…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 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, waitingToday’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, TumblrI’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 LandIT’S OVER. What an exhausting, exhilarating week. On a chronic illness front, I’m really proud I made it through. Sadly, I couldn’t stick around for planned oysters and martinis celebrations as planned because I just needed to go home and die. The first session was all of us listening to each others’ settings of Luke [...]
Tagged Alexander Garsden, Caroline Lee, Chamber Made Opera, Chamber Made Opera librettist workshop, contemporary Melbourne-based composers, contemporary opera, David Chisholm, David Young, Deborah Kayser, Dr. Christine McCombe, Dr. Linda Kouvaras, Elliott John Guyger, Helen Gifford, Ida Duelund Hansen, Jesse McVeity, Kevin March, Laura Vaughan, libretto writing, Luke Paulding, Paul Horan, poetic intent, viola da gambaI succumbed. Last night, I took sleepers and ugh the legal drug hangover that ensued this morning. Still, at least I got a solid ten hours’ sleep: even slept through Paul Verhoeven’s irritating announcing on Triple J (drinking game: have a shot every time Paul Verhoeven mentions Paul Verhoeven’s name when Paul Verhoeven is doing [...]
Tagged Chamber Made Opera, Chamber Made Opera librettist workshop, libretto writing, National Australian Poetry Week, Stephen ArmstrongReached the halfway mark! Still not sleeping much. Thankfully, commuting and our central location means that two exceedingly notable coffee joints are keeping me alive – underneath Flinders Street Station, there’s Cup of Truth (omg, they had a Radiohead song playing from OK Computer when I got there! best Radiohead album ever!) and on Little [...]
Tagged Alison Croggon, Chamber Made Opera, Chamber Made Opera librettist workshop, David Young, Deborah Cheetham, Deborah Kayser, identity, libretto writing, National Australian Poetry Week, Overload Poetry Festival, Pecan Summer, postcolonial anxietyMan, insomnia’s really starting to take it out of me. However, with the help of coffee, it’s time to do day two. Sadly, Brett Kelly, our original presenter could not be present for our first session but we had a delightful fill-in: the Danish-born performer and composer Ida Duelund Hansen. She came armed with her [...]
Tagged Chamber Made Opera, Chamber Made Opera librettist workshop, classical music, Dido and Aeneas, Die Winterreise, editing, Franz Schubert, Henry Purcell, Ida Duelund Hansen, Judith Rodriguez, lieder, Lindy, Moya Henderson, National Australian Poetry Week, opera, Wilhelm Muller, writing poetryIt’s National Poetry Week! That means some srs poetry action. For me, this also means getting to attend a workshop aimed at introducing writers to the art of writing a libretto, the text of an opera that is then set to music by a composer. It’s a joint effort run by Chamber Made Opera and [...]
Tagged Chamber Made Opera, Chamber Made Opera librettist workshop, counterpoint, David Young, Deborah Kayser, Gram magazine, Island literary journal, Islet, libretto writing, Margaret Cameron, National Australian Poetry Week, The Wheeler Centre, Victorian Writers CentreOr: the post where Gem bulks up on trade paperbacks and graphic novels to meet desired 2011 quota…yep, it’s over halfway through the year and I’m resorting to dirty means to try and make it to 60 books though according to Goodreads, only books begun and finished can technically be counted and they have to have an [...]
Tagged Anya's Ghost, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Ballou, Fables comic book series, graphic novel, Jamie McKelvie, Ken Follett, Kieron Gillen, Phonogram comic, poetry, Susan Coolidge, The Darwin Poems, The Pillars of the Earth, Vera BrosgolI’ve spent the last month waiting for various things to work, things not working, then back to waiting for the new things to start working. It’s actually been pretty shit and I spent 2.5 weeks in bed. Things I learnt: even after 16 hours of sleep, I can still be tired; some medications make you [...]
Tagged 1000 Pound Bend, Chamber Made Opera librettist workshop, Claire Fontaine notebooks, Field Notes notebooks, Gram magazine, Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth pencils, O Check stationery, Rhodia stationery, sickness, The Fall, writing poetryWhoops, I miscounted – I’ve read ten more books since my last post for a while and yes I am counting a poetry chapbook even though it doesn’t have an ISBN…sue me though it does have an ISSN. Anyway, here’s my next ten books that I’ve been trying to devour as making it to sixty [...]
Tagged Bill Willingham, book reviews, Fables comic book series, Frans Masereel, Geoff Lemon, Going Down Swinging, Jack of Fables, Jay Wiseman, Jessica Friedmann, Miriam Wei Wei Lo, No Pretty Words, Rachael Hale, SM 101, SmittenMy bad. For the two of you that actually pay attention to my book-reading habits, you can be forgiven for thinking I haven’t been reading at all. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like because I’ve spent the last three or so months a. really, really unwell and b. apparently making up for [...]
Tagged A A Milne, Allen Ginsberg, Blood and Guts In High School, book review, Burnings, DailyLit, E H Shepard, Emily Dickinson, G, Gardens of the Moon, Just So Stories, Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder, Ocean Vuong, poetry, R L Stevenson, reading, Rudyard Kipling, short story, Steven Erikson, Treasure Island, Winnie the Pooh