[	Current Location	|	Brisbane; Marshall manor.	]
[	mood	|	contemplative	]
[	music	|	"Anyone Else But You" - Michael Cera & Ellen Page (care of The Mouldy Peaches)	]

WALL-E
[Boundlessly innovative environmentalist satire enrichened with romance, high adventure and a star-turn by the Little Trash-Compactor That Could.]

[	Current Location	|	Melbourne, Australia	]
[	mood	|	restless	]
[	music	|	"Strung Out Again" - Elliott Smith	]

¶ 81st American Academy Awards nominees (Predictions):

*** = Predicted winner
<> = real nominees; 26/30: which means I've improved in my talent for the presdigitation of bureaucratic cinematic votership

Best Film:

"Slumdog Millionaire" *** <>
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" <>
"Milk" <>
"Frost/Nixon" <>
"The Dark Knight"

(Final-pick alternative: "Doubt")
The Reader <>

Best Actor:

Mickey Rourke, "The Wrestler" *** <>
Sean Penn, "Milk" <>
Frank Langella, "Frost/Nixon" <>
Brad Pitt, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" <>
Clint Eastwood, "Gran Torino"

(Final-pick alternative: Richard Jenkins, "The Visitor" <>)

Best Actress:

Kate Winslet, "Revolutionary Road" ***
Anne Hathaway, "Rachel Getting Married" <>
Meryl Streep, "Doubt" <>
Sally Hawkins, "Happy-Go-Lucky"
Angelina Jolie, "Changeling" <>

(Final-pick alternative: Melissa Leo, "Frozen River" <>)
Kate Winslet, "The Reader" <>

Best Supporting Actor:

Heath Ledger, "The Dark Knight" *** <>
Robert Downey, Jr., "Tropic Thunder" <>
Josh Brolin, "Milk" <>
Phillip Seymour Hoffman, "Doubt" <>
Dev Patel, "Slumdog Millionaire"

(Final-pick alternative: Eddie Marsan, "Happy-Go-Lucky")
Michael Shannon, "Revolutionary Road" <>

Best Supporting Actress:

Kate Winslet, "The Reader" ***
Penelope Cruz, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" <>
Viola Davis, "Doubt" <>
Amy Adams, "Doubt" <>
Marisa Tomei, "The Wrestler" <>

(Final-pick alternative: Taraji P. Henson, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" <>)

Best Director:

David Fincher, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" <>
Danny Boyle, "Slumdog Millionaire" *** <>
Gus Van Sant, "Milk" <>
Christopher Nolan, "The Dark Knight"
Ron Howard, "Frost/Nixon" <>

(Final-pick alternative: Clint Eastwood, "Gran Torino" and/or "Changeling")
Stephen Daldry, "The Reader" <>

[	Current Location	|	Melbourne, Australia	]
[	mood	|	ecstatic	]
[	music	|	"After the Curtain" - Beirut	]

“These Kids Today, David Foster Wallace, and A Reflection On Style – With a Score by Beirut”:

A MISSPENT YOUTH (circa 1996)

Like the percussive reverberence of prize marbles colliding with hopscotch slate: Let us invite the image to materialise behind our shuttered retinas, phosphorous and striking. Like a chorus of one hundred, one thousand Christmas crackerjack crackling together in a perpetuitous sequence of one-second delays: Let us call up this truth, activate it, conjure it from the swimmy consciousness which possesses it. Let us fashion onto it a cloth of some importance, let us attribute to it volumes of marvel and mystery. Like a dragon with the heart of a powderkeg firework imploding into a pyre of smoke and St. Elmo’s fire over an open body of still water: Let us quieten our collective pulses and reign in our searching hands, and listen to the sound of this eleven year-old boy’s pencil as it describes the wide hemispherical language of his densely-packed prose, whittling away the negative space on his ring-bound Foolscap notebook – his first – with the cultivated discipline of an ice-sculptor, perhaps, or an Inuit architect.

 The child’s words are polysyllabic ones, and the character of his glyphs are travestied and lurid, round and slightly, peripherally aslant. There are more curves here than on English economy class. And owing in no immodest part to the fact that the kid had only developed wrists about two years prior, his sentences dribble at weird and disconcerting trajectories down the length of the page. These are, as the teachers of this prepubescent catastrophe with the furrowed forehead and the set jaw have exhaustively attested, not orthodox sentences; not really the sort of material that they’d anticipated; not the phylum of philologic play which these primary-school academics’ three-year degrees had promised would exist their end of the workforce trail. To abbreviate and collapse the multiplicitous opinions of all his teachers into a unitary consensus view, this kid was surely some spectacular freak species – you couldn’t claim ears like that normal – but it was the way he’d fury away with that pencil grafted firmly to his unflagging fist which provoked Nightmare On Elm Street flashbacks[1].

Hoo-boy, did he provoke them into fits of discomfiture. There wasn’t a solitary Catholic childhood educator amongst the notoriously haunted pack of them who enjoyed a full and unadulterated night’s sleep after reading some of the lunatic shit he composed during class. It wasn’t just robots battling gelatinous men composed entirely out of snot which startled them out of their salubrious academic apathies, nor the unprecedented plot digressions involving Parasauralophus (some kind of pre-Jar Jar Binks dinosaur equipped with a head which can shoot out torpedoes of goo at enemy ninjas) and the Bicyclops (He has one bicycle for a head, and when he’s super-mad the bell rings an attack-warning!)[2]. Nossir – it was the tireless invention and the haggard devotion invested in these narratives which sustained the trauma experienced by his teachers. He didn’t really seem to appreciate their brand of puritanical Christian-school discipline, like being asked to rigorously rewrite his fiction before it was designated sufficiently devoid of all that crazy verbiage – proboscis, for example, or vomitous – to justify a golden star or an immaculate red tick.

