Sticky Wicket

Those few amongst you who give a squat what Justin Lowe thinks or feels won't be too surprised to know I have ambivalent feelings toward Mark Davis, he of Ganglands fame, a boomer railing against his tribe. As a 1964 baby I have been afforded the somewhat dubious honour of sitting on the demographic fence, but that's what defines me as an X, surely. The snaking shadows cast by fireworks, nefarious, skulking, grumbling, caustic as Lear's fool. Not a generation at all. Y is a generation. An honest to goodness biblical generation, not something spawned in a Sex Pistols song. We haunt the stage, we 1964-73 mob. I am a 43 year old man who finds more in common with 24 year olds red-eyed with the hours they have to work to pay off their HECS debt than the 45 year olds barking at them to earn their 12 bucks an hour. I paid next to nothing for my education, for what it was worth. I did not treasure it, rather railed against it if truth be told. Kids now know the value of their time on the campus. For that they are damned and damned in equal measure from one side or the other of the old boomer divide.

For a start, these kids read, voraciously. But not the right stuff, of course. Ring any bells, ye of the '68 putsch? Poetry is a matter of life or death for them, as is history, music, in fact pretty much everything but post-war politics. Ring any bells dropouts, draft-dodgers, groupies? I love listening to the Anne Summers of this world harp on about how dyslexic and sub-literate are the youth (Y for youth, get it now?) of today. But like I say, I sit on the fence. I still remember listening to those posturing manifestos drawled from campuses all over the world, the same empty slogans borrowed from previous generations who actually lived and died by them, the icy assumptions of children in thrall to power ("all men are rapists" has to be my lasting favourite). Where would the Anne Summers, Ray Martins, Robert Mannes, John Pilgers et al be now without the latitude of post-war youth? It was a unique experiment in child-rearing they have yet to appreciate because that kind of latitude will never be repeated. They ate the whole cookie.

But I am concerned here with Mark Davis, what brings him back ten years on to rake over the still hot coals of Ganglands. It wouldn't happen to be a publishing deal would it? I speculate. As I say I sit on the fence. I am working my way to an interview I heard on ABC radio a few weeks back, prompted by Mark Davis' article in Overland magazine, and reproduced in concise form in the Melbourne Age. It began

Somewhere deep in the fabric of Australian cultural life it is forever 1974. The Whitlam government is still in office. THIS DAY TONIGHT is still on television. Patrick White has recently won the Nobel Prize. The last fading bars of Eagle Rock echo from the Sunbury stage.

Sonorous, peripatetic syntax in a Pilgeresque kind of way. Pressing all the right buttons, hints of an underlying message, the promise of a cut away.

Instantly Mark Davis has fallen into the trap he accused the Boomers of in Ganglands - of stereotyping an entire generation. He writes like a Boomer, he is a Boomer, so what exactly is his point in this whole line-drawing exercise.

Squat.

He is selling a line, selling a book, himself.

Every word Mark Davis has ever written was addressed to his Boomer market, not to the issues, and for that he betrays himself as a boomer. Child of the golden age, occluded from staring into the sun too long, eating that campus food, listening to the echo of his own priviliged feet down the corridors of one of the plushest campuses on the planet.

I get ahead of myself, once again, because my point was a talk I heard on ABC radio recently between our Mark, the ubiquitous Richard Neville and a rather shrill Sally Warhaft, editor of the excellent fledgling Australian journal The Monthly. I was tooling down the M4 at the time between my Blue Mountain exile and my weekend job in North Ryde, so I thought I'd check in on what the Boomers were doing. I mean I switched to Radio National.

And there was Mark Davis employing his best bed-time manner on a rather wistful, dilatory Suzanne Donisthorpe as she pretended to chair a debate between these parties. Sally Warhaft was supposed to represent the "benighted" (Suzanne's words), but it very soon became apparent she was neither happy with our Mark or the moniker. Ms Donisthorpe, I have to say, seemed to have already made up her mind about the whole debate sometime in 1998 or thereabouts, and I see why she is more producer than presenter. She sounded tired. Sally Warhaft sounded anything but. Richard Neville sounded reasonable with all the wisdom of his colourful and privileged years.

The round table sound became something of a triangle with very pointy ends as Sally W vented her daddy's girl spleen at the perennial nerd that is Mark Davis. A more courageous man I have rarely heard on ABC radio unless you count that Steve Waugh innings in 199-, but that betrays one weakness of mine too many.

