Workshop: Zines with Adam Ford

Next Wednesday 9 December between 5 and 7pm I’ll be hanging out at Signal, the arts space run by the City of Melbourne, with all of my zinemaking gear as part of a workshop I’m teaching, wherein zines will be discussed, dissected and also created.

Merry Christmas (blog war is over).

When I was five I thought when a lightsaber hit you, you turned into a blanket.

The ozpo cyberweb has spent the last three weeks on tenterhooks as it anticipated the outcome of the blog war declared between poets Nathan Curnow and Derek Motion. The stakes were high – the loser had to quit their blog – and now a winner has been declared.

It seems Wagga Wagga’s own Derek Motion has vanquished Ballarat boy Nathan Curnow in a clear-cut 86-81 victory, and now, as per the terms of engagement, Nathan’s Blog Eats Poet blog has ceased publication. Kudos to Derek and commiserations to Nathan. I’ve enjoyed both of their blogs over the last few months since I discovered them.

I’m pleased that Derek will continue to opine online as he has been doing, and my sadness at the loss of Nathan’s blog is tempered by the establishment of his new MySpace and his own admission that he was kind of planning on quitting anyway.

The only thing left to ask in the aftermath of this titanic struggle is what next? Will other po-bloggers, inspired by Motion v. Curnow, declare war on fellow poet bloggers? Will Motion’s victory inspire him to carve out more space in the ozpo landscape? Will he set his sights on annexing Curnow’s MySpace, or will Curnow enact a displaced vengeance on some other, smaller, ozpoblog? Time, my friends, as always, can only tell.

Eric Dando has a blog!

It’s full of poems, comics and an article about saffron milkcap mushrooms. You can also read in its entirety Eric’s MA thesis about Oink Oink Oink, his latest novel. Here’s how Eric describes Oink Oink Oink:

The narrator of the story, Squirly Fern (SF), is of Japanese/ Australian descent; his grandfathers fought each other in World War Two and he is living with his mother in Japan.  At the beginning of the story, he moves to Australia to meet his father, not realising that his father has fallen in love with a transgenic pig and has been ’stimulating’ the swine in his charge for some time.

Eric’s first novel, Snail, was a major touchstone for me when I was writing Man Bites Dog. And now the internet has provided us with Dando on tap. Lovely.

But boastfulness is a sin, surely?

Dude, they totally made an action figure out of the game they made out of Dante’s Inferno! Action Figure Insider broke the news earlier this week:

Boasting 30 points of articulation, Dante is truly one of a kind. He carries a Cross in a sheath on his right hip, has an interchangeable right hand, and then, of course, there’s the scythe… An imposing site in itself, Death’s scythe stands over eight inches tall! Not only that, but the blade is detachable for hand-held use.

To accompany the figure’s release, a series of playsets will also be available, based on the famous series of illustrations by French engraver Gustave Doré’s L’Enfer sequence.

"Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost."

"Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me / And underfoot a lake, that from the frost / The semblance had of glass, and not of water. "

"Beatrice am I, who do bid thee go; / I come from there, where I would fain return; / Love moved me, which compelleth me to speak."

Coming soon: the Fredy Neptune action figure complete with grenade, fake press pass and removable sailor’s cap accessories, and the Jenny Joseph doll complete with purple jacket and red hat that doesn’t go.

The Words We Found

On the way home from Castlemaine station after last night’s launch of The Words We Found, the 21st-anniversary anthology celebrating the history of Voiceworks, I shared a taxi with a woman holding an open bourbon can on her lap. She asked what I’d been up to in Melbourne, and when I told her “a book launch” she got excited and asked to see the book.

After reading the back cover blurb out loud to me and the taxi driver she told me that the only thing to do now was to get Oprah to read the book. Everything else would just fall into place after that.

Happy 21st birthday Voiceworks, and many happy returns.

AD Hope: Inscription for a War

“Stranger, go tell the Spartans we died here obedient to their commands.”
— Inscription at Thermopylae

Linger not, stranger. Shed no tear.
Go back to those who sent us here.

We are the young they drafted out
To wars their folly brought about.

Go tell those old men, safe in bed,
We took their orders and are dead.

 
Happy Remembrance Day.

From the Vaults: Solo Flight

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.

Two blogs enter. One blog leaves.

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.

The hundredth monkeypunch.

posted with vodpod

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.

Vigilante Virgin updates

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.