In fact, and this generated genuine fear amongst their affronted lunch-hour staff committees, the little grey-eyed spook appeared to thrive off being afforded a new opportunity to “polish” his prose. His phrase-making would become more elaborate, more polyphonic, shirking thrift and economy for noise and rabble, but the clincher was in the quality of his demented imagery. As vivid as Rapture, as loquacious as a sky teeming with angels and ravens, the kid’s stories scored hot, horrible visual epiphanies into the tissue of his every teacher’s brain, and when these victims were finally unburdened at the advent of his grade-school graduation, not one doubt gestated within their rhapsodic hearts. This monstrous little despot of dreams would be a writer. Like the scene in The Fifth Element where the newly-formulated, sentient, obsidian satellite grows bigger, vaster in circumference by being blasted at with nuclear warheads, this kid’s energy continued to prevail[3]. Criticism only reinforced his trajectory. Editorial dismay arising from the proliferation of adjectives, neologisms and damaged characters littering his work only helped to feed the kid’s monkey.

Like a cannonade of buckshot being dispensed into the unfaltering phalanx of a spider army: Let us tell it how it was. Everyone was soon entangled in and engulfed by the sticky filaments of his spew of words. The boy would be a writer, a fictioneer. The stain was on the inside, on his soul, like the Mark of Cain.

***

A MISUNDERSTOOD LIFE (circa 2008)

Reading first about David Foster Wallace’s suicide by stumbling upon the pithy entry of an online weblog two days after the event, I sat with knuckles balled on the sweat-warped knees of my grey jeans and reeled[4].

Unashamed, I’ll concede that I only timorously dipped into Foster Wallace’s self-reflexive, Rabelaisian, 1,079-paged exhaustion of prose, Infinite Jest (1996)[5]: I tested the waters, equipped with trepidatious toe, demonstrating the same inseizable horror of the osprey in descent towards a bloom of fish[6]. (See, an osprey, – to mix metaphors with the artifice of a literary barman, – having gambled its hand, knows with some prognosticative certainty that the moment it thrusts its talons into the back and dorsal fin of a thrashing codfish, it can drown. Fuck eugenics: My hereditary fondness for ornithology, compounded with an alarming long-term memory which archives even the most dispensable nonsense-conversation, has ensured I now retain a fact about ospreys I learnt in primary school, fifteen years ago. The blue eagle of the seas will surrender herself, risk the carnivorous embrace of the ocean, so that she may capture a meal for her children; if the codfish proves too heavy for the osprey’s swift frame and wingspan, the bird cannot retract her talons: she submits herself, snap, to an Icarean death.)

So that’s the general sense of gravity and commitment which I artfully surmised went hand-in-glove (talon-in-flesh?) with braving Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Reading his chimerical novel was no sun-soaked, desert-island enterprise. You certainly don’t brandish paperback editions at friends as suggested holiday fare (not unless you secretly harbour a deep-seeded loathing for them, or perhaps are seeing them off prior to their disembarking to the moon). And you won’t prove anything to the devout, chai-swilling Christian readership of your altruistic suburban bookclub by recommending Infinite Jest, not a single inky-dink, unless it’s that your soul’s as black as Lucifer’s desktop screensaver. And you don’t, you just don’t tell the girl with the heartbreaking cascade of strawberry blonde hair sitting with paranoid unease next to you on the public bus, Now I don’t know you, but I overheard you laughing on the phone, and if you think he promises amusement, you ain’t yet laughed the way the Fine Almighty, David Foster Wallace, and Little Brown Publishing intended! No, it’s a sad case: You won’t make friends, you won’t advertise your genetic predisposition as an efficient hunter or a chieftain walking loftily amongst more feeble men, you won’t describe your aptitude for boring tasks or your potentially illegal intelligence, you won’t secure the implacable hearts of all the world’s pool-party summer-girls by revealing that you’d stuck it out through Infinite Jest.

Reading Foster Wallace’s novel is an indisputable achievement, but it’s also a demonstration of brazen risk, and probably not something to stimulate the covetous inclinations of dawn-headed strangers on public transport. To resuscitate our youth-woozy analogy, Infinite Jest is some deep-water Goby fish with a chasmic mouth to instil a chill in a God-fearing Ahab, let alone a bird-of-prey like the osprey[7]. Foster Wallace tests his reader throughout, creating a reading experience which is both disconcerting and vertiginous, willing you to drop the leviathan and seek higher ground. I’d hazard that the few who succeed maintain their commitment to the text by immersing themselves in the comedy of Foster Wallace’s literature, not the complexity.

            I can’t claim to have possessed the sufficient gamble to get much further than the first seventy pages. It was the unbroken three-paged list of medical and pharmaceutical drugs – a concordance of polysyllabic biochemical words that interrupted the narrative in a self-reflexive literary attempt to describe the breadth of one character’s pill-popping addiction – which finally exhausted me. At the time of purchase, two years prior, it frustrated, if not violated my obligations as a reader of experimental prose. Consequently, I buried Infinite Jest’s lurid and mocking spine, as wide as a baby’s handspan, in my protesting bookshelf and contented myself in the delusion that Foster Wallace’s novel hadn’t bested me, that I’d extracted what was essential to the work and had discarded the remainder. But when you’re a writer, and so questionably imbalanced, lies can only nourish you for so long. Soon your pride flares up like the head of an adder. My failure to read David Foster Wallace’s book began to develop symbolic overtones. There was more at stake, here, then just my integrity as a reader or as an appealing bus passenger. My patented inability to delight in a tome of postmodernist autodidactic fiction which The Sydney Morning Herald averred as “literary genius” advertised something about my capacity as a reader[8]. I wailed. I gnashed my teeth. I built shrines to Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemmingway. Eventually I waded with lunatic eyes through Infinite Jest’s hundred pages of addendum and encyclopaedic footnotes in an effort to decipher the enigma, to coax out the sphinx, to channel the certain epiphany abandoned to dormancy from out of Foster Wallace’s heavy text. I failed again, and immediately transferred my attention, I think, to The Little Prince[9]. Something with pictures, anyway.