Mark Davis, for those of you who have the misfortune to live beyond the realms of this fascinating if rather hide-bound debate, has been arguing since 1997 that the reins of cultural, economic and political life in Australia are in the hands of a kind of club who all fucked and fought each other on campus in the 60's and 70's and now shrug off any suggestion they are THEM, THE MAN, THE HEAT, THE ESTABLISHMENT, another creak in an already creaky door. They simply don't have it in them to grow up that much (that, at least, is the kernel of his argument that got stuck in my teeth).

Sally Warhaft is, on her own admission, in her mid-thirties, however a little prickly around matters of chronoglogy in this particular performance like one with something to hide. In the midst of defending her demographic call as editor at The Monthly, she slipped once or twice, but you could forgive her, you HAD to, she was that shrill.

"If there was anyone that HOT out there, they'd be found."

This from the apparent spokesperson for the benighted on the pointy table of aunty's reason. This millenial aphorism following up some rather scintillating attacks on Generation Y's ability to express themselves ("I get fifty to a hundred UNSOLICITED manuscripts a week!!!" poor dear. "They are largely unpublishable.") This, on top of some isolated case of a happy student oblivious to the fact there weren't one but two world wars, seemed to be her case for a defence of the infedensible.

That talent is not self-evident is one of the tragedies of the boomer generation, I'm afraid. Their lense is geared to the spectacle, the next big thing, their expectations heightened (whether they want to admit it or not) by the technical, sociological and economic fireworks of 1914-18, 1939-45. Unfortunately for the rest of us, culture doesn't work that way.

New-(ish) Poetry by Oscar Vallazza

ON THE BEACH

I watch the kids of a new nation
washing the sins of old crimes
in the surf of an old land
reaching into the waves of the endless water
of a world of myths and spirit
under the watchful eye
of Julian Rocks

The mountains lie on the round horizon.

- Oscar Vallazza Byron Bay, 9 July, 1995

Giramondo

The Giramondo Publishing Company

warmly invites you
to the launch of the new
poetry collection by

Jane Gibian

Ardent


to be launched by
Adam Aitken
on Sunday 5 August
3.30 for 4 pm
upstairs at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Rd
Glebe

More Black Inc.

Tanya Levin, author of People in Glass Houses - An Insider’s Story of a Life In and Out of Hillsong, will be discussing her explosive memoir at two events in Sydney in August 2007.

People in Glass Houses is the first insider’s account of what it’s really like growing up inside the country’s most ambitious, entrepreneurial and influential religious corporation. Opening up the world of Christian fundamentalism, this is a powerful, personal and at times very funny exploration of an all-singing, all-swaying mega church.

Stanton Library Event

Venue: Stanton Library, 234 Miller Street, North Sydney
Date: Tuesday 7 August
Time: 1pm
Bookings: No bookings required.

Gleebooks Event

Tanya Levin in conversation with Steve Cannane from JTV

Venue: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
Date: Thursday 16 August
Time: 6.30 for 7pm
Cost: $10/$7 conc. gleeclub welcome
Bookings: Ph: 02 9660 2333 or visit www.gleebooks.com.au to request a place.

For further information on Black Inc. books, please visit www.blackincbooks.com.

New Poetry by rob walker

jazz channel

did lester young charlie parker dizzy gillespie and buddy rich at the philharmonic
in 1953 know that they would be the sound track to turbulence and three
layers of clouds of three different shades of white travelling at
three different speeds modal merging with melodic to
this diorama somewhere between osaka and
singapore as i down brandy cointreau
white wine and beer and
slip into a fog of an
indeterminate
decade
?

- rob walker 2007

rob walker is a poet and teacher from South Australia. His latest chapbook phobiaphobia (poetry of fear and anxiety) will be released by Picaro Press later in 2007.

Special Black Inc. News Bulletin

Black Inc. Books Australian Small Publisher of the Year!

The 2007 Australian Book Industry Awards were presented by the Minister for Arts and Sport, Senator George Brandis last night in Sydney.

Black Inc. is pleased to announce it has been awarded the Australian Small Publisher of the Year 2007.

Black Inc. would also like to congratulate Alice Pung, author of the bestselling memoir Unpolished Gem, who was awarded the Australian Newcomer of the Year 2007. Unpolished Gem was also shortlisted in the Australian Biography of the Year and Australian Book of the Year award categories.

