Ambient stinger

A short music composition featuring synthesised foley and synthesisers.

Ambient stinger (percussive)

A stinger designed on a synth.

Animosine

Animosine is a short transitional sound on a synth.

Anything will do

Anything Will Do is a short instrumental piece featuring a tenor saxophone, 1 synth and a piano.

Where I'm calling from : alterity and the other I of the unconcious

As I assess my fractured novel manuscript: a narrative in multiple first-person voices, I engage with writing that I produce at a primal/generative moment of narrative composition; I encounter writing that is both familiar and strange, known and other.

The sense in which I produce writing that is ‘other’ to me is intriguing. I recognise that a dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘self-as-other’ exists in my writing and, in this, I am drawn to Derrida’s concept of alterity: to the idea that language is ghosted by the trace of the other. I am intrigued by the haunting shadow of trace: by the ‘other’ that simulates presence and makes the otherwise empty sign ‘full’ of meaning. 

When I acknowledge that my writing is at once strange and other, as well as familiar and known, I realise that the writing that I produce at a primal/generative moment of narrative composition is produced under the delusion of self-presence; it is produced under the delusion that meaning is present to consciousness ‘at a given moment’; it is produced when I am both ‘I’ and ‘not I’. This leads me to ask: What is my attitude to the effects that I produce when I am not I? What is my reaction when the other takes the floor?

To engage with these questions in the context of my fractured novel manuscript, is to engage with the possibilities for meaning that narrative, as a language map, encompasses; it is to engage in an inquiry about the relationship between language and semantic intention; it is to ask how my attitude toward the voice of the other in my writing affects the ‘finished’ product of the narrative text.

As I tackle these questions, I plot the operation of alterity; I plot the work of the unconscious as it operates at a primal/generative moment of narrative composition; I ask: how does the language of my fractured narrative mean? I ask: what is the relationship between meaning and authorial intention?

The concept of alterity explicates the ghostly shadow that lurks behind the sign, simulating presence and making the otherwise empty sign full of meaning. The concept of alterity therefore explains how my writing might be strange to me, in the sense that I am estranged from it (because it is not consciously, logically determined) but, simultaneously, how my writing is familiar, strangely familiar (in the sense of a latent, ghostly shadow, a web of unconscious associations).

Alterity recognises that the present (surface narrative) is infected by a past (primal/generative moment of narrative composition) that I cannot access in a definitive way.

The indelible ink of the special stamp: an insider’s research essay on imprints and erasures

The medical profession ascribes otherness to people with disabilities through diagnosis and expertism, which sets in motion discursive powers that oversee their exclusion through schooling and beyond. In this paper, I present a narrative pieced together from personal experiences of ducking and weaving the deficit discourse in ‘inclusive’ education, when seeking employment and in day-to-day family interaction as a person with severely impaired vision. This work builds on previous qualitative research I conducted in Queensland, Australia with a group of young people with impaired vision who attended an inclusive secondary school. I frame this discussion using Foucault’s conception of normalising judgement against the hegemony of normalcy, and consider that inclusion for people with disabilities is reminiscent of a haunting. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how my ideology is formed, and how it in turn shapes a research agenda geared toward seeking greater inclusion for young people with disabilities in schools.

Under the forest and Ladyswamp ( a radio play and a sonic poem)

'Under the Forest'  and 'Ladyswamp' are audio recordings created in collaboration with musician/ sound artist Tom Kazas. As the first outputs of the ongoing Lyrebird project (fully documented at writingfix.com.au) both works reinvent history in artistic form. At the same time they consider the aftermath of inappropriate farming techniques, representing the sense of disconnection the settlers immediately have from any historical continuity or indigenous relationship to land. In focussing on a regional area in Victoria and the stories that emerge from here, this practice-led research has implications for all other regional areas in countries throughout a world in a time of climate change. The two pieces, linked by the flow of water from the upper catchment of the Tarwin River, to the river flats near the South Gippsland coast, embody the presence of location via poetic means; the flow is from erosion to silt: of land becoming water, becoming land. In the sound design the locations are also represented poetically without losing the actuality of their haunting geography.
The two audio works were first presented at the Double Dialogues Conference: 'The 21st century - The Event, The Subject, The Artwork', Fiji, 2012, and are published in In/Stead, Issue 4, 2013 alongside a discursive article, ‘Under the forest & Ladyswamp: a radio play & a sonic poem’. Extracts of the audio appear on Youtube. The process of ‘Ladyswamp’ appears on an educational video currently in production by Deakin University.

Grief and Dharma: Suffering, empathy and moral imaginative intuition

The article explores recent thinking on the 'hard emotions', in particular, grief, sorrow and mourning, and link the challenging inner and social condition to the calling of Dharma (righteous law, normatively worthy action). Drawing from some comparative work (academic and personal) in the study of grief, mourning and empathy, we shall discuss the treatment of this tragic pathos in classical Indic literature and modern-day psychotherapy. We shall demonstrate, despite being secularised, these emotions continue to serve as the sites of imagination at a much more personal and inter-personal level that are not antithetical to a Dharmic (sacred) quest despite their haunting presence even when 'the four walls collapse around one in the intensity of duḥkha (suffering, sorrow).