            It was more than half a year later, after my post-traumatic Infinite Jest distress had finally subsided, when I initiated my first conversation about Foster Wallace with a friend who I’d always determined could in fact be entirely crazy. It took five minutes for him to convince me that, despite all the psychic scarring and the arsenal of reservations I’d stockpiled, Infinite Jest was still entitled a semblance of literary value. Of course, most of those five minutes involved him gratuitously wallowing in his success at having finished the novel, but to my genuine shock and abasement, I started to laugh when he discussed a scene in Foster Wallace’s work whereby the central protagonist’s father commits suicide by inserting his head into an operational microwave. How could I have denied myself the glee generated by such terrible and terrific satire, by stopping short? I decided, therefore, that Foster Wallace was merely a writerly jerk-off. But assuredly not a write-off. Thus, upon entering badly-stocked bookstores and bewildering the counter-staff with my aggressive and irritating laughter, I soon found myself forging a personal conviction to read the more digestible examples of Foster Wallace’s musings.

There were stories of linguistic pyrotechnics! Essays of formal subversion and generous silliness! With humble pie fermenting in the pit of my stomach, I realised that Foster Wallace wrote similarly to myself. He committed himself to the architecture of interesting, shambling, discombobulating sentences. His was a sesquipedalian syntax, as verbose as a baby whose Alphabetti Spaghetti contained hidden Mary Poppins references: supercalifragilistic-expialidocius![10] Described here were the territories of the Difficult Wordsmith[11]: nothing was lazy, was easy, no phrase was divorced of character, every analogy or zeugmatic sentence bristled with convolution and erudition. Did people like this? For my part, I wrote challenging literature because that’s how my mind operated; when I’d finished all withstanding homework during class-time in primary school one teacher had thrust an outdated Websters Dictionary at me and instructed that I read. My vocabulary expanded exponentially, like a puffer-fish adopted by a family of volleyballs. Soon I knew too much obscurantist phraseology, too much arcana, to be able to write a story without it informing my personal stylistic; I could read six novels simultaneously, and did, frequently, but such a tumultuous spume of words meant that when it came to creating my own fiction, I wrote with a thesaurus for a heart and with a pantheon of authorial gods inhabiting my soul. Like a monopoly of clowns hijacking a limousine out of nothing but pure hedonistic impulse, it was my new-born vocabulary which piloted the flight of my words. I was a victim of verbiage. And yet somewhere along the line Stockholm Syndrome kicked in: I embraced the literary abuse, I made it work for me.

This calls for a discussion on the politics of transgression. Ferdinand de Saussure, the French semiotician and linguist, has a lot to say on this subject, as does the philosopher and intellectual Michel Foucault[12]. Now, most learned readers like to believe, as it relates to cultural epistemology, that they’re Saussure, but I’m convinced the vast majority really know Foucault. (This is an old joke, which means I’m not to blame.) What seems readily apparent within their literature, after pursuing dangerous liaisons with an untrustworthy French dictionary, is that subverting the conventions of a social contract can only work when the text refers back to what it’s shunning, dismissing, dissing – on into perpetuity. For me, this constitutes the monsoonal and bountiful heartland of comedy. A writer who rearranges the pro forma for Lit 101 willingly submits him-or-herself to an act of sabotage. Kicking sacred cows is a political operation, not something you do when Farmer Joe is on the john. Perhaps I chose to rebel against the notion of the “simple story, well told” because I found freedom in disrupting the orthodoxy. But the anger has subsided from my work, and still the commitment to my style prevails. A joke doesn’t get old because it’s retold.

For his part, what David Foster Wallace’s shorter (and correspondingly, punchier) stuff attested to was that an elusive and heretofore illusory readership existed for him to feel comfortable in adopting his personalised style. The discovery was ungovernable. There were people who championed his work like it signified the frontier of literature, and even some of them composed reviews for important publications with names like The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph[13]. When the impetus for plot progression dissolved in one of his fictions in order to foreground an authorial interjection on the most effective way to dismantle a bed, say, or when an essay on gourmet-cooking teemed with high-falutin’ footnotes describing the biological sensory system and pain threshold of the lobster, it was a cruel and awkward demand upon me not to feel a symbiosis with the man, not to celebrate my own work vicariously through his. If Foster Wallace had readers, then so must I! I was jazzed, incendiary, my time beneath the strobes of some future limelight was secured. In the meantime, whilst the portentous star of my future validation was rising, I’d occupy my time dreaming of spontaneous conversations on buses, invent problematic analogies involving osprey, and write an Honours thesis to provoke somersaults from the clouds and incite the fish into fits of laughter. The world spun about me like a galaxy of Roulette wheels, like the ghosts of Galileo and Copernicus. I eased into the seductive upholstery of Kirk’s Writing Chair and surrendered myself to the choreography of dancing fingertips.

My novella, “Carnivalesque”, an elaborate frame-narrative filtered with polyphonic ambition through the perspectives of ten multiethnic protagonists, came together under three months, after three drafts, with excursive re-reading of Chaucer, Bulgakov, and Faulkner[14]. Directly prior to or following my traumatic writing sessions, neither possessing the funds nor the savagery to get drunk and exchange numbers with a particularly ugly hangover, I’d play the albums of Beirut aloud at maximum volume and gambol up and down the corridor in the pretence that I was a gypsy from the Caucasus[15]. This did nothing to improve my writing, but it made returning to a novella-in-progress concerning an itinerant sideshow-caravan, extinct wolves, Irish midgets and decapitated Frenchmen seem sane in contrast. Being a notorious Maximalist, my story was dense, multi-layered, bombastic, populated by prodigies and dunces, and despite the verisimilitude to cake-baking instructions, it was self-satirising. If I were a responsible writer, I could have identified my readership in a twinkle, in a periwinkle. It wasn’t until my procrastinatory trawl through the opaque waters of untrustworthy websites, having intercepted news of Foster Wallace’s suicide, that my reading audience became apparent.