2007 Books Alive Great Read Guide

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung had been selected for 2007 Books Alive Great Read Guide. The Books Alive Great Read Guide is an Australian Government initiative that showcases 50 books so good everyone will want to read them.

For further information on the 2007 Books Alive Great Read Guide, please visit http://www.booksalive.com.au/

For further information on the Australian Book Industry Awards, please visit http://www.publishers.asn.au/index.cfm

For further information on Black Inc. books, please visit http://www.blackincbooks.com

Binary Blues

I apologise to all for my tardiness of late, but on top of writing commitments I have had a run of bad luck with computers and am awaiting a replacement hard drive. I managed to rustle up something, but am not sure how long the window will remain open (pardon the pun). Contributors get back to me on or about the 26th (three days from this post), and see whether things haven't improved. Once again sorry, but we have all been there.

The Land of the Beigists

Could the national epidemic of somnambulism and mediocrity become an election issue? Steve Burrell set the ball rolling in last weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald with a competent if not overly original article on the current intellectual and spiritual malaise overwhelming this country. He was careful not to slide into political polemic, for the current Federal Government is merely one symptom of a chronic distemper that has afflicted the land down under since its earliest days as a colony. The old excuses no longer wash, however, and it seems our egalitarian legacy is only ever flaunted these days in defence of the average. I encounter people almost daily brimming with energy and ideas, but what Steven Burrell and many others are worried about is that they seem to be working in a bubble that eventually either bursts quietly or drifts off north of the line to people more receptive to the fresh and extraordinary. It is not a problem unique to Australia, of course, as the post-war generation ages and constantly shifts the cultural, economic and political goal posts to suit its changing needs, but we are perhaps more vulnerable than most because more practised than most at dragging down the “tall poppy” in the name of an egalitarianism that never really existed.

Now the deputy leader of the ALP, Julia Gillard, has stepped into the debate with her address last night to mark the 75th anniversary of the Australian Quarterly. She views the erosion of once vibrant cultural institutions in this country as a deliberate and sustained attack by some on the right of politics who feel compelled to fall into line with the nascent “global monoculture” of expediency and silence. “Their attempt to denigrate people like our philosophers, artists, writers and even climate scientists as out-of-touch, inner-city elites, and to claim that our egalitarian values are unsuited to new economic necessities, risks subsuming us into the blancmange of an emerging monoculture.”

Fighting words, Julia! But I would take issue with her on the origins of this attack. As far as the old right-left divide holds any relevance at all, there has been a steady erosion of values coming from both sides, often from within the very institutions themselves. I find it ironic that the culture of the individual has fostered a resistance to comprehensive education in much of the three post-war generations and that this has in turn peopled the world with semi-literate somnambulists barely cognisant of their rights and potential, let alone how to go about defending them.

In the world of international poetry, to bring this argument a little closer to home, there are already strong signs of this monoculture taking hold as the academies spit out armies of bright shiny things, their heads crammed with faux Ashberrian angst and the latest post-modern antitheses of eloquence and aesthetic. Anyone who doubts my take on things (and they are legion, I’m sure), please take some time from your busy schedule to surf the net and sample what’s on offer in all the major English-speaking cultures re all things poetic. Then track down some of the latest work being translated from the French, German, Romanian, Russian etc and much the same pattern emerges. Does this reflect the majority of what is being written and read and experienced by young poets, or simply what is being sought by their ageing, cloistered doyens? Some of it is very good, of course, but I am concerned here with the emerging global monoculture and what poets could and should be doing to arrest or even reverse it. The poetic, after all, is a duty not a right. Comments always welcome.

No Reaction

We're gettin' no reaction, with due apologies to this nation's Shadow Minister for the Environment. I asked for submissions recently, but perhaps you are all holding off waiting for the new website to be up and running. Well, you may be waiting sometime as my designer seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel and I am about as IT savvy as my nine year old dog. So please, feel free to send me poetry or stories (max 1500 words). NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE. There are submission guidelines below the merchandising, but I pride myself on being less pedantic and far more punctual than most.

Trends in German Poetry

The Writing & Society Research Group
presents an informal symposium with
poet in residence Ulrike Sandig
on trends in contemporary German poetry
and her German-English translation project
with Australian poet Jane Gibian
Friday 15 June
3.00-5.00pm
Fair Trade Coffee Company café
33 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe(www.fairtradecoffeecompany.com.au)

Ulrike Sandig was born in 1979 in Grossenhain Saxony, and lives in Leipzig. She has studied and worked in France and India, and has a Masters Degree in Religious Studies and Indology from the University of Leipzig. In 2001 she co-founded the literary group "augenpost". Her publications include a volume of poetry Zunder (2005), and der tag an dem alma kamillen kaufte (an audio book with Marlen Pelny, 2006). In May 2006 she was awarded the Meran Poetry Prize. She is currently a student at the Leipzig Institute of German Literature.

