No future ..

and some small jubilance down my street in Alexandria, Sydney ..

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This is such a great birthday greeting. I have to post it. It's my birthday today and it's Agnes Varda's, Emperor Renzong of China's, American rapper Big L's and Laurie (greetings sender) Duggan's birthday today too.
Thirtieth of May - enjoy the day.

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                               Vale Michael Callaghan

Michael Callaghan, the artist behind the iconic If the unemployed are dole bludgers, what the fuck are the idle rich?, has died at his home in Exeter. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Nugget Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship. Michael was a founder of Redback Graphix in Wollongong and spent some years making brilliant posters in Sydney at the Tin Sheds, Sydney University's art workshop.

Back in 1978 I wrote and worked on a film, Cattle Annie,
directed by Gill Leahy in which Michael played a street punk -

       PB, Michael and Doco on location,1978 (photo by Micky Allan)

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Next Tuesday in Adelaide :

australian experimental art foundation
& Dark Horsey Bookshop present:

THE LEE MARVIN READINGS
Convened by Ken Bolton

The new writing performed
Every Tuesday in May
Dark Horsey Bookshop
EAF, Adelaide
7.30 for a prompt 8pm start.
Price $5

TUESDAY May 22

LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU COSTELLO
Aidan Coleman * Kerryn Goldsworthy *
Steve Brock * Pam Brown *

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Shearsman Books has just published a collection of Laurie Duggan's wonderful notational poems from his various strayings to diverse places.

The publicity :
The Pursuit of Happiness collects shorter poems written during and after the composition of Crab & Winkle, and concludes with 'The Nathan Papers', an earlier and longer work written in Australia. The poems address the state of the art and the state of the nation, investigating the spaces left for pleasure in this new dark age. As anthropological investigations, they shift from Robert Creeley, burgers and South African wine on Charing Cross Road to images of Santa Claus in Anglo-Greek Paphos and Japanese tourist signs in the Brontë country.

Tony Baker's blurb:
Duggan’s poetry has the virtue too that it never "abandons the local". Like Paul Blackburn . . . he builds his work out of what he finds in, on or about the premises.

The cover painting, Flight from reason, is by the Australian-born Modernist painter Stella Bowen.

To read a sample poem and for ordering info click here.

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And even more - Coming up in May

UWA Publishing presents

Kate Lilley
Ladylike

to be launched
by Pam Brown

Friday 11th May
5:30 for 6:00 pm
at the Common Room
Level 4
Woolley Building A20
Science Road
University of Sydney

The publicity says :
Ladylike is Australian poet Kate Lilley’s much awaited second volume of poetry, following her 2002 debut Versary (Salt Publishing).

The title poem of this collection (‘Ladylike’) draws on pamphlets associated with the notorious case of the bigamist Mary Carleton, who was executed in 1673, and texts contemporary with it; women from Sigmund Freud’s case studies provide the material for the series of poems, ‘Round Vienna’; and the poem ‘Cleft’ is dedicated to Kate Lilley’s mother, Australian literary giant Dorothy Hewett.

Throughout this collection, Kate mines the areas of her scholarly specialisation – the early modern period – as well as contemporary popular culture and matches it with some of the twentieth century’s enduring interests such as psychoanalysis and Freud. Ladylike is a valuable addition to Australian poetry at large and will be of interest to readers of poetry, early modern history, Freud and early psychoanalysis.

Pam Brown says :
Kate Lilley's trim poems linger in thresholds between the material world and otherworlds of slippage and undersound. Women and girls - strumpet, slattern, coquette, rubbermaid, princess - wayward, proclaimed, scandalous, diminished, wronged - are recovered and redeemed. In the dolour of grief, mother and daughter coalesce imperceptibly and mourning is immense. Ladylike loves language literarily. Kate Lilley is a mistress of adverbs and discrepancies. She adroitly melds the seventeenth century with the nineteenth and the twentieth, with its cinema classics and Freudian psychosexual dreams and neuroses, into the televisual synthetics of the twenty-first. These poems are compelling and exquisite.

Kate Lilley was born in 1960 and grew up in Perth and Sydney. After completing her PhD on Masculine Elegy at the University of London she spent four years as a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University. Since 1990 she has taught feminist literary history and theory at the University of Sydney and has published widely on early modern women’s writing and contemporary poetry. She is the editor of Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings. Her first volume of poetry, Versary, was published in 2002 and awarded numerous prizes internationally.

For further information click here

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More - Coming up in May

THE LEE MARVIN READINGS
Convened by Ken Bolton

The new writing performed
Every Tuesday in May
Dark Horsey Bookshop
EAF, Adelaide
7.30 for a prompt 8pm start.
Price $5

#1 MAY 1 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU REED
Linda Marie Walker * Cath Kenneally * Shannon Burns * Gretta Mitchell

#2 MAY 8 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LUKE ALTMANN
Christine Collins * Nicholas Jose * Rachael Mead * Rory Kennett-Lister

#3 MAY 15 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS
Ken Bolton * Steve Brock * Lauren Lovett * Carol Lefevre

#4 MAY 22 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LOU COSTELLO
Pam Brown * Aidan Coleman * Kerryn Goldsworthy * Stephen Lawrence

#5 MAY 29 LEE MARVIN IN AN EVENING WITH LE LOUP GAROU
Jill Jones * John Jenkins * Chelsea Avard * Mike Ladd

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