Yesterday, I went to a poetry reading – Lorraine McGuigan is the Cafe Poet of a neat little place in Eltham called The Lane. Eltham’s always had an active artistic community as well as loads of trees. I remember in high school being quite jealous of the (artistic-hippie) folks who lived out that way, though [...]
Tagged books, Cafe Poet, Eltham, fantasy, fantasy novel series, Lorraine McGuigan, love, outer Melbourne, reading, The LaneYippee! Finally got a lot of my chronic health problems under control and for the first time since, perhaps, my undergraduate degree, I’m at a level of activity that I’m 75% happy about: yoga’s helped me reduce the dosage of one of my medications and now that I have my balance back, I can ride [...]
Tagged bike riding, creativity, good health, Instagramazine, National Poetry Month, photography, writing, zinesDynamics. I met up with a good friend yesterday and told her something that’s occupied my thoughts the last few days: a good chunk of (predominantly) Western society is used to non-linear narrative. It’s not even just a contemporaneous thing though most of us uselessly liberal arts educated people (yes, I definitely count myself as [...]
Tagged emotional intelligence, emotions, expectations, happiness, kink, polyamory, postmodernism…perhaps. I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter these days (for others’ benefit more than my own) but yesterday was A Very Good Twitter Day. My Scottish-born friend recited Robert Burns’ Address to a Haggis. Then there was Radiohead demonstrating the purpose of reading books (via @rageabc). Gush.
Tagged poetry recitation, Radiohead, reading, Robert Burns(in case you were wondering about the title…) I made it to fifty-three books. So damn close. I’m too damn lazy to review all of them, so here’s the list. It wasn’t as good a year as 2010 (despite my also failing to reach my goal then too) where I finished fifty-nine books, started fifty-four [...]
Tagged books, French language, readingI’ve lived in Australia for most of my life but the question still gets asked and it still irritates me: What nationality are you? I look the person dead in the eye and say “British.” The next question: Where are you really from? My mind answers: Fuck off, that’s none of your business. My mouth [...]
Tagged identity, poetry, postcolonial anxietyThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
There is no way around it: I think next week will be the hardest week of my life ever. I’ve never ever been so frightened in my life, I’ve never wanted someone to hold my hand and tell me it will be okay more than I have since yesterday evening. This sort of fear and [...]
Tagged fear, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, waitingThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Today’s Poets.org poem of the day, ouch. It’s some cold comfort when someone else can say the things you feel or experience, even if they don’t necessarily feel or experience them themselves, or you can’t get confirmation of aforementioned. In case you didn’t get the memo, poets sometimes lie in their poems and then sometimes… (found [...]
Tagged Dorothea Lasky, poetry, Poets.org, TumblrThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I’m rereading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with my good friend Ranjit. It’s time I focussed on other loves. I thought it might be nice to share one of my favourite passages. I’ve read this poem several times over the years (and rarely been none the wiser though now I have a Norton Critical Edition [...]
Tagged Norton Critical Editions, poetry, T. S. Eliot, textual variants, The Waste Land