Ulrike Sandig's residency in Sydney is hosted by the UWS Writing & Society Research Group and the UTS Centre for New Writing, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut.

Latest JS Harry

The Giramondo Publishing Company
invites you to the launch
of the new poetry collection by
J.S. Harry
Not finding Wittgenstein:
Peter Henry Lepus Poems
to be launched by
David Malouf
and Kerry Leves
on Thursday 21 June
6 for 6.30 pm
upstairs at Gleebooks
49 Glebe Pt Rd
Glebe
RSVP: 9660 2333
Giramondo Publishing from the
Writing & Society Research Group
University of Western Sydney

New Poetry by Wayne H.W. Wolfson

A Single Veil

I walk.
A ghost which looks like you in the fog, it is just a memory which has yet to be burned away by the dawn.
The mornings are now damp, a gossamer of fog wraps itself around everything.
I walk among the canals, there is a scent, anisette and spoiled milk, which makes me dizzy.
I walk.
I stumble.
I know.

- Wayne HW Wolfson 2007


Izabel

You are hurt, but not even sure why. Ah, where are you my autumn friend? Your name is now alien in my mouth. Heavy on my tongue, a piece of paper.
All the paper on the table, hanging off the edge of the table, flapping slowly. Sunday night coming down, a sheet at a time. Pages, swollen, pregnant with words.
My only friend, duty. My autumn friend. Fall. Somewhere is a place with no words, I will go too, when I have no choice, holding her ink stained hands.

- Wayne HW Wolfson 2007


Mahler

Death is private, but eventually we are all there.
Tiny yellow flowers shot up from in-between the rocks. These little patches of color could hypnotize if you walked the whole shore.
Now she is on top.
Many rocks go without her flaxen hair.
There are some greens to be seen too.
Thin violent jags.
This morning, coming out of the shower, I thought I heard her laugh, but it was only yesterday.

- Wayne HW Wolfson 2007


Wayne is young poet from the States who has just returned from a yearly sabbatical in Paris.

Meanwhile, beyond the land of the beigists

The Stinging Fly is hosting a showcase for Ireland's various literary magazines during Listowel Writers Week, which kicks off tonight.

We'll have copies of the various journals for sale, as well as providing subscription information and submission guidelines.

Please come and visit the table in the Listowel Arms Hotel on Thursday, Friday or Saturday (May 31 - June 2).

Other magazines featured include Crannóg, Cyphers, The Dublin Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Shop, Southword, Succour and The Yellow Nib.


Bluepepper addendum

Pubs and books, Sydney readers!! Remember when that was more than an idea to be sneered at by the seemingly relentless tide of makeover people, those inextricably smug, painfully inarticulate and dangerously thin-skinned creatures who poison our favourite drinking holes and then raise our rent as a thank you?

PS Yes, I am speaking from bountiful experience here. Shutup or I'll write a poem about it.

Black Mark

Quarterly Essay 26: His Master’s Voice By David Marr PB $14.95

John Howard has the loudest voice in Australia. He has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced NGOs, censored the arts, prosecuted leakers, criminalised protest and curtailed parliamentary scrutiny. Though touted as a contest of values, this has been a party-political assault on Australia’s liberal culture. In the name of “balance” the Liberal Party has muscled its way into the intellectual life of the country.And this has happened because we let it happen. Once again, Howard has shown his superb grasp of Australia as it really is. In His Master’s Voice, David Marr investigates both a decade of suppression and the strange willingness of Australians to watch, with such little angst, their liberties drift away.

