Virginia Woolf



Virginia Woolf’s Incidental Pilot, Marianne Wex’s Legroom and the Dancing Man

I first read Virginia Woolf’s short – just six pages – essay, ‘Flying Over London’ (Selected Essays, Oxford University Press, 2009), in a café in Sydney. The barista deftly worked a rising swan into the frothy surface of my coffee.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , ,

A Writing Surface of One’s Own

A waitress here has The Owl and The Pussycat tattooed on her goose-pimpled biceps. They sweetly peek from the hem of an unseasonable short sleeve. Indigo-inked, theirs is a nursery frieze’s block print detail. She is all at sea in her ravaged pea-green tights. Her roughly made skirt abounds with floating, shifting dice. It retains its looped yellow fringing, a faded tangelo backing, from its vintage past life as a painted velvet souvenir cushion cover. She has a ring at the end of her nose, her nose, a ring at the end of her nose. Her girlfriend’s lips, hair and boots are cerise. With honey, she sweetens – and makes a meal of – her sweetly gratis hot tea, blushes like a peach, purrs. The illustrated waitress hovers, calls ‘Who?’ and, like a zephyr, swoops with a cloth, a notepad and a fluffy rainbow-haired Troll Doll-ended pencil.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , ,

Silence Turned into Objects: Looking at where Poets Write

Among the most extreme, in the sense of horrific, writing places for poems bequeathed to us would be the conditions in which Ezra Pound produced The Pisan Cantos. There is some speculation as to the exact number of those Cantos …

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , , , ,

IWD: Murder, She Wrote

Three lines from The Seventh section of Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic, first published in 1977 and re-issued March 2013 by Spinifex Press, close out a varied discussion by the author on the political nature of death, that Socrates’ death ‘was political’ (as underlined in the handwritten original), that Socrates was not a writer and that writers ‘need teachers like Socrates’. In the same section she argues that artists often use ‘Another’s pain … for the success of expression’. ‘Art as comfort’, Moorhead follows on, ‘ — strange concept. / Such assumptions aren’t questioned often enough.’

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , , , , ,