If you throw the frisbee by yourself,
it will not come back.
The sun might be shining in the most exquisite way,
But
If you throw the frisbee by yourself,
it will not come back.
You might have just won tattslotto,
scoring yourself a cool million,
But
If you throw the frisbee by yourself,
it will not come back.
You might have the sexiest thighs in the world,
But
If you throw the frisbee by yourself,
it will not come back.
Flowers might be blooming in the park.
Children might be running around in innocent bliss.
Dogs might be sniffing other dogs’ arses.
A complete stranger might come up to you
and tell you that she loves you,
But
If you throw the frisbee by yourself,
it will not come back.
If you throw the frisbee by yourself,
it will
not
come
back.
In case you’ve been blogging under a rock for the last – oh – week or so, it behooves me to direct your attention to the current skirmish taking place in the blogosphere wherein poets Derek Motion and Nathan Curnow have challenged each other to a battle-of-the-comments.
The rules are simple: both Curnow and Motion have set up a blog post and invited comments upon that post. At the end of three weeks (ie, November 22 or thereabouts) the poet with the most comments wins, and the losing poet must abandon their blog forever.
To celebrate this unparalleled event I have commissioned my nefarious art-monkeys to work their Photoshop-fu magic in a manner that befits, and they have bettered even themselves with this, the official unofficial commemorative .jpg of the Curnow/Motion Blog Battle 2009.
(click to embiggenisate)
Who will walk away from this digital defenestration unscathed? Who will resign from the world wide web in shame? Will the ghost poetry of Curnow win the day, or will Motion’s space for typing triumph? Whose cuisine blog will reign supreme? Only YOU can decide, gentle reader.
Back in June 2006 I started a dumb little one-joke blog called Monkey Punch Dinosaur. I had been inspired by having seen Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong on a flight back from Thailand a month earlier.
It’s a dreadful film – the epitome of the kind of film that doesn’t need to be made because it adds nothing at all to its source or inspiration (and indeed sometimes cheapens that source/inspiration by virtue of its very existence) – but there’s a glorious sequence somewhere in the middle there where, instead of King Kong fighting a Tyrannosaurus Rex as he does in the original, Mr. Jackson decreed that Kong should fight THREE T-Rexes, and not just for the five minutes that the skirmish took in the original – it should be a 20-minute special effects extravafreakinganza of state-of-the-art computer animated monkey v. dino mayhem.
A few other people have weighed in on Marieke Hardy’s m-novel thingo, revealing even more shortcomings of the particular model of publication chosen by those involved.
I’ve already pointed out (as have others) that it’s more of an online thing than a mobile thing, but the rapier-witted Gullybogan has drawn some parallels between “Vigilante Virgin” and other mobile phone subscription business models.
Hackpacker is doing a review in progress, focussing for the moment on the delivery mechanism, and he’s promised to get into the actual story in a later post. Duncan Felton has pointed out that the technological limitations of the scheme make it pretty simple to subvert the subscription model and get the whole thing for the price of a single instalment.
And now, as a result of the Age’s decision to publish the first five instalments of the story in print, their website now has those first five instalments available for free. I’ve had a read, and while it’s not entirely terrible, there’s a preponderance of cleverclever phraseology
“Judy Bowler wasn’t what you’d call pleasant looking, not even if you were the Dalai Lama and you’d been caught off-guard during a particularly beatific moment and asked to provide a positive physical character reference.”
and overwrought metaphors
“Already, she felt the icy fabric of the chair seeping through her tracksuit and spreading, like a wholly unpleasant rash, around her fleshy kidneys.”
which, combined with the fairly slow-moving plot, doesn’t do anything to make me regret my decision to spend my $11.25 buying action figures on ebay instead of on this ground-breaking literary experiment.
A fact that fills me with inordinate glee. Here’s a sample:
I had a dream in which I was on a tractor, lurching along, pulling a wagon that was piled with large backpacks. Along for the ride were some rather well-known German DJs, one of whom was named Luke Vibert. (Luke is a real guy, and is not German — I had been listening to a Warp Records compilation earlier in the day, so maybe that’s how he got into my dream…)
Then there was a kind of intercut scene, away from the slow tractor travel, of these DJs in a club, behind their decks and laptops on the DJ platform. Some had guitars slung around their necks (but were not playing them), shouting into a special DJ mike with their German accents, “Ve are African men!, Ve are African men!” The crowd was dancing wildly.
Have a listen to this:
posted with vodpod
And then have a listen to this:
posted with vodpod
Is it just me, or is there a bit of overlap there in terms of speech patterns? I know Ajay Rochester from The Biggest Loser used to be a poet, but I’m getting the impression that she may not be Channel Ten’s only secret versifier.
Or maybe I’ve got it arse-backwards and the poetry community is rife with secret newsreaders…
Angela Meyer did an interview with yours truly a while ago. And now it’s up on her website.
A couple of days ago Marieke Hardy’s mobile book, “Vigilante Virgin”, began transmission. The project is being sponsored by Borders, who have called it “an Australian first”. Me, I’m a bit dubious. But let’s have a closer look at what they mean by “mobile book” first.
From a technological perspective, what Marieke’s doing sounds quantitatively different from the cell phone/mobile phone novels that have had their most success in Japan, and which have been around since 2005. Those things are little java-based applications specifically intended to be used exclusively on mobile phones.
It sounds like what they’re talking about is a 20-part story on the web. The “mobile” bit really only comes into play because subscribers will get texted the web address of each new chapter. And most likely then access the page using the web browsers on their mobiles. I’m guessing you could probably access it via computer too.
If you take the question of delivery method out of the equation, then, what you’re left with is an online story told in installments. And there’s already been a few of those – one that readily springs to mind is Australian author Max Barry’s Machine Man, a subscription-based online story told in daily instalments, which has been going since March 2009.
My little girl doesn’t want me to read
the story by the avant-garde New York artist.
My little girl doesn’t want me to read
the moral tale based on a Buddhist legend.
My little girl doesn’t want me to read
the nostalgic nineteen-fifties pastiche.
My little girl doesn’t want me to read
the whimsical post-modern nursery rhymes.
My little girl doesn’t want me to read
the reprint of the book I loved at her age.
My little girl doesn’t want me to read
the eco-parable on recycled cardboard.
All my little girl wants me to read
is the book about counting from one to ten.
one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten.
Again!
one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten.
Again!
Again!
Again!
Again!