As far back as the moment when my magpie-brained raving secured me first-place in the Brisbane writers award for youth under the age of 17 in 2000, as far back as the tortuous process of maturity which both me and my writing had to endure to come into our own, I’ve been inspired by the taunting of teachers. Albeit sometimes I resemble (and act like) a hillbilly highwayman, and though occasionally I send readers into convulsions of miscomprehension, I’ve picked this path because it’s the one that was manifest to me ever since I was old enough to transgress the rules of my earliest critics. I write now, today, in an effort to prove that my vision, voice and violence against convention is valid, is worthwhile, even if there are certain circles who maintain I signify the corruption of the “transcendent signified”, the universal yarn. In fact, my writing hasn’t altered much since I was eleven, when I used to bite people and fall out of trees. I still use words like “vomitous” and “proboscis” but I’ve cultivated an appreciation for doing so sparingly, and only when it’s necessary to vault the reader into reveries of intellectualisation over creatures composed entirely of snot. Certainly, “Carnivalesque” favours Siamese twins and undead European hunters over the Bicyclops. Nonetheless, in the same way an arborealist can trace the evolution of a tree by making a transversal cut into its rings, if you squint hard enough whilst reading the Honours novella, it’s not hard to delineate that the blueprint for this most recent fiction shares an awful likeness to those stories I shat out at my terrified grade-school teachers all those years ago. I can’t claim to understand why David Foster Wallace killed himself. Maybe he didn’t think anyone out there was actually listening. But I resolve to believe that for every style there exists a readership. Even if they’re hiding beneath the desks in their staff-room offices.

Foster Wallace, like the osprey, now sleeps with the fishes. His conviction and determination to bend rules has provided me an understanding of what my writing is permitted to do. A great man who met a sad end, may he enjoy his final and eternal joke whilst we maintain to grapple with his Infinite Jest*.

* The essayist would appreciate it if, upon reading this conclusion, you play Beirut’s “After the Curtain” and pirouette down the nearest corridor. For your convenience, a courtyard will do at a pinch. Thank you.

[	Current Location	|	Melbourne, Australia	]
[	mood	|	discontent	]
[	music	|	"Where Gravity Is Dead" - Laura Veirs	]

¶ I've not composed anything of specific subjective value in here, that normative & eponymously referred-to 'Kirk-ified' rant, for too long, too long. Which has only exacerbated the necessity that I do so now; but, as constitutes the case when there's nothing but a veritable logorrhoea of verbiage to expunge, to secrete, I'm mired by my own overwhelming intentions, -- put more exactingly, I'm fucking linguistically constipated. So I probably won't articulate everything that necessitates expression here, but I'll disavowal any inclination of mine to make like a titmouse & hole myself up in the proverbial coal-scuttle of absolute voicelessness, and give you what I can whilst I'm able. This year's, at least insofar as I'd contextualise and attribute the vast inchoate majority of its events for myself, as they can be rendered significant for me, has been pretty ungovernable. I'll quit vacillation in favour of vivacity: It's been a shit-kicker, the incurable mongoloid swineherd of the lot of them, a right monstrous suckhole if suckholes are to be endowed personal affectations for this analogy to sustain itself. Yup, 2008's not been overtly redemptive in its day-by-day, month-by-month wheel of woe & coterie of circumstance. I'd brandish my copper-bottomed hobo-pot with a fury and boil it all down to the depravities & horrors of Honours. Really, it's been some freak specie of Boschean hell, I extoll no lie. Without occupying this germane and necessary juncture taxonomising how brutal & divorced of joy this post-graduate year has been for me, I'll contrarily foreground everything I feel presently, and presciently, upon the fact that what I've undertaken ain't been a writer's degree. It's been (exhaustively Western) philosophy, ontology, cultural & methodological criticism. What they've instilled in me is the hunger, the power, the baroque and godforsaken pursuit of critical interventions, the need to rend every concept & ideological manoeuvre, every frost-silvered pine and migratory bird, of its base, its foundation, its substance, of its emotive (or affective) capacity. Nothing, no form of writing, no manifold work or artefact of literature, no authorial invention is beyond being problematised, is beyond being infected with the contagion of self-critical immolation. It's meant that my writing has become, has developed, has been tempered by a tendentious uncertainty. It's meant my writing process, my enthusiasm, my savage lust for the writerly gambit, has become impure, uninflected or disinvested of the veracity and impulse of the epiphanic experience, il y a joie, the golden moment, the creative sublimation, the need to pound those motherfucking keys. They've instructed that I become critic, and renounce the profundity, the certainty, the inexorable and tumescent swell of fun, for kickin' the can, for fanning piss into the typhoon, for barking, braying, conceding to the courage of immediate creative expression. See, Australian-facilitated post-graduate programs are apparatuses, are appendages of research faculties, and research faculties don't want to encourage fun when work should be sober & cognitively-reconfiguring, they don't want you to excel when you should be conducting a comprehensive close-reading, they don't want you to produce fiction faster than the literary critic can hypostatise, disassemble, square it up and rip it apart. They don't want you writing a novel, when you should be thinking, studying, processing, theoretically explicating upon the whole gloried history of novel-writing. They don't want you to write a short-story without compromising half its word-limit with a rationale that contextualises the impetuousness, the fray and fight underpinning it. I don't care about accusations of throwback-Structuralist thinking, I don't care if what I'm militantly teasing out here is disregarded as a writer's phantasia of a practise that is no longer confined to & defined by its practical virtue, I don't give a calcified shit for your blusterous stuttering attesting to the integrity of the academic tradition, the furthering of the intellectual disciplines emerging from the endeavours of the noble literary critic. I didn't go to writing school to kill or starve the desire. I didn't go to writing school to generate theory about writing, and write about theory. I didn't give myself over to lose myself: I went to writing school to become stronger, more confident, swifter, more artful, better, just better, as a writer. And the conflict this year has consigned me to is trying to maintain that love, whilst all 'round me want to take it away. That's how it's felt. And next year never looked so sublime, nor so promising.

