About to be published...

L to R : Michael Darley, Terry Larsen, and Laurie Duggan

Image credit.

My interview with Laurie Duggan, Australian poet and all-round lovely guy, is about to be published by Southerly as part of their "Nest of Bunyips" edition being launched on the 8th of May. More information on the Southerly website.

More "On the Road" movie posters

Garrett Hedlund is Dean Moriarty a.k.a. Neal Cassady

Sam Riley is Sal Paradise a.k.a. Jack Kerouac

Kirsten Dunst is Camille a.k.a. Carolyn Cassady

All poster images from On the Road facebook page. See the offical movie website for more details.

Journaling...

A Line a Day Diary

Moleksine Sketchbook Large

I like the idea of these line a day journals for five years - I imagine looking back over the last few years of entries and seeing what I was doing on that day in the previous years - but I am not a daily writer. I tend to write in my journal sporadically, and while I write at least once a week, I don't think I am the line a day kind of person. I like to glue things in. I like to save public transport tickets, movie stubs, and exhibition postcards  to glue and sticky tape into my journals. I like to include photobooth photographs, free maps, postage stamps and other people's old receipts and shopping lists that I find in library books and while grocery shopping. I started doing this in my travel journals and it became a habit. 

That is why I have come to love the Moleskine sketchbook. I bought one by accident, I meant to buy a large notebook and picked up a sketchbook, but it was a happy accident. The pages are thicker and stand up to my sticking and gluing and my black ink fountain pen doesn't show through the pages (like it did in the notebook).  The sketchbooks probably don't have as many pages as the notebooks, but I like that they are unlined and can write as in them as large or small as I want to. 

I don't buy Moleskines because I think I am Bruce Chatwin or Ernest Hemingway (even though I love both of them), I buy them because I like the size, the weight and colour of the paper, the rounded corners and the portability. I also like the envelope in the back, the elastic close and the simplicity of them.

Do you journal? Do you have a favorite brand, or style, or size? Have you ever had a line a day journal - did it work for you?

N.B. This is not a sponsored post, I just thought I'd share my favorite style of journal. 



New in the mail...

Image from Shearsman Books

Laurie Duggan's new book of poetry, The Pursuit of Happiness, arrived in the mail yesterday. I really enjoy Duggan's poems and style - his observations, wit, breavity, and word play. I have only had a chance to glimpse the first few pages, but I have already found lines to make me smile.

cement slabs, on which

black-faced sheep forage

the explosive factory

blew up in 1916

(from "Angles 1-18")

Milan

1

avoid places the guide books describe as 'bohemian'

only the northern edge of Brera begins to feel like real people

live there

2

the sparrows are smaller than English sparrows

but the pigeons and blackbirds are the same size

3

in Veronese's 'Last Supper'

everyone appears drunk

4

Medardo Rosso sculpts

like wax melts

5

Ball's 'Dog on a leash'

just about describes the Quadrilatero d'Oro

6

the Stazione Centrale is under wraps

the futurists have abandoned the city



Reading...

Reading: A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean by Irad Malkin.

I haven't changed my thesis topic, I am still looking at new Australian poets, but I am also looking at the networks that contribute to the formation of a literary generation. As such, I have been reading up on social network theory for models that provide a way to move beyond binary representations or centre-periphery models. Malkin's book offers a way to examine decentralised and non-hierarchical networks, and while his focus is obviously on the ancient Mediterranean, chapter one offers a great introduction to network analysis (thanks Martin for lending this to me!).

There is a new review on the Australian Poetry Review site on John Leonard's Young Poets: An Australian Anthology (2011).

And Friday night Sam and I went and saw Bombshells at the Queensland Performing Arts Center. Sam's review of the performance has been published on M/C Reviews.

Researching parodies...

Image credit

I am researching parodies of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" for a lecture I am giving this month. So far I have found "Whisper", "Yelp" and "Tweet". Do you know of any other good ones?

Here are the first lines from the ones I have found (follow the links above for the whole poem):

Whisper - Jeffery Bilbro
I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, clamoring futile
frustration,
locked in cubicles, staring wide-eyed at shifting, flickering screens that monitor the
pulses of nations,
chained by headphones, cell phones, emails, texts, breaking news, virtual friends,

Tweet - Oyl Miller
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era

Yelp - Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg
I saw the best mind of my generation distracted by text messaging, emailing, tweeting, dragging their cursors through google links at dawn, looking for an info fix,
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ultra-fast heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

On the Road posters...

Alice Braga is Terry a.k.a. Bea Franco

Amy Adams is Jane a.k.a. Joan Vollmer

Elisabeth Moss is Galatea Dunkel a.k.a. Helen Hinkle

Tom Sturridge is Carlo Marx a.k.a. Allen Ginsberg

Viggo Mortensen is Old Bull Lee a.k.a. William Burroughs

Have you seen these yet? These are the official movie posters that have been posted on the On the Road - The Movie facebook page. Still waiting for posters of: Kristen Stewart (as Marylou, aka Louanne Henderson), Kirsten Dunst (as Camile, aka Carolyn Cassady), Sam Riley (as Sal Paradise, aka Jack Kerouac) and Garrett Hedlund (as Dean Moriarty, aka Neal Cassady).

What do you think? Do you like the aesthetic of the posters? Or do they look a little over photoshopped to you? I personally find the little quotes floating beside their faces a little distracting, they don't seem very embedded into the overall image. Regardless, these posters certainly make me think about what the film might be like.