AustLit

'The archive is a site of both order and trouble. It could be said that the archive is where history goes to sleep. Where stories of truth and fiction and the ones that sit in between (or outside of), are kept, contained, and ‘assert the wholeness of Time’. (Le Guin, 1974)' (Introduction)

'Lately, I don’t have any poetry in me. The words are always too thick and ungraspable, or they’re too thin, seeping out of my loosely clenched fingers. I close my hand into a tight fist, wanting to wring this feeling out. Language passes through me, in cloudy shapes I only vaguely recognise as the distance between myself and the rest of the world. I read a quote from a scientist that says I am both a universe of atoms and an atom in the universe. This feels incomprehensible, so I imagine my body as a container waiting to be filled or emptied.' (Introduction)

'When you arrive in Singapore, chances are you will arrive at Changi Airport. You could come by the Causeway from Johor Bahru, but chances are that you will fly in, to a clean, quiet, gleaming, glistening, orderly terminal that looks more like a luxury mall than any other airport you have been to, especially LAX. The muzak will lull you, the travelators move you, and the janitors spray and wipe behind you. This is travel that is sanitised, suburban, temperature controlled by sensors and computers. After you pass customs, you will grade their service on a touchscreen and it will tell you to ‘have a nice day’. As you collect your bags, you will not be jostled, not even hurried let alone harangued, and you will begin to glimpse the concrete and green just out of reach, just in the humidity out there outside, all before you step aboard the MRT to take you anywhere in the city state you might desire, sweat-free. The money is made of plastic and there are stewards in case you need guidance, all while being welcomed into an idea of the present that has harbingers in the past and future. Welcome to Singapore.' (Introduction)

'Breathless. Walwicz’s poem reminds me of meeting someone whom you haven’t seen for a while and you’re catching up and they tell you a story that may have taken place over years but it comes out all in one breathless movement and you are literally feeling like you are trying to catch up, trying to run alongside them, keeping pace. Breathless. Child-like, in the way that a child will tell a story—they don’t stop for breath, they get caught up, caught in the story. Hear me out see what I mean listen.' (Introduction) 

'‘What's open about an open relationship?’ Justin Clemens asked during his reading at the launch of The Open in 2021. This reminds me of an idea Slavoj Žižek touches on in The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994). The point was not about open relationships but about BDSM partnerships, where he writes: ‘What is of crucial importance here is the total self-externalisation of the masochist's most intimate passion: the most intimate desires become objects of contract and composed negotiation.’ Agreements that accompany erotic power games—as well as open relationships and relationships that broadly fall into the ‘consensual non-monogamy’ category—are often worked out with a microscopic scrutiny reserved for the pre-nuptial. What appears open is not always so. The low Australian skylines, the way earth and sky appear to embrace and melt into each other—the appearance of innocent and natural co-existence belies the ongoing reality of settler-colonial violence. Clemens’s provocation is a suitable apéritif for the poetic-philosophical experience that is Lucy Van's The Open.' (Introduction) 

'It is close to midnight. The poet that I’ve been working with has just died, aged eighty-seven. I spent a month or so in his living room recording his entire oeuvre—around seven decades—for my Wasteland audio-exhibition of Malaysian poetry. His face next to mine reading and reading for hours on end, his voice strident, searing through one ear and into the brain, painting an eloquence of words out of syllables and silence. I have spent many years of my career (and a few university degrees) searching for these moments. This experience now feels like an illicit swan song for an audience of one. No other record exists. This poet’s legacy now lives in my laptop’s hard drive. Between deadlines, I don’t have space to think.'  (Introduction)

'One of the key tragedies of academia—or of any other profession whose appeal rests on the idea that it in some way comprises a ‘calling’, that is, that we might be doing this kind of work (thinking, reading, writing) regardless of whether or not it was remunerated (a lucky thing, given how much of it is not)—is that the Venn diagram of the jobs we’d like to be doing and the jobs we end up doing looks like two circles, not, actually, unlike the dark ones under my eyes: 

O_O

portrait of the artist experiencing the dawning realisation that they only have one good hour of work left in them before their stimulant wears off' (Introduction)

'I give an annual lecture on the Malayan decolonisation to a room of young Australian university students, whose yawns and elongated faces grow increasingly more weary each year. Black-and-white pictures of Asian politicians and White soldiers overlap on the projector screen, followed by pictures of White politicians and Asian soldiers, each slide disconnected and disconnecting in flashes of texts, maps, essay-pointers and colour-coded flowcharts. I sometimes worry that the human experience gets lost in translation.' (Introduction)

'Ramadan is one month long and its timing follows the lunar calendar. This means that each year, it inches backwards twelve days. My tenth birthday, in September 2006, was on the first day of Ramadan. As I write this opening paragraph, it is April and we’re one week in. Between 2011 and 2018, Ramadan spanned the months of July and August—the northern hemisphere summer holidays.' (Introduction)

'Reading nonfiction that avoids easy classification has led me to write nonfiction that is difficult to classify, because it frustratingly—and sometimes delightfully—doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. This elusive category could also be described as experimentalism, hybrid essay writing, literary narrative nonfiction, zine-making, autotheory and ficto-criticism, although the last two have been subsumed or at least collapsed into the autofiction genre, which has been experiencing a comeback in contemporary novel writing. As Christian Lorentzen articulates in the article ‘Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ Is ‘Autofiction’?’:

The term ‘autofiction’ has been in vogue for the past decade to describe a wave of very good American novels by the likes of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Jenny Offill, and Tao Lin, among others, as well as the multivolume epic My Struggle by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. These are books that invite readers to imagine they might be reading something like a diary, where the transit from real life to the page has been more or less direct.' (Introduction)

'My love of the world game and of world literature exist alongside one another. 1994 stands as a remarkable year when I both fell in love with USA ’94, watching Roberto Baggio sky the ball over the cross-bar to lose on penalties, and when I began reading novels on my own. In 1998, I watched France win while visiting family in Singapore, a true testament to adolescence, eating fried kway teow in front of the big screen, watching Frank Leboeuf and Lilian Thuram defend as though their lives depended on it, which they surely did. In that year, I remember with great fondness reading J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K as I began to find my way through contemporary writers who had won ‘Big Prizes’. By 2002, when South Korea and Japan hosted the World Cup, I had started making my way through the classics, from Kharms to Camus to Coleridge. And so, football and reading have always been about leisure to me.'  (Introduction)

'In the photo Dua Lipa is not reading. Dua Lipa is lying, supine, in a tricolour bikini, basking in noonday sun. The kind which inevitably invokes a chill even though it’s 28 degrees and cloudless. The kind which makes you sneeze when you step into its crisp glare, which makes people say to each other with tight-lipped smiles, oh, aren’t we so lucky, finally, blue skies, I can’t believe how bad this weather has been lately. Dua Lipa is practising sun safety, shielding herself from harsh rays with a tome the size of a skull, spine turned towards the camera, eyes turned away as if caught unawares. On its spine, the title: A Little Life / Hanya Yanagihara. I wonder what Dua Lipa is thinking about. It is May, 2020. Lockdown, maybe. International travel. Her bestselling album Future Nostalgia. Albanian-Kosovar reunification.'  (Introduction)