The rye bread is as constant as the snow and I am ingesting both of these delights throughout the days, from light to night. Like most tourists to Berlinn Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ has been a terrific read and added much Cold War paranoia to my journeys around back alleys and past men in trench coats. Yes, we are told the East-West battles are over, yes, the Berlin Wall has fallen, but Berlin is also full of faces that don’t smile and bodies covered in dark clothes, disappearing in and beyond the subways. I’ve been consuming novels and non fiction and very little on the poem brain.
Travelling
January 6th, 2010
looking for Gerhard
January 2nd, 2010
Consumption
For the fourth day snowing – it is snowing. Magnificent. For the fourth day coughing – I am coughing and carrying around an intense flu. Pathetic to be ill when the flakes are falling for me and demanding snow people to be constructed! The time in bed has allowed me to ponder on the world and also read as much German inspired literature as possible. I did, however, put aside Rilke’s prose, as it was starting to reflect my condition – being about an ill fellow who was hallucinating and seeing his dead ancestors.
Back in Hobart – the bag has arrived safely and the contents will be sorted for the first of a quartet of exhibitions of the duffle bag.
An Enormous thanks to our Poetry Commander, Commander Vine, who picked up the bag for us and was, yet again, involved in a media frenzy (!) as journalists at the Hobart Mercury snapped the handover.
Our darling Ms Bonny Cassidy has left the building and when I return to The Red Room it will be to assess new applicants for the role of Education Officer. In the meantime Ms Bennett is overseeing the 2010 beginning of Red activities and the rest of the world carries on as if Christmas never was.
December 28th, 2009
Berlin: Never drive a car when you’re dead (from a postcard)
Snow is possible. The pizza was 2 euro and the tastiest I’ve tried for years. Ice wet roads make riding the bike difficult but if this sun keeps up, tomorrow we’ll head over to one of the Berlin forests. The Black Forest, we’re saving for a little later in this trip. The German language is infectious and few speak English readily so practice is inevitable fun. I have my PONS to learn some verbs and a few other German books that I was able to purchase using a Christmas gift voucher, one of the best gifts to receive, before leaving home. The trains here are yellow, quick and snug: inside lovers fall asleep all over the space and lots of drunk Christmas party folk still spinning from the 24th. Big, hairy, scary dogs ride the trains too. At night, because our legs are tired from wall walking or exploring the secret lanes, the sofa becomes a movie house. Tonight it is Sunday and after the hot bath my cousins, E and I will get under the blankets for the second half of the story of a submarine adventure. The film’s American overdub is nauseating and hysterical and tomorrow there will be more laughing and probably other expressions of distress which, due to history, accompany wherever you go.
Here, in Berlin, the people and the family in Sydney seem not to exist as though I have forgotten them and they me. This anonymous but acceptable act of vanishing is the one of the most wonderful and confronting aspect of travel.
December 24th, 2009
Christmas Eve in Berlin
It is Christmas Eve and the Berliners are either in the shopping center purchasing Herring or snug inside their homes drinking grog and breaking Rye bread. I’m here, in Berlin, with my lovely cousins and my partner, whose luggage has got lost in transit. We share the front room with two fat and constantly fighting cats, Abigail and Renincki; they live on a carpet castle in the front room, where we sleep.
My German phrases include: ‘ich verstehe nicht’ and ‘bis dan’. I am also using words stolen by the English to spice up my conversational skills (or lack) – such as ‘wanderlust’ , ‘poltergeist’ and ‘Dummkopf’.
The Red Room is worlds away from the snow and this state of extreme calm that is created by cold weather and no mobile phone. I have left the work in the capable hands of our Patron, Bonny and Tamryn. The last week in The Room was heavy with sadness at our wonderful Ms Cassidy moving on to full time teaching work and then learning.
The marvellous news is that NSW Arts have provided us with funds towards a range of our projects for 2010. With this income we will be able to kick start the year at The Sydney Writers’ Festival and tour our ‘Sea Things’ exhibition. There was a moment of terror when we learnt the Australia Council’s Literature Board had rejected our application for funding and instead put all their eggs in one basket that wasn’t ours.
But,
right now, the lima beans are boiling and we’re about to begin the first of a series of baking cakes and gingerbread. The sounds here are of aluminium being scrubbed and soft socks on wooden floors and the occasional snap and pop of fireworks.
