AustLit

'“In the 1960s and ’70s I grew up on a sheep farm in north-eastern Victoria,” said choreographer Rosalind Crisp in a very plain voice, somewhere at the start of her lecture-performance DIRtywork. Crisp had spent more than a decade dancing and choreographing in France; she only returned a few years ago. She continued, “My parents, my three siblings, myself and our dogs and cats ate sheep nearly every day.”'

 (Introduction)

'Don't let that quote up there scare you. My interest in this essay is 'my interest in', my curiosity about, envy. Operating more as Nietzschean difference than as a negating, the 'vs', in other words, is active rather than adversarial. The take-home - to save your reading on - pertains to dosage. While grim to experience, envy insists; it isn't going anywhere. Even as visual trace, as word, it cuts a compelling figure. Four letters, in their uppercase guise: sloping, canyonesque, stalactite-mite-like. The 'E' faces its companions - who wait, lined up - and it contemplates its relation to them. They occupy space nearby, are proximate, parallel, but do not coincide with the 'E'. Envy, as philosopher Agnes Heller reminds us in 'A Theory of Feelings', tends to occur most virulently between 'similars', not across starker hierarchies.' (Publication abstract)

'That there is no easy translation for 'awkward' in other languages suggests that I'm only myself in English. This feels like a loss because I'd like to think of myself as Turkish, too. An internet search on this subject - is awkwardness an Anglophone phenomenon - will throw up near-miss translations, foreign words that instead capture strangeness, discomfort, ugliness, untidiness, clumsiness. Some languages have resorted to borrowing the word from English wholesale - Spanish and German use 'awkward' the way they use 'download' or 'spinning'. In Turkish we say tuhaf or sakar. One means strange, the other clumsy.'

 (Publication abstract)

'In February of 1985, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood was attacked by a saltwater crocodile. She was in a red plastic canoe, in the part of the river she was told not to go to. She tried to jump from the canoe into a tree to escape the crocodile, but the crocodile jumped too. It death-rolled her three times in the water before she managed to escape and crawl to a place where a ranger found her.' (Publication abstract)

'If a person bi"en by a mad dog looks in the mirror, they will see the animal's image reflected there. and ese are not my words, they are Paul the Silentiary's words. A silentiary is an advocate for silence: did Paul occupy a quiet body? I wonder this now but not o!en. When I imagine his words and his mirror, I assume a loud body, something collapsing. Either way, it does not ma"er. I only need to write the body down for it to remember itself.' (Publication abstract)

'Year that an Australian Government environmental impact assessment recommended against the construction of a runway on rock anywhere within Australian Antarctic Territory: 2003.'  (Publication abstract)

'We live in an era of hostile architecture, disinformation, and privatisation. Our right to exist in public freely is increasingly compromised. In 2018, Forbes ran an op-ed suggesting that libraries could be replaced by Amazon. In the same week, Omar Sakr wrote a twitter thread celebrating the social, intellectual, and domestic role of Liverpool public library in his teenage years. When Vanessa Giron, the commissioning editor for this series, wrote a Brow by Numbers for TLB 39, she focussed on the increase in public library membership and patronage, and paradoxical decrease in staff and funding on both a state and federal level. It seems we need public information and safe spaces for congregation and learning now more than ever—but how ‘public’ can these public spaces be when they are entrenched in the logics of colonialism and capitalism? Are these spaces truly free, if they propound colonialist narratives under the guise of objectivity. Are they truly public, if they are inaccessible to those who would benefit most from them?

'We asked five writers to consider the public, personal, and structural role that public libraries play in our society. The responses from our writers were generous, ranging from writing from poetic, to academic, to critical, to playful. For some, public libraries provided access, safety, education, or entertainment. For others, they may symbolise hierarchies that privilege particular narratives over others. They conjured memories, provocations, and projections about the future of public information and public space.

'We hope this series provides, if not answers, a richer understanding of the stakes and terms of the issue at hand.' (Introduction)

'A woman is telling me shes basically my grandmother. She tells me this while we sit opposite each other in her backyard, over the scraps of an almost-finished Christmas lunch. Although it's not Christmas; it's Boxing Day. From her pocket she removes a fifty-pack of Peter Jacksons, and taps the bottom of the box so a single cigarette slides out. In the box I can see one cigarette turned upward, a bloom of tobacco in a sea of butts. A lucky cigarette, a friend told me once, although that friend has long-since moved onto the more economically viable pouch. The woman - Finnie is her name, I have no idea what it's short for - lights her cigarette, picks at the carcass of a Coles rotisserie chicken. I think about how much more depressed I am since I got Netflix. She tells me she feels as if she is my grandmother; I can call her anytime, with any problem.'  (Publication abstract)

'She's wearing fishnet stockings, red high-heeled boots and white knickers stretched tight across her ass. She looks over her shoulder, a surprised squawk on her face. She's mid-way through chowing into a burger, grease oozing over her feathered hands. Her comb is a seductive red, her beak stained with lipstick. and is chick has titties, too: her breasts are huge.'

 (Publication abstract)

'There are two ways to walk from my workplace to the post office. If you take the long way, you can walk past the old-fashioned bookbinding office where the dog with bowed front legs lives. and ere are pedestrian lights on the long way. The shortcut takes you down a narrow laneway, behind other offices and studios, past old terraces tucked away, facing inwards, oblivious to the traffic just around the corner. Along this laneway lives an enormous, thriving bougainvillea vine. As the city warms it grows noticeably thicker and more determined. It is sturdy and wide and appears so solid and plump that you might imagine one of Anne Geddes' babies curling up there for a coral-tinted nap. Is there a picture of early infancy more dreamlike, more implausibly serene than the ones Anne Geddes staged? The babies of that world do not scream, or cry, or ask for anything at all. they are chubby and quiet, they are still, and they sleep. They appear safe, as though their future is assured.' (Publication abstract)