At first, called into existence without the invested suggestions and coddling of parents, before I was old enough to discern the unnavigable gulf between myself and those whom seemed, at least by the architecture of their exteriors, so similar to me, I thought myself an exile. Why did the people, those braces of unending people down below, scatter beneath my gaze like a band of thieves caught out in the act of trespass? Why did they rush around, describing indeterminable tangents in their suits and summer dresses, with their cigarettes fuming like the heartbeats of flowers between their teeth, their streetcars and taxicabs roaring in pursuit of direction or directive? What testament to purgatory was this world, whereby anyone I might hope to know as kith or kin wore uniforms of herringbone or hound’s-tooth, dolled up in henna or hairnets, and whistled on their fingers at each other, chanting instruction at one another on their mobiles, trading blows with and stealing kisses from one another as though the former brand of madness was altogether separate from the latter? Why were the mysterious ways of humanity exclusive to those whom engineered them at street-level, seemingly beyond my powers of observation, though I might still claim to be a member of the same club? Everything they did with urgency and veracity, everything that was immediate and transparent to them yielded little clarity to someone like myself, a friendless historian, an interrogative watcher. Why scale that ivy trellis to guardedly dispatch secret correspondences beneath the window-lintel? Why sever the throat of an innocuous and unthreatening alley-dweller, industriously bury his body beneath an accumulation of dustbin dross, only to secure the paltry sum of money he’d cadged from the sidewalks to collect in his wallet? Why unfurl a sneer behind the back of the person you’d just kowtowed to, or defame them a “motherfucker” when only minutes prior you’d addressed them with a word like “genius”? Why entangle your tongue in the hot startled mouth of his, when you were sure he’d only dash your aspirations to smithereens? Why lie to get ahead, why train yourself to spin sentiments of cunning and luminous promises, only to ascend a ladder and forge alliances amongst a company of men so much better at deception than you could even dream? Why marry her, when you loved her sister? Why resist arrest when you hoped to have been imprisoned? Why fuck your boss, your ex-girlfriend, your high-school sweetheart, your orthodontist, that little boy, those fifty-six high-rollers? The motivations of everyone were incontrovertibly nonsensical and opaque.

I travelled the fences of the world, fjording over oceans and crossing continents, looking with a sad, distrusting and baleful eye into the cities, homes, relationships and interactions of the ground-goers, wondering why they never channelled the desire to look up. The fences of every nation, the fences which instigate delimiters and delineations between what is rightfully kept outside and what is suitably contained within, the fences which run for miles through the suburbs, backyards, landscapes and headspaces of those who propagate and erect them, over sea, sky and soil, do not confront nor enclose me. There will never exist a place which is not drawn, quartered and scored by the breadth of a fence of some kind. But I have never needed to circumlocute these, because I live above them, I live on them, I walk over the tops of plywood, brick and mortar, barbed wire, buttress, colonnade, gun-towers, glass and gossamer always aware of what is brooding below me, but ever ensnared in a thrall of gratitude over having to share my air and my ideas with the horizon, sun-warped and solitary. That was, of course, until her eyes drifted upward, illustrating a reverent arc of deep-set tigerish brown, on a day I’ll always remember, early in a year I’d already disaffectedly come to lament.

                ‘Who the fuck are you?’

                I’d been seized up by peripatetic thoughts of monstrous and romantic illusion, sitting with my chin cupped in my palm, my legs crossed to simulate the blossom of a lotus, staring vacantly at the peak of her scalp when she’d rotated to face me. A first for every occasion.

                ‘I said, who the fuck are you? And why aren’t you wearing anything? If you’re some sort of pervert, if you’re some drug-smacked freak, I’ll call in the cops.’ Call in, like she was capable of assembling a team of vigilante protectors at the hit of her speed-dial.

                ‘Um. I’m just like you, actually,’ I proposed, locating my nipples and obscuring them from view with two steepled palms.

                ‘You’re on my fence. You’re naked. You ain’t like any version of me I ever fucking remember. You get down from there, stop massaging your tits, and put on some goddamn pants. What do you think the neighbours will think of me, if they see I’m harbouring some pill-poppin’ gymnast endowed with the bits of a horse? Chrissake, there’s a public school near here. Get down.’

                Unknowing and caught out in the act of daytime reverie whilst she struggled with the multicoloured pegs on her Hill’s-Hoist, she appeared before me like a vision from a realm without fences, a golden creature of molten dance cut from the sun and released upon the sleeping populace of this work-embroiled Western burg. Disgruntled, pissed off and cataloguing me as either a molester, maniac or mendicant, she was the hue of New Year’s laughter, and sexier than all the pool-party summer girls you’ll never get to exchange eyes with.

                ‘I am like you. Honest. I like to watch the waves break whilst sitting too close to the shoreline. Going to France, observing their customs, I came back here changed. I hate your immediate neighbour and his penchant for controlled burn-offs in his own backyard, just like you do. Some days I think I’ll never make any distinct human connection with anyone. I feel solace when the sky goes red, and casts a lurid glow on the faces of those turned away from it. I like listening to jazz music wend its way through the night. I miss people I can’t even properly remember. I loathe winter, but I moon for autumn. I’d dance in my underwear in the corridor, as well, just as you do, if I owned either.’

                Her forehead furrowed, and she offered me a hand. Never before had I contemplated the possibility of grounding myself. I could generate a feeling of security by recognising that, even now, I was an arbiter of knowledge about the world below me. I knew enough and had bore witness to the passing of years overstuffed with sufficient experience to understand what was expected of me, down at street-level, if I wanted to live amongst all those whom I’d long watched dispassionately, judged and learned from. But to elect to live within fences, as opposed to beyond them, was a momentous expectation, a grave and definitive departure from living between sky and canopy.

                ‘Well?’ She thrust her hand out once more, and her exhaling cleavage swelled toward me like moths before an unfrosted bulb.

                I extended my own hand. She grasped it with an unprecedented strength, and then she pushed it back with a savage humour, watching me gamble equilibrium, waver, topple and plunge into her neighbour’s backyard, naked and deprived flight, my asshole gasping at the cruelty alleged against me. She watched me, the light in her eyes applauding my fall, and when the starved bull mastiff with the piggish snout materialised at the threshold of her neighbour’s backdoor, her laughter struck matches against the wax surface of my heart.

                ‘Yeah, hi,’ sprawled the panorama of her voice into the receiver of her phone; ‘I’ve got to report some freak-case. Yeah. He’s naked, and in my neighbour’s yard. I’m almost certain he had plans with my neighbour’s dog. Yes, that’s right. Thought I’d call you right away, rather than sit on the fence.’