October 15th, 2009
Dr Bonny Cassidy’s Great Adventure to Melbourne
“When we first sat down to design Red Room’s education program, Papercuts, we did so with our own ideas about how contemporary Australian poetry could be communicated to young people, and with the advice and expertise of individuals in the education sector including our program writer Tony Britten, an English teacher at SCEGGS Darlinghurst. The 2007 pilot program took an experimental approach to finding interested NSW schools, selecting individual poets and gathering feedback. Soon enough, we were going national – taking Papercuts to Victoria in 2008 and 2009 – and bowled over by the quality of writing and ideas about exhibition and publication that students were producing.
Our challenge now is to maintain the program’s boutique nature – hand-selected poets for different localities and class needs – while delivering to every school that is interested in taking part. Our bottom line is, if a school demands Papercuts, then we will take it to them regardless of their location. Who else is going to put our emerging and mid-career poets into conversation with kids about the real process of writing? How else can students understand poetic form except by intimately appreciating its craft?
Recently, we’ve undertaken two professional development sessions with English teachers, at Ravenswood (NSW) and Peninsula High School (VIC). Jo spent a week in residence at Ravenswood and was able to spend time with both teachers and students. What’s exciting about these opportunities is that the school becomes engaged with the contemporary scene and with the reality of the writing business rather than simply being at its receiving end as buyers, librarians and theorists. The benefit of sustained contact with a live poet – and the same could be said for a live artist, dancer and so on – is unique. I spent a day with a dozen teachers at Peninsula, including those with junior and senior secondary classes. What’s so valuable for us is hearing about what teachers need and miss out on when it comes to teaching poetry. As teacher John Russell told me, they don’t sit in the staff room and chat about the brilliance of Robert Frost – there’s no time, and it’s “not done”. But given the time and space to sit around together and enjoy discussing poems for pleasure, the usefulness of this kind of discussion to HSC teachers as well as Year 8 coordinators is clear. At both schools, these sessions also produced original poems by staff and the chance for them to share their own writing with colleagues.
Maybe the last word from Papercuts it to remind teachers, students, parents and poets that we are all readers and writers of some description; and that to deliberately and enjoyably read and write should never be seen as an indulgence or a privilege.”
Yours,
Bonny
Education Officer
September 13th, 2009
Lionel in Brisbane
The hotel Lionel and I are staying in has a funny little swimming pool about the size of a tea cup. The pool is situated beneath a highway and, oddly, populated by the hotel guests. It looks, from my balcony spy point, like a pool of pollution and anything but refreshing. Regardless, the people are happy in the chlorine.
This is one of the greatest hotel’s on earth: My mobile phone charger forgot to get into my suitcase and stayed at home. But, would you know it, but the hotel has over 250 mobile phone chargers in their lost property. Less than five minutes was spent finding one to fit my phone and the world of text messages and mobile rings returned to me.
All these details are just details – the act today was Lionel in the Red Box Gallery. The crowd was tiny but diverse. I think most other festival goers were at the big name events featuring historians and pearl earrings and palatable stuff. Yet, in the glassed in theater, Lionel took those listening into the past, present and future of his life and the landscape of Brisbane. The audience were transfixed and, I hope, fully aware that what they were hearing would never be repeated in the same way again; that the poems from Lionel, today, were read because they had to be.
March 16th, 2008
Read, listen, be showered in blessings.
Stomach has begun to purify itself with assistance from ovaltine like tablets – antibiotics my Sydney doctor sneaked into my medicine kit. Having swallowed countless panadols, drunk blackberry gastrolite, until I fizzed myself into a stupor, and tried immersing myself in rosewater baths, the only alternative left was a dependable course of savage, efficient medicinal drugs. So, the day of departure is the day of trying black sago pudding and tasting it with some pleasure.
Moans and moping did not prevent me from venturing beyond the hotel compound, to Ubud, with 4 other friends. My romantic notions of stone monkeys and our crew being the only avatars in the town was killed upon seeing more gormless women shopping in boutiques and furniture shops than on Sydney’s Oxford street . In particular my mind has kept the image of an Indonesian palace on one corner with a sweaty tourist bargaining over the price of a pineapple sarong, on the other.
