

I haven't changed my thesis topic, I am still looking at new Australian poets, but I am also looking at the networks that contribute to the formation of a literary generation. As such, I have been reading up on social network theory for models that provide a way to move beyond binary representations or centre-periphery models. Malkin's book offers a way to examine decentralised and non-hierarchical networks, and while his focus is obviously on the ancient Mediterranean, chapter one offers a great introduction to network analysis (thanks Martin for lending this to me!).

There is a new review on the Australian Poetry Review site on John Leonard's Young Poets: An Australian Anthology (2011).

And Friday night Sam and I went and saw Bombshells at the Queensland Performing Arts Center. Sam's review of the performance has been published on M/C Reviews.

Researching parodies...

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I am researching parodies of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" for a lecture I am giving this month. So far I have found "Whisper", "Yelp" and "Tweet". Do you know of any other good ones?

Here are the first lines from the ones I have found (follow the links above for the whole poem):

Whisper - Jeffery Bilbro
I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, clamoring futile
frustration,
locked in cubicles, staring wide-eyed at shifting, flickering screens that monitor the
pulses of nations,
chained by headphones, cell phones, emails, texts, breaking news, virtual friends,

Tweet - Oyl Miller
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era

Yelp - Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg
I saw the best mind of my generation distracted by text messaging, emailing, tweeting, dragging their cursors through google links at dawn, looking for an info fix,
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ultra-fast heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

On the Road posters...

Alice Braga is Terry a.k.a. Bea Franco

Amy Adams is Jane a.k.a. Joan Vollmer

Elisabeth Moss is Galatea Dunkel a.k.a. Helen Hinkle

Tom Sturridge is Carlo Marx a.k.a. Allen Ginsberg

Viggo Mortensen is Old Bull Lee a.k.a. William Burroughs

Have you seen these yet? These are the official movie posters that have been posted on the On the Road - The Movie facebook page. Still waiting for posters of: Kristen Stewart (as Marylou, aka Louanne Henderson), Kirsten Dunst (as Camile, aka Carolyn Cassady), Sam Riley (as Sal Paradise, aka Jack Kerouac) and Garrett Hedlund (as Dean Moriarty, aka Neal Cassady).

What do you think? Do you like the aesthetic of the posters? Or do they look a little over photoshopped to you? I personally find the little quotes floating beside their faces a little distracting, they don't seem very embedded into the overall image. Regardless, these posters certainly make me think about what the film might be like.

Another weekend...

Another wedding. Hope you had a great one!

Today is...

UNESCO World Poetry Day!

From the UN website: 

Poetry contributes to creative diversity, by questioning anew our use of words and things, our modes of perception and understanding of the world. Through its associations, its metaphors and its own grammar, poetic language is thus conceivably another facet of the dialogue among cultures. Diversity in dialogue, free flow of ideas by word, creativity and innovation. World Poetry Day is an invitation to reflect on the power of language and the full development of each person’s creative abilities. 

So here is a poem for World Poetry Day about poetry.

My Heart
by Frank O'Hara

I don't prefer one "strain" to another.

I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,

not just a sleeper, but also the big,

overproduced first-run kind. I want to be

at least as alive as the vulgar. And if

some aficionado of my mess says "That's

not like Frank!", all to the good! I

don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,

do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,

often. I want my feet to be bare,

I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--

you can't plan on the heart, but

the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

                                                                                                                 Poem from here.

I want to travel...

"Alex" Travel Tags

"Alex" Travel Wallet 

A5 Leather Journal. All images from Corban and Blair

Dylan and I are saving up for a European adventure (which may have to be put on hold until I finish my thesis), but in the mean time just looking at these leather travel goods from Corban and Blair make me want to pack my suitcase (actually the Henri Cartier Bresson exhibition at QAG had the same effect on me). But damn their marketing people for emailing me images of delightful travel inspired products, now I am day dreaming about flying into Turkey and meandering across Europe to London...

NB. This isn't a sponsored post, I just got an email today from Corban and Blair and I liked their products. 

Goodbye Weekend...

Photo by Jakeson Adriaans

Dylan and I at the wedding. What a night! It has taken me most of Sunday to recover and we have another wedding this coming weekend. I will be back to working on the thesis tomorrow, but it was a great weekend spent catching up with family. 

Some photobooth photographs from the wedding. 

Book shelf lust...

all images via book shelf porn

Some pretties for the weekend... now I think I need a ladder...

End of week...

Image via book shelf porn

It has been a busy week, one that has seen me at the Fryer library almost everyday and I will be back there again next week. I have been working on my appendix of poetry magazines that the "new Australian poets" published in from 1968-1978 for my thesis (see Poetry magazines 1968-79 tab/page above), as well as my post-confirmation prospectus document (see PhD thesis tab/page above for an updated thesis statement). I am also researching and writing interview questions for the two last interviews I will be conducting, as well as writing an abstract for a conference later in the year and mapping an outline for my next chapter and making a PowerPoint for a guest lecture I will be giving next month. Meanwhile, I am still reading Sons of Clovis and All Poets Welcome, as well as interviews with a number of poets by Erica Travers (nee Bell).

However, I have the weekend off to go to a family wedding at the Gold Coast, have a great weekend!

In case you haven't seen it...

Here is the official On the Road movie trailer released in time for Kerouac's 90th birthday.

Reading...

I am still reading Sons of Clovis and All Poets Welcome, but around the net there is also an interesting article on the Australian Book Review book on reviewing, "What literary editors seeks in new reviewers" and there is Martin Duwell's latest review over at Australian Poetry Review on David McCooey's Outside.

I am busy rewriting parts of my prospectus for Wednesday (chapter outlines, timetable etc.), so not much time for reading at the moment, but I am really enjoying All Poets Welcome.

Will Oldham at Matisse Up Late at GOMA in the drawing room...

To coincide with the Matisse drawing exhibition that has been running at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) for the last few months there have been a series of "Up late" nights with clothed life models posing in the drawing room while live music plays. The drawing room is a space at the end of the exhibition where you can draw with pencil on paper, or a stylus on an ipad, and be inspired by sculptures and various still life compositions.

Last night I went and saw Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy play. It is a unique evening when you are able to enjoyed a glass of red wine while drawing a model dressed as a ballerina and see an exhibition while listening to live music. Great concept, only sadly there was a total lack of space near the stage and also a lot of people, so we didn't actually get to see him much. If you look really carefully in photograph five (above) you can see a tiny dot left of center which is Will Oldham. Great night out though.