ESSAYS
The Last Cameron by Evan Maloney
'I think the plastic arts are so quaint,' said one successful Australian artist when she was asked to comment on Hayes's work several years ago.
Anna Hedigan surveys Australian journals on the web
Few of these journals have capitalised on the cross-over between people who love to read “hard” books and journals, and web-readers. Do they think we're all searching for porn? Or are they worried that posting content from their journal will dilute their brand?
Robert Merkin: "Draft Dodgers & Veterans"
A friend of mine, a math professor, has shown me a paper from around 1995 which shows that the Vietnam birthday lottery draft was fundamentally misdesigned, favoring some birthdays, making others significantly more dangerous. I find the implications of that — well, I don't know how I find them.
Robert Merkin: "Returning, We Hear the Larks"
A lot of literature, unfortunately, tends to heap unique, exquisite beauty and virtue on Dying Young; impressionable young readers are encouraged to think they are missing something, and have failed Truth and Beauty somehow, if they reach age 30 with all their limbs.
Robert Merkin: "On Thomas Pynchon & Mass Hypnosis"
There's a lot of popular (and insightful) American fiction and screenwriting beginning in the '50s that plays around with this living-death lifestyle of mass hypnosis.
Robert Merkin: "As a little introduction to me and zombies"
As a little introduction to me and zombies, my head has always been filled with popular music, novelty songs of the moment, and one of them that had always stuck with me, from around 1960, was an American version of a Trinidadian Calypso song called “Zombie Jamboree” (or “Back to Back”) was written by Conrad Eugene Mauge, Jr, who performed as Lord Invader.
Rebecca Cannon: Detritus – Copyleft In Action
For five years Steev Hise has been collecting cultural fall out which certain detrivores would have us call art. Passionately cataloguing, nurturing and studying these oft discarded remnants of society, Hise runs the web site Detritus.net, a minefield for corporate …
Copyleft
The theme for this, the 11th issue of Cordite and our fifth online, is copyleft. As one contributor recently asked: “What the #$%! is that?” It's a good question.
I knew these festivals, these two festivals
An e-mail arrived one morning inviting me to be a guest at the Mildura Writers Festival, the weekend of 1-4 August. I'd been recommended as an emerging writer. We would love to be the first festival you get invited to!! …
Taipei Breathing
For 14 days over Christmas 2001-2, I spent time with friends in Taipei, capital city of Taiwan. These are some brief impressions of my time there. Quotes are from work in progress.
Gus Gollings: A Note on Asian Scripts
The QWERTY keyboard has come into widespread use all over the world. It is based on the modern Latin alphabet, and it obviously does not directly support the input of the tens of thousands of ideographs from Chinese, Japanese and …
Music
A few weeks ago a friend pointed out to me that if you type www.cordite.com.au into a web browser and, as the saying goes, 'run it through the Internet', you'll find not this site (we're steadfastly .org) but a guns …
What Audience? Which Festival?
Having recently worked as director of the Australian Poetry Festival (Burning Lines, April 2001), Martin Langford offers his contribution to the continuing discussion about how to present poetry to the public.
Festivals
Welcome to the first Internet-only issue of Cordite. Issue #8 reflects a period of transition within Cordite. Migrating to the Web has been a difficult and confusing process, with which we have not yet fully come to grips. We now …
Chris Mansell: Poetry of the Northern Territory
Region is not acknowledged in contemporary Australian poetry – which is strange since the way we see our tradition is in terms of bush and country. It's also what most contemporary poets have rejected in fact (and, legitimately, act in …
Georg Trakl’s ‘Dreamland’
Sometimes I am brought to recall those quiet days which to me trace a wondrous, happy, wayward life, one which I can taste, unquestionably, like a gift granted by benign, anonymous hands. And the little town of Talesgrund is replaced …
Between Virtue and Innocence: In Defence of Prose Poetry
Each virtue responds to a specific form of innocence. Innocence is moral instinct. Virtue is prose, innocence is poetry. – Novalis Long before Romanticism, poetry was thought to whisper with a sound which was the sound of Nature purified; poetry …
Narrative and Poetry: What Happened Next?
In narratology, the narratee is the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a particular narrative. Narrative poetry belongs to the class of poems, including ballads, epics, and verse romances, that tell stories. (Dramatic and lyric …
Experience and Transcendence in the Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer
Someone says, “Poetry is about experience”. Then someone else says, “Poetry is about transcendence”. No sooner are these two statements allowed to engage each other than a vast, complicated world begins to form. Fierce conflicts arise between the advocates of experience and the defenders of transcendence. “Poetry holds a mirror to life”, we are told. “Poetry is no reflection”, we hear in reply, “it is a ‘furious ascension’”.