                My howls stirred up the block, like a bantam who’d been dethroned. Fangs sank into my pelvis. So this is what it felt like, to sacrifice the stars.

[	Current Location	|	Melbourne, Australia	]
[	mood	|	grateful	]
[	music	|	"Psychogirl" - Jens Leckman	]

[The subsequent / secondary gonzo travelogue and formally subversive creative non-fiction work, describing both an aftermath of preceding personal circumstances and a new international foray, August 2007. (c)]

[	mood	|	chipper	]
[	music	|	"So Come Back, I Am Waiting" - Okkervil River	]

I think I may have stumbled upon the most staggering, necessary and inspired story ever:


'Brazil priest carried off by balloons

A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons is missing off the southern coast of Brazil.

Rescuers in helicopters and small fishing boats were searching off the coast of Santa Catarina state, where pieces of balloons were found.

Reverend Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off from the port city of Paranagua on Sunday afternoon, wearing a helmet, thermal suit and a parachute.

He was reported missing about eight hours later after losing contact with port authority officials, according to the treasurer of his Sao Cristovao parish, Denise Gallas.

Gallas said by telephone that the priest wanted to break a 19-hour record for the most hours flying with balloons to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil's second-largest port for agricultural products.

Some American adventurers have used helium balloons to emulate Larry Walters - who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons.

A video of Carli posted on the G1 website of Globo TV showed the smiling 41-year-old priest slipping into a flight suit, being strapped to a seat attached to a huge column green, red, white and yellow balloons, and soaring into the air to the cheers of a crowd.

According to Gallas, the priest soared to an altitude of 6,000 metres then descended to about 2,500 metres for his planned flight to the city of Dourados, 750km north-west of his parish.

But winds pushed him in another direction, and Carli was some 50km off the coast when he last contacted Paranagua's port authority, Gallas said.

Carli had a GPS device, a satellite phone, a buoyant chair and was an experienced skydiver, Gallas said.

"We are absolutely confident he will be found alive and well, floating somewhere in the ocean," she said.

"He knew what he was doing and was fully prepared for any kind of mishap." '

[	mood	|	complacent	]
[	music	|	"To Bring You My Love" - P.J. Harvey	]

            NIKOLAI

            Those who know anything of The Hague gaze upon the Dutch as the victors at Waterloo and the fervent arbiters of the Calvinist ontology. I, too, know little else as dictated by Steiner school rhetoric about the concerns and historical reformations of my own country as that of the common folk; I was born a labour unto my parents as we of The Travelling Gypsy Caravan, Hippodrome and Greatest Exploration of the Profane in the Orient all are; and in such dimensions and parameters as a sufferer* I am perhaps of such a debilitated humour that my land and its people interest me nought.

            I am fostered now by a family of organic convenience; I have multiple brothers in the people of Efim, Ruadán, Izari, Piers, Squint†, Torisan, and I am privileged a sisterly kin of such feminine glamour and precocity in the form of the twins, Lilith, Misha and Sun. Never before have I, nor my minstrelsy, been the facilitator for such enthusiasm than amongst the members of my coterie. There is a sentiment ascribed to Goethe which reads: “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” This provides a luminous definition for my lute, the gagaku biwa which I name Marlowe, as it uses me to author the music which demands the adoration of the agog onlooker. Marlowe is no more my instrument than I am his; we have both made a pact with the blacksmith Beelzebub, the pagan founder of the metal of deliverance, so that our songs may ignite the academia of history. I breathe smoke in the snow as TTGCHGEPO continues rambling to its final audience; I have sold my soul so that Lucifer might let me steal the wind from birds.

            Izari soothes us with a story of the last Hokkaido Wolf and the hunter whom made it his quarry. It is a pretty narrative about a Dutchman compelled to move, to take action, to abandon stasis and make pursuit. It reminds me of myself‡, and I find it blooms within me and through the strings of Marlowe with vitality and voice. I continue the parable in form of a song, and I play it as we of TTGCHGEPO hunker about the midnight fire.

*  For my part, I am applied to the task to tolerate what the contemporary medical accumulate refers to as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, of which I am to consider myself burdened with “hypermobility”. Mine is a body whose invariable pilot fish form the school of modern genealogy, and as such I occupied four years of my life confined to the amusements of a solitary hospital bed for diagnosed fear that movement might yield a corrosive effect upon my elasticised and unstable ligaments. Herein should satisfy all the conventions of backstory with which one may desire in relation to my person: I can no longer stagnate; I can no longer conform to paediatric opinion or genetic prognosis; I can only move, with an inexorable exuberance for speed and pursuit, because I feel I have already committed to inactivity and disciplined sleep far beyond the measure of any human endurance; no soul will compel me to another four years abed; no soul will prevent my plight for flight.

† The name gifted Bulou Kikau of The Travelling Gypsy Caravan, Hippodrome and Greatest Exploration of the Profane in the Orient (henceforth “TTGCHGEPO”), by decree of Efim, Lilith and some drinking gin.

‡ I am sure that is the point.

FUMIKI & FUMIKO

            Nikolai Van Winklersen is sexy in all the ways a chaste Japanese girl involved in scholarly seats of passion should ignore. He’s morose. He’s penniless. He’s obsessive. He’s Dutch. So: We appreciate and dignify the sincere revulsion that such traits should conjure in us, and thus in this forum and the spirit of likemindedness we have to respond that revolting is also kind of a turn-on. We can’t begin to catalogue all the dirty fucks we’ve committed; but each time we unanimously agree to deny an attraction to every asshole, shark and misanthrope we come to acquaint ourselves with, the more we find ourselves tittering like roadside geishas at the prospect of sliding our palms into each unwarranted sleeze’s waistband. We’ve tried everything short of consistent therapy, but we’ve come to comprehend the collusive chaos of sex, and there’d be no way we could limit ourselves if the room was locked, and the lounge upholstered, and the psychologist was a registered male quack with a clipboard concealing his erection.

            In our spring-kindled home region of Kansai, on the island of Honshū, whilst other girls were learning from their grandmothers the necessary methods to observe rights at the manifold shrines of Lord Buddha Shakamuni, we were growing pendulous breasts, transferring pressed cherry blossom petals from the flats of our tongues into the hot exotic mouths of others, playing a tempestuous harp on the forged rock abutment lording over the lip of the natural spring, whilst fountain spray fanned into our hair and rained into our gasping smiles. Vast-shouldered local temple courtiers would wrangle to organise for days off so as to swarm over us like kitsune, capricious fox spirits exhorting us to disband ourselves of our bodyhugging one-piece the white sensuality of a crocodile lotus, whilst they filibustered with one another as to who would first be privileged the triumph of cupping our hipbones under thumb. We were bodhisattva, the prophetic fulfilment of your one mythologised and unsinkable calendar girl, the sweetest piece of ass spanning the beaches of California to Ibiza, the pool party goddess capable of baptising you a quarterback for life. There was forever a litter of boys exalting about us in swimming trunks as yellow as Spanish summer, volleyballs ballooning around us, suntan oil being lathered into the small of our back. We can’t proceed to presume what incalculable horror it must be to  be born deprived of those irregularities of our person which tease adoration from the stony hearts of lovelorn men, and sweat the libido out of the most religious of boys as though a dormant fever.

We can’t imagine a life devoid of our cataclysmic qualities of grace, nimbleness, arcane beauty and dishevelled glamour; such a life would be ungovernable, such an existence would lack in the ethereal power of love: because if you look unlovable, how can you expect to make it easy for your designed counterpart? We, Fumiki and Fumiko Dustin Nakamura, however, are irresponsibly sublime. No man has failed to avert the allure of our charm; and to prove ourselves as a galaxial standard for physically delightful, we’ve never stopped long enough to permit one man comfort whilst another was deserving of a position to grant us praise. Mister Zaslavsky calls us his “new breed of Siamese twin fighting-fish” – before roaring from between the fibres of his beard, “You flop from man-to-man like as though puddle-to-puddle, like the trappings of each mean to confine you. You pair of dizzy conjoined girls, what does he have to provide so that he can stop you from jumping!?”

Mister Zaslavsky ruts like an animal – a truffle boar, perhaps, or a berserker black bear – but it feels like devotion to us in the six minutes he lasts, which is all we can ever ask of his kindness. Nonetheless, tonight our sights are intent on Nikolai, as his lyric – The Dutchman grew grim and he retraced his steps/As the sounds of the dog subsided into the ridge/His compass instructed that he forge North as the frost ate through his cloth/He happened on a hovel, there beneath the willows – striate and eclipse us.

When he finishes, and his voice grows dark and hoarse, he sheathes the lute in its pheasant-hide bag, staring at us from across the flames.

‘Twins: continue the story for us. It’s going to be a long night, and the moon’s only belatedly setting.’

Nikolai Van Winklersen is sexy in all the ways a chaste Japanese girl can’t intelligibly resist.

‘We’re more into pop,’ we say, smiling at him with our thighs.

‘Ah, so? You don’t say? It’s Raining Men, am I right?’ Mister Zaslavsky releases a ramshackle chatter of chuckles.

            ‘Sure, Nikolai. We’ll extend the story.’ We roll our eyes at Mister Z., and he winks at us, whilst Sun goes on toasting a marshmallow.

SUN

            I have never known my Father and so it is that I come to need Guidance    The Guidance I seek will not be found in the realm of mortal flesh  I am of the tender fruiting age of Eleven and still I understand    I understand that no human male will suffice in substitution    There can be no substitution for the Father whom wedded you with this world    This world is very large and extremely various in its people    People are unhappy beings but they can create such wonder   I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have known my Father even now whilst I am Eleven years of age    But I have come to agree with Izari who is One-Hundred and Fourteen years of age that I am Impressionable    I love Izari like he is my own Father    I do not miss my Mother because my Mother suffered the heart-pain of Liver Cancer and she died in Holy Agony    So to miss my Mother is to miss her in Holy Agony and although I am Impressionable yet I am not Selfish    I am glad that she Passed On in her dance through the thorned garden of Barbarity     I can only Anticipate to see both She and He when I Pass On as well    I wish to be a Daoist Xian but I never went into Learning    There are many theologies    There are too many theologies    There are too few gods    I occasionally would look at life as a godless Plane    Why does there have to be so little Dignity in people who have not been exposed to Others    It is the Identical problem in my country of origin    Korea has been formed from a race of beings incapable of Negotiation    There is no Demilitarized Zone in our Hearts    Everyone maintains a side    Everyone is a turncoat    Everyone is Dying every day and no-one my age seems to Understand    We all are Passing On as our corporeality tethers itself to the accurate rotation of the Sun    We all are suffering from the loyalty of our Breath and the Pride of our Mind    I am finding Solace in the Guidance and Company of my Friends    They know we are all Passing On each new day    They know this because I see a noble remnant of their glory dissolve and Pass On as people who cannot understand shun from us and Stare    They Stare at the Sun like they can rationalise its Majesty and Magnanimity    They Stare at me like they hate who Made me    We are in Japan to host our final Festival before the Travelling Gypsy Caravan retires its festivities    I have been one with my Friends since I was Seven years of age    This is a lonely time we all agree    But in loneliness there is a starry gallantry    I do not know what I will do once the festivities are over    We are all Passing On one way or another    Fumiki and Fumiko Nakamura say such a beautiful Story beneath the canopy of cloud    They speak of a woman whom The Dutchman meets    She is of a Rare and Most Inspiring fairness    She knows a Hunter who has seen The Dutchman’s Beast    Before our festival begins I am earnest in adding my own story part    Maybe I will find my Father if he Lives yet    If Izari and I can find an Extinct Wolf like The Dutchman and his Hunter anything invested with enough Hunger is marked by Possibility

PIERS

Never has a headless man seen the terrain I’ve seen:

                Rarely has his faceless gaze graced the manifold green

                of cerise plateaux in the troughs of Scotland or

                the sulphurous scarlet deserts of Cairo and Israel

                where each morning prevails upon his shoulders

                with elegance undreamed, ‘til the dilated eye bulges;

                Which is why I’m ever a fortuitous soul of the French

                varietal, foregrounding the cutting-edge without

                allowing that to go to the head (no pun intended;

    -- only wit applies), the avant savant striving to clench

                the exquisite multitude of this intercontinental joy

                within a dastardly gauntlet!; and if Piers Guillaume

                Fleurthiery thought seeing without eyes was obscene

    -- I would explain to he –for that man, it is thee – that:

    Never has a well-headed person been headless as I’ve been.