Purchasing anything at this stage of the trip is a queer experience because of my assuming so many avatars this trip. One day, my brain and actions think and try to act upon issues of peace, heroes, poverty and torture. Then, a day later- fruit cocktail on a beach in a gluttonous peace available to few.
Tree trunks smoke with incense and all doorways have an offering of flowers in bamboo, before the first human footstep makes its way into morning. All these religious acts bring India close to me and a few nights back, as an Indonesia version of a Ramayana story was being played for the tourist pack, I felt that first, dreadful sense of missing the me that was, only a few meals ago, in India.
March 11th, 2008
Myself and Mick internet together beside a lace curtained window, in Indonesia
Tagore questions ‘Can one who is not a lover, know what love is?’; so this afternoon I question, ‘Can one who is not a motorbike rider, know what a motorbike is?” – To answer this myself and four fellows are about to cruise the coastline, by moonlight. Being unable to ride, and reasonably terrified of being spoked to death or rolled into the ground by a truck, I shall be dinked. I am considering a pink helmet, and repulsively Barbie, Girlie as that sounds, it is the only one that fits my skull size.
Here in Bali, I am attending a conference to explore ethics, peace and ways that I can use the experiences I had in India, in my work and life, in Australia. I am with a band of other individuals addressing a similar question, but in relation to different areas in South East Asia.
All day four walls, a square table, pineapple juice and the excrutiating rustle of plastic wraps around single mints (yes, an incredible waste of plastic) has filled the senses. So tonight, as a way to re stimulate the body and mind, a speedy journey along unknown roads, to untasted dinners, and perhaps no return at all.
Just imagine if the four of us on this cruise rode all the way to the end of the earth and this was the last blog I ever wrote? Such is the lure of risk, curiosity and trying new things in order to change.
February 29th, 2008
Sold! One conscious womb!
From a balcony the Dirga street stalls break open their shutters at about 7PM, faces of all ages selling skills. The stalls offer an array of objects, each object incorporating shells, including cashew nuts (a shell of black sugar, for example). Every stall I moved close to and some object or edible was placed in my palm and I was to taste, while, what felt like the entire seaside of West Bengal, watched on in pleasure and displeasure. The most peculiar taste these last few days was a hot cup of lemon tea, piqued with rock salt and sunlight, – a pungent taste and nauseating smell normally associated with beef stock or men’s toilets at train stations. Balloons, popcorn and gun games here, as at all seaside towns.
I purchased a conch shell to take part of the first sound of creation, back to Sydney. Their pearly white spirals suggest an infinity of space, directing their shape into that of a mouth as it hums ‘Om’. Holding the piece in my hands it seemed incapable of destroying all evil, as the Mahabharata claims. Yet, when the conch man blew it, the waves sat back and night air bristled, such was its force of authority and super nature.
My ears must have been smiling so greatly that the conch sheller breathed even more deeply, as if his back opened up a hole for more breeze to reach his lungs, and he blew a second time. Now, the sound was without a mellowness but a distressing alarm, caused by his tight embouchure and serious stare.
February 26th, 2008
Bare feet painted red to match my temple spotted skull dot
Motorbikes, rickshaws powered by people and bicycles, feet, bullocks, horse, boat, auto rickshaw, car, plane and cab; modes of getting about in Calcutta. No decent person would ride on a human pulled rickshaw as the men are thinner than carrot shavings and smaller than mustard seeds. Only a fool would ride a horse around the main square as the animals are so undernourished you can hear their guts grumble and see the air between their ribs. As those who have journeyed here prior to me, and those after, the cruel absurdity of poverty parallel with fullness and joy is wrenched of sense.
My preferred mode travel machine is the auto rickshaw. Three wheels of dangerous wonder, snip snap between traffic and four to a shaw, the other three I have no idea who they are or where they are going. Bodies smell of fried fish, alcohol, tea, incense, sweat and hair conditioner. My body would smell of milk and tangerines, foods I consume like a baby monkey.
The script on view would delight any and every reader or writer ; Indian languages flood the streets and newspapers. The songs on public transport range from electronic hindi anthems to national anthems and most hum whilst going about their duties. Where I stay the hummingbirds flick about to the tunes of stainless steel, megaphones and international voices in the stairwells.
My voice is mostly silent here, too much listening to do and, in comparison with all the tales I hear, my life is less interesting because I know about it.