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At what point did my handwriting begin to resemble my parents’? It never used to. It used to be a sort of miserly scrawl – miserly, that’s what my Mum used to always call it, because people with small handwriting are always misers, she said – more like little frantic scratchings than legible script. But now I found my handwriting getting larger, more loopy and free form. It took me a while to figure out where I’d seen that handwriting before. And then come memories of Mum writing out our tuckshop orders on those brown paper bags and Dad leaving notes all over the house – Close the back door before you leave, Don’t waste water.
In fleeing my parents (to uni, into writing-and-music-not-medicine, out of home, overseas) I hoped to escape their influence, their burdensome past and expectations. But my hand betrays me – even as I write a story about leaving them behind, the very handwriting itself reminds me of them. And as I write, my literary influences rise up from the deepest reaches of my subconscious. There’s Mark Twain’s version of the Joan of Arc legend, which made me cry in Grade 5. A young adult fiction rendering of Arthur and his Knights, which I can never find but whose themes – unrewarded heroics, betrayal, brotherly camaraderie – still tug on my heartstrings when they surface in the most banal formats (the ending of the first Fallout videogame, for one, and the ending of the first Redwall book by Brian Jacques, Martin the Warrior).
And will I ever escape the haunting image of Remedios the Beauty floating away into the sky? And how often have I returned to that final, unforgettable sentence in The Great Gatsby, which itself seems to eternally recur even as you read it?
Ultimately I’m writing for myself – I have to. Even the most attentive reader, with the most intimate knowledge of my life would only come away from a piece of my writing with an infinitesimal number of meaningful moments of influence. All the rest are there for myself – because reading is ultimately a lonely pastime and any writing (well, my writing anyway) is like a series of echoes of other pieces of writing – both by me and by other people. Images and phrases have a way of recurring in my writing, again and again, as if I’m trying to scratch away an itch. Which is the pleasure in rereading – new echoes surface – and why I have a guilty pleasure in rereading stuff I’ve written a long time ago – it’s the same as looking at my handwriting; the echoes multiply with each revisit and eventually I don’t know what parts of me are real and what parts are echoes. Eventually I’ll be like a reverb chamber, endlessly echoing on and on and on…
The above is a screenshot of a skills assessment my housemate was completing for the Newstart (dole) payment. It’s supposed to help recipients learn the sorts of skills they need to be able to find gainful employment…while reinforcing some subliminal stereotypes while they’re at it…
The text reads:
“Chief’s tend to be high achievers and work towards achieving a promotion as soon as possible. For this reason they often accept extra responsibilities and strive for recognition of their abilities.
Businesses also need Indian’s. Indian’s are often the staff members who get things done and are comfortable with accepting direction.
They don’t mind doing menial and repetitive tasks and prefer not to accept additional responsibilities. Businesses need Indian’s and they are an important component to business operations.”
I’m not sure which I’m more concerned with – that whoever wrote this didn’t think that there was something suss about telling us that Indians are the perfect convenience store employees…or that a skills assessment test for the unemployed doesn’t know how to use apostrophes.
This is a recording of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. He records himself speaking and then plays it back into that same room, recording that playback. He does that again and again, each time picking up the resonant frequencies of the room. The recited text describes the process itself:
“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but, more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”
As you listen to the recording, the speech becomes unintelligible and eventually all you are left with are the pure resonant harmonies of the room itself. Stay tuned for a performance of I am sitting in a room chez Pèche.
Ever since my girlfriend made a speech at my 21st in which she mentioned that I was particularly fond of Jacques, I’ve been copping a lot of shit about him. Lately it’s reached a kind of crescendo, and I feel as if I can barely walk out the door without being subjected to snide jokes about Continental philosophy. So, in an attempt to deflect attention from my love of deconstructionism, here’s a list of other nerdy things I enjoy which you can tease me about:
- Noise music
- Arsenal FC
- Human Rights
- Computer games
- Cycling
- End-of-the-world movies, especially ones with the scene where someone volunteers for the almost-certain-death-save-the-planet mission and then they ask who for anyone who will come with them to step forward and then everyone does, at the same time
- Coming-of-age films, especially ones revolving around high school sports teams in which a boy earns his father’s respect by almost winning the same trophy his father had won as a boy
- The internet, especially the badly spelt parts
- General low-brow procrastination which doesn’t revolve around ontology, epistemology, the limits of language, or the human condition
PS
I <3 JD 4 eva
I rode from East Melbourne to the Mount today. Thankfully, Spring decided to show up, so it was a beautiful ride along the Yarra and Gardiner’s Creek. Usually I take a mostly road route, but today I went most of the way along a series of bike paths. It made a lot of difference – I was able to really get into a rhythm and tagged along to the back of a couple of good riders who really pulled me along at a nice pace.
One of the zines I brought back from TINA was Ianto Ware’s ‘21 Days in July: The Physics and Metaphysics of Cycling’. In it, Dr. Ware talks about the state of Zen the good rider can get into when she gets her cadence right. If your cadence is too high, it’ll feel like you’re over-revving, turning the pedals a lot for not much gain. If your cadence is too low, you’ll be pushing yourself out of the saddle, and tiring yourself in the process. But if your cadence is just right, you’ll get into that mystical state where every pedal stroke seems to keep you gliding along. It’s when riding feels effortless that you really start to become aware of what you’re riding through. Today, it was really lovely to ride through the parks and past cricket ovals, with the sun bathing everything without heating me up to much.
I did cramp up about 200 metres from home, which was pretty annoying. I had to actually get off and walk for a bit while my calves recovered. They’re actually still quite sore as I write.
Anyhoo, it probably won’t be long before I’m wearing full body lycra and riding to my corporate office where I’ll roll around in a pool full of money while laughing maniacally. It’s a slippery slippery slope. And yes, Cat, this blog is self-indulgent. All blogs are, and most writing is. What are you gunna do about, huh?