“More than any law, any failure of the Opposition or individual act of bastardry over the last decade, what’s done most to gag democracy in this country is the sense that debating John Howard gets us nowhere.”DAVID MARR, HIS MASTER’S VOICE

*David Marr will be touring Australia - see below for Quarterly Essay 26 events*

Memories Like Angels

After four long years, Brentley Frazer has finally released his much anticipated follow up to "Dark Samadhi", a book I savoured both publicly and privately. I may as well 'fess up now that I have written the blurb for this one, at least the one that appears at the publisher's web site, but some of you will already be well aware of my regard for this Brisbane poet recently relocated to Melbourne. We share a common sensibility, although our styles and artistic milieu are markedly different, and his energy and commitment to new writing is far more effective than mine. Would that there were more Brentley Frazer's in our small but vibrant poetry scene and a few less of those Sydney beatnik hacks last seen penning dross for the harbour city's most august and questionable rag. This one has the long and typically Frazerian title of "Memories like angels at a ball tripping over their gowns" and is available first and foremost at the publisher's website (just click on the post heading) as well as all good bookshops worth the name.

Call for submissions

I am in the process of setting up a website, but as my web designer is about to fly back to Malta for a whirlwind of avuncular advice and grappa, I will keep the bluepepper flying for the foreseeable. If you feel you have anything worthwhile to add to this kitchen experiment with fridge magnet forever at your back, then please send me your best and honest, and please do so secure in the knowledge the whole lot will be linked to the new website (if and when it happens) and will continue pretty much as is in that capacity. As far as I can fathom from the white fog sprouted at me by IT guys (I am in my forties and do drink and so on a great deal) this will mean many more hits for anyone posted at bluepepper. The website I envisage as a more permanent display of contemporary poetry's newest and brightest, but we have all heard that before, so I will attempt (very much against my Scorpio nature) to tread lightly from here on in. So please feel free, which is, I am afraid, what your poetry will continue to be in this particular corner of cyberspace until the aprons are finally off and the fridge magnets politely fed to the belching one-eyed monster canvassing your electorate any day now.

New Poetry by Les Wicks

BURNT RUBBER AT THE DEAD ZONE

Elena has a new art, her brushes

this black Kawasaki Big Ninja, ZZR-1100, plus a radiation detector.

Girl of speed and silence,

technology beyond fingers, a stretched drum-skin of abyss

and straw where the Monkey Law of Curiosity is written in poison.

She rides through Chernobyl taking photos – the Luminous Law of Poke.

Snow promises “reconciliation”.

A few declining shards of occupation, even tour guides

but visitors cannot stay -

canned by quiet, the innate dissonance

of human clutter without the tribe…

well-fed eyes skitter, shoulder muscles clench beside placards

for the 1986 Mayday Parade

Party of Lenin leads us to the Triumph of Communism.

Magazines unread, Fish and Hunt.

Kindergarten trips are postponed

for 30 generations.

"Chernobyl" means wormwood and

is an iridescent palette. This woman passes

rusting nests of tanks, Sikorski bones. My own

daughter was born that week 1986, this alp of news and a slow, implacable

gyre of contractions as we watched Nightmare on Elm St, then Cheers.

A hoar of antiquity in the toss of their manes
Prejevalsky Horses shave grasslands, this new age of life -

roses go the way

of any managed thing.

Peace is imposed on this tiny patch as

confident wolves ignore the scent of dead farmyards.

Wild boar multiply, move in to simple wooden huts that

drink radiation but refuse to desert

their contract of shelter.

The Ferris ("Devil's") Wheel will not turn.

Washing, 20 years untouched, still on the line.

Vovik + Tanya = love (maybe still/

600 miles away and them nervously with new children

waiting for the taint).

Elena reassures us

that bitumen protects,

doses at their lowest in the centre of roads.

No one is surprised by this, enduring haven of we beasts that ate.

Is this the last human ecology?

Roars of our engines, the septic gasp.

Opal eyes peering from tarmacadam coats.

Les Wicks 2007

Folly

For reaons completely unfathomable to me, Google has decided to butcher their blogging program, and until I can find my way around the ten tonne boulder they have rolled across my path, visitors are simply going to have to live with the format as it stands. Or you could email Google and let them know what you think of the genius who thought he'd earn his Christmas bonus early by touting this folly.

In the meantime, however, you may be interested to know that The Great Big Show is about to hit the bookstores. I would post a link here, but I was hungover the day they handed out IT degrees.

Oh no, there it is. Now for the cover art......

Justin Lowe makes a correction (or two)

I have withdrawn The Great Big Show from public circulation while I finalise its publication and release. I thank those people who showed an interest and hope the rest of you do likewise when it hits your bookstores.

Black Inc. makes a correction

Please note this correction to Friday’s March & April events information.
Bookings for these events at Gleebooks can only be made by calling 02 9660 2333 or by visiting www.gleebooks.com.au/events