                And voilà! though I’ve never before breathed with lips air

                of this magnifique Japanese hue, I must be open to declare

                that lips are of small convenience to a headless man besides;

                which is why I’ve never used mine, and instead come to rely

                on the open collar of my cravat to circulate these Eastern winds

    --  and I could be forgiven for presuming that I’ve sinned!

    for the faith of Mlle. Fumiki and Fumiko concerns itself with

    the circles of “karma” and other Buddhist fancies which

    I’ve frequently violated in my life as a man deprived a head:

    Japan’s granted me all five hells, whilst I hoped I might be forgiv’d!

    Case in point, I’ve been relegated – Efim prefers “delegated” – to

    bring up the retinue’s rear, (which intends to discern that

    he’d rather I shoulder the gear), then to assist Izari or Sun in

    their progress toward pursuing the wolf  and making headway

    to the site from which our last-ever spectacle will have been!

    Where we’re going is Ōdōri Park, amidst the thrall of Sapporo,

    evoking a Hollyhock Festival (of sorts) as though descendents of El Dorado!

    We French are tres familiar to starting the Lenten month avec la masquerade:

    and as the eventide of May coincides with our parade, no pagan idea

    should see fit to germinate!; This litany of inveterate grotesqueries,

    this well-travelled assemblage of burlesquers: see! –

    we’re very much the product of a carnival culture, a vagrant circus to

    betray the je ne sais pas of your YouTube, your iPod, your

    firework extravaganza. We’re more primitive than the Gunpowder Plot,

    more pacifist than your Tiananmen panzer! I’ll quake ‘til I’m black and blue,

    we advocate on behalf of holy decadence (patrons of the shrove);

    our purpose is to absolve the sinner by inviting him to revel.

    Such epistemological intent may appear to dishevel the handsome man;

    oui, it may even incant him to the manufacture of outright diabolique acts

    -- but it is not for us to dispatch judgement: he’s doing the best he can.

    Ruadán, the Irish roustabout, braves the deep-canyon chill to my left,

    The man is little, but his heart is large, though of valour his eyes are bereft:

    ‘Piers,’ he mumbles, excavating about in the pockets of his knickerbockers,

    to produce a rope of red liquorice which he cuds on whilst we tramp,

    ‘I been brewin’ up a reg’lar sinkhole of worries, if sinkholes are partial

    to being brewed.’ He swallows his candy-coloured fear. ‘The marshal

    of our fates is what Mr Efim’s ever-and-on been best at,’ Ruadán sniffed;

    ‘But it seems leastways to me that the circ’lar dimensions of our travels

    looks high-on likely to imply one ailin’ fact. I’m relative to thinkin’ we lost,

    and Mr Izari been rotatin’ like a weathervane, like he’s gone lost his gift.’

    I studied the roustabout’s white ghostly face, eyes like vents in a porkpie,

    (my talent at scrutiny is of no limitations, even without mine own head),

    -- spake I, with tweed-sweetened arms crossed at the fork of my chest,

    ‘Ce n'est pas vrai Ruadán! Sir Ruadán Royce Colquhoun! I appreciate your anxiety,

    for if we were lost, imagine the dismay! But let me put your concerns to rest.’

    ‘Izari has been a pedigree artisan of these forests for eighty-nine years!

    He’s a brilliant individual! A memory like a beartrap! Now, pray allay those fears!

    I’ve been conversing with the trees (in their own tongue; an effort, but with reward)

    -- for they tell me in precise syntax that we’re within ascending one further hill,

    and I’ve lived sufferably long to know that a maple does not lie. But I digress:

    Monsieur Ruadán, our fourth day will end with results of success!’

    The roustabout offered me a cigarette, Spanish tea-leaf (a fine Irish friend);

    ‘Now as far as you can throw me, and it ain’t churchly to go on guesstimatin’,

    it ain’t like I’m brewing a bluster for no wrong.’ The tiny man inhaled a plume,

    ‘I come into this world a home-schooled scholar. Of intelleck I don’t pretend.

    But what I be swift about the feet about, metafixically speakin’, is my smarts

    when it comes to direction. We started south, now widdershins we be south:

    that’s some circ’lar dimensions if ever I chalked it.’ He stamped the stub underfoot.

    I listened to this rhetoric (for I’ve had dealings with all sundry of class) and thought

    “Alors!, he’s keen,” (though I’m aware his father was a sweep; ever covered in soot.)

    ‘Ruadán,’ spake I, ice on my breath, forming smoky apparitions above my cravat,

    ‘we’re in Hokkaido, we’re heading toward Sapporo: we know precisely where we’re at.

    If you continue to deceive yourself à la this madness, I can suggest nought but

    an item of advice: Lilith is burdened with traumas, Efim is over-busy,

    we’re all much too invested in this enterprise to indulge an idle insanity.

    To permit illness of mind by projecting thoughts of this kind is one of pure banality.

    I will tell you a story – Izari offered the beginning – but the body of momentum

    is incrediblé interesting. It begins on the morning when the Dutchman awakens

    to find himself in bed avec la fair woman. He starts up abruptly, he darts

    to his clothes. She is awake, head nestled against bedhead, hands on vial of laudanum.

    “For what rationale of deceit! For what object of mutiny! For what foul-play am I

    to discover myself trussed up in bedding, my head fogged with the drug!

     You have soiled my fertility, you have warped mine clarity!” et cetera. (It was a long spiel.)

    The fair lady addressed the livid Dutchman, as magpie quarrelled at the lintel,

    “You say you lost this wolf, its pricey hide. You are not lost. My love is, for it is not real..."