Hi Bhakthi,
It’s fun being efnick isn’t it? You get to eat lots of yummy food and dress up all cute. And you get all the plum jobs and you get to avoid white guilt as well. I don’t know why more people aren’t efnick – it’s a total laff riot.
Of course, this is all thanks to the eradication of Racism. ‘Cos everyone we know is just too smart to be racist. We’re so good at deconstructing everything we say that we’re always aware of any perceived racism – ipso facto lorem ipsum etcetera we are able to negate our racism with our awareness of said racism. It’s like we’re all walking around with permanent scare quotes floating around our ears. Racism seems to be a matter of intelligence – only so-called ‘bogans’ can be racist, drowning in ignorance as they are.
And because racism is a matter of intelligence, there is no bigger fox paz than forgetting about those implied scare quotes and actually taking a comment at face value. To point out (without being self-deprecating or ironic) that a joke is racist/sexist/homophobic/offensive is a cue for awkward sniggers and sheep-faced smiles as if to say, gee, don’t you get it?
I mean, today in class, we were workshopping this piece that had some serious sexist issues with gender representations…but when someone eventually pointed this out, she had to preface her comments by saying, ‘Maybe it’s just like, my inner feminist, but…’ Those that bang on about how we have to break taboos and smash PC see themselves as radical, cutting edge. But it’s actually the much easier, normative position to take. Rather than engaging with the problems and issues raised by the sexism in the piece, the class chose instead to attack ‘PC-ness’ – by which they mean, people who are lame enough to be hung up about race, gender and general loser topics like that.
But who are we kidding? This post-political posturing does nothing more than support the status quo. As Tom Cho said in a recent panel on ‘lacism’ (don’t ask), the ‘nothing is sacred’ position is not necessarily radical or even interesting. It is simply nihilistic, and does a lot more damage to progressive thinking than it does to conservative politics. Racial discourse isn’t a zero sum game – which is why people totally miss the point when the say, ‘But don’t you think whiteface is just as offensive as blackface? I’m not the racist – I support true equality’. But this isn’t equality – it’s just a very effective way of undermining the progressive platform from which the oppressed can speak out against discrimination.
Anyways, this will all be discounted because it’s just efnick writing, right? Which is totes cute and stuff but like, just get over it yeah?
Yours,
Knut P.
Hi Cat,
How’s work? I’m currently sitting in my car listening to Grizzly Bear because I don’t have enough money to pay the parking metre, and I’m waiting until 6.30, when you don’t have to pay anymore. I’ve got about 1,000 copies of Right Now in the back too, which were delivered straight from the press to my front door. It made me realise that I’m never going to get over print…Kindle be damned! As soon as the boxes arrived I tore one open and picked up a copy, running my fingers along the cover as if it were Braille, or something. It smells new as well, and there’s something about holding a publication I’ve been so intimately responsible for that makes me a little giddy and scared and wordless…
…which is all much better than I was feeling this morning, which was a combination of whatsthepointofallthis and ohmywheredidallthetimego? A rather paralytic combination as it turns out – I skipped class to cook myself a curry instead. First time I’ve cooked for myself in about three weeks as well – I’d forgotten how nice it is to just spend all day preparing and eating a meal.
[Moved car into free spot.]
You may also have noticed that my name is now Knut. I think I’ll try it on for size before I change it by deed poll. Oh and thanks for offering to edit Right Now, I’m totally going to hold you to that. It can be the first step in your whole ‘doing things’ phase that hopefully you’re spending a lot of time putting into action.
Anyhoo, now that I no longer need to sit in the car, I might duck off to the library to start writing this essay that’s due tomorrow. Stay away from those babies!!!
Yours,
Knut P.
‘They’re devil worshippers…indulgent white kids…opening up black holes to other universes’ – Tina, the lady who lives in the warehouse where we recorded this…
…just a little ambient jam by Andre Peach and Nic Tammens.
Sometimes you can hear a whole lot about a band and then realize that you know nothing about their music. I’d heard a whole lot about Aleks and the Ramps’ live show – that they regularly come on stage in matching basketball uniforms, and that their sets include choreographed interpretative dance. They’ve even shot a “guerilla” music video for one of their songs at Charlton’s, an infamous karaoke bar in Melbourne which involved outlandish dance moves and frequent cuts to the bemused faces of Charlton’s regulars.
But with the release of their second album, Midnight Believer, Aleks is hoping that people will be talking about more than just their onstage antics – “as soon as you get known for something other than your music – and we became known as the basketball uniform band – then it’s a good time to stop!”
If anything, the band has mellowed out since their debut, Pisces vs Aquarius, which was almost schizophrenic in the abruptness of its changes. That’s one of the things Aleks was less than happy with on the last record – “we used to have no filtration process with our ideas – we’d just be like ‘well and then what happens?’”
The key to their sound – at times smooth and layered and at other times sharp and abrasive – lies in their musical process which brings together, rather than separates, the writing and recording phases. Aleks says that the process is one of “writing, recording, cutting and pasting and then shifting around.” And the live show isn’t separate either – songs are often demoed live before going back to Aleks shed for “the never ending overdub sessions”, which in turn affects how they play the track live – “[we realized” that maybe that guitar part isn’t as important as it used to be, because now there’s this new synth bit which we’ve learnt through doing the recording is more important.”
Not that the new album is a complete depature, “I do still like music that leaps from big to small, and goes places. But [instead we’re] trying to find where it’s fluid but still jarring – where it’s natural.”
As for their live show? They may have ditched the basketball uniforms but that doesn’t mean the gigs will be any less manic – “I just think that if you’re a band putting on a show, you should put on a show!”
