ESSAYS
Editorial Intervention
Usually I despise the practice whereby editors place their own work in an issue of the publication they're editing. Apart from denying a place to someone whose work is probably better, such actions often signal a kind of desperation, a …
Domesticated Enemies
Our 21st issue, Domestic Enemy, sees Cordite finally obtain its majority! From our humble beginnings in 1997, it's been a long and dusty road, filled with many pit-stops, refuels, vehicle and driver changes, roadblocks, fake abductions, detours and [insert your …
Submerged Is the Best Place to Be
Submerged is the best place to be on a hot summer's day: somewhere in the shady corner of the pool, cross-legged on the bottom, blowing bubbles until you run out of air. Submerged is where Tony Soprano's psychiatrist tells him …
Judith Wright in Jammu
Being from a country that cannot seem to stop boasting about its ancient legacies and from a family whose own history goes back seventy-five generations, I find it incomprehensible how any self-respecting nation could spend over a century looking outside of itself for a ‘heritage’.
Richard Frankland’s Charcoal Club
Part of my homework for singing class was to go to a live gig. I didn't know much about Frankland, I hadn't known he was standing for the Senate until I went to vote. He has a powerful voice and his band of six (including a drummer who doubled as a eucalyptus branch shaker) played songs that veered from country to funky, interspersed with Frankland's state-of-things discourse.
Billy Bragg and the Fight for a New Australia
Thatcherism was the name given to the tide of economic rationalism that swept through Britain in the 1980's. It was a series of, often forceful, policy reforms and social upheavals that transformed the nation economically, politically, socially and philosophically. Musically, the nation was mute. The original f&^k you of punk's first wave, which was quite often only ever protest for protests sake, had all but died. In its place the superficiality of New Wave and the introspection of Goth reigned supreme.
Syd Barrett’s Threnodic Devotion
When something is 'of the stars' (de sidera) we desire it (desideratus); when there are no stars, we have no desires; when we have no desires we are ready to die, or be silent.
Zoe Dattner: The Greeting Card Writers
Poets come in many different shapes and forms. I'm not about to give you my ideas as to what makes a poet because I don't think I'm qualified. What I am interested in however, is all the different subsets of humanity where poetry exists. Where individuals take it upon themselves to express something in words, something they believe is representative of the way in which we all live our lives, the similarities in the human existence that highlight the fact that we are all suffering from, laughing at, celebrating, the same things. And so it was that I began to develop an obsession of sorts, that has since become an affection, for those unsung heroes, the Greeting Card writers.
Searching for the Young Haiku Rebels
“What is it about haiku that cannot be defeated?” asked Jim Kacian, one of the founders of the World Haiku Association, in a paper delivered at the first conference of the WHA in Croatia, 2000. It's a good question, one …
The Woman Who Knows Latin (Inglés)
Women writers in Mexico, like women writers the world over, and perhaps I should say all writers the world over, work against a background of many real and potential threats to their freedom of expression. I have written in the …
Mujer que sabe latín (Español)
Las escritoras en México, como las escritoras en todo el mundo, y tal vez mejor dicho, como todos los escritores en todo el mundo, trabajan contra un fondo de muchas amenazas, potenciales y actuales, contra su libertad de expresión. En …
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.