Snap

‘Snap’ deploys the queer cliché of becoming-sailor as a trope for recognition in the amorous encounter and literalises the ‘copycat’ as its catalyst. As Girard argues (1973), the human is foremost mimetic: this story makes its claim for originality and authenticity of connection through the playful recycling of cliché.‘Snap’ eschews the relative affectlessness of some metafiction by staging an amorous approach under the shadow of mortality. It exploits the liminal moment of modernist short fiction to summon the ‘manifold’ of experience. Here, love opens a space of intertextual esonance (Costello 2007), including motifs of Genet (masquerade), Duras (haunting) and Maurice Blanchot (the infinite approach), by writing the threshold of encounter as the intensive silence of wond

Dharma and grief: secularisation of a sacred emotion

The presentation begins with the moving scene of Va¯lmi¯ki's grief over the bereavement of the survivor of the two birds in amorous union as one of them is pierced by a hunter's arrow. After considering Abhinavagupta's doubt about the genuineness of Va¯lmi¯ki's grief, the paper moves to Maha¯bha¯rata as the women from the warring clans bear witness to the horrendous carnage ensuing from the battle, and the constant rebuke that Yudhisthira, head of the Pa¯ndava clan, faces from Draupadi¯ for wandering the earth without finding a stable foundation for Dharma or grounding it in firm absolutes. We liken Yudhisthira to Mahatma Gandhi facing the near-collapse of the Indian subcontinent as it was being rent apart with communal violence on the eve of its Independence. But we also compare Yudhisthira with Hamlet, the tragic grief-ridden character, who is equally bewildered and confused by the array of emotions and sensations that overwhelm his lingering body upon news of the death of and ghostly encounter with his murdered father. With this as the context, we take the occasion to explore recent thinking on the 'hard emotions', in particular, grief, sorrow and mourning, and link the challenging inner and social condition to the calling of Dharma (righteous law, normatively worthy action). Drawing from some comparative work (academic and personal) in the study of grief, mourning and empathy, we shall discuss the treatment of this tragic pathos in classical Indic literature and modern-day psychotherapy. We shall demonstrate, despite being secularised, these emotions continue to serve as the sites of imagination at a much more personal and inter-personal level that are not antithetical to a Dharmic (sacred) quest despite their haunting presence even when 'the four walls collapse around one in the intensity of duhkha (suffering, sorrow)' (Tagore).

Riding parallel

This extended poem deploys a mode of ekphrasis to perform queer desire as metonymically proliferative, from the sublime to the abject, but always productive. At the same time, it celebrates this propensity as a mode of positive haunting which multiplies experience through improbable connections across space-time.

Alexandra Watkins interviews Michelle de Kretser on 'Springtime'

Sydney in spring is a palette of luminous intensity. Fresh green spaces meet vivid blue skies. Lilac jacarandas burst into life throughout the city and its suburbs. It is time of renewal when locals and tourists take full advantage of this most favoured of seasons. It is a curious setting for a gothic tale, albeit the location for Michelle de Kretser’s latest work, Springtime: A Ghost Story. Bringing light to darkness this ‘black-spring’ interview with Michelle de Kretser questions Australian literary and cultural customs and environmental stereotypes. It also probes literary fashions, short form fiction, the Melbourne / Sydney cultural divide, gothic tropes, and the psychology of space. Through her discussion with interviewer Alix Watkins, de Kretser reflects on her interest in haunting, the influence of her Sri Lankan background, and the attraction of brevity following her previous epic Questions of Travel (Miles Franklin Award 2012).

Manifesto of a defeated poet

This feature-length experimental film is the result of an intimate collaboration between Bosnian filmmaker/poet/painter/musician/performace artist Saidin Salkic (On Karasevdah: Srebrenica Blues, 2007 & Konvent 2010) and veteran Australian experimental filmmaker and film educator John Cumming (Obsession, Recognition & Sabotage 1985-87, First time Tragedy Second Tome Farce, 1989, The Hollow Centre 1999). Created over a period of four years it draws on the traditions and possibilities of improvisation – in cinematography, experimental cinema, dance, music and performance – with moments of intensity and repose, fluidity and halting re-composure. Cumming’s camera and Salkic’s movement work in front of it are at once expressionistic and in dialectical tension as are Salkic’s poetry, his haunting improvisations on piano and melodica and Cumming’s industrial soundscapes. SYNOPSIS: In the midst of fascist-capitalist madness, the Foreigner (a poet/dancer with sun on his palms and blood from his dreams on his face) hovers in neon twilight with last whispers of sanity on his lips, guarding and protecting the world – forever. REVIEW: ‘Full of mystery and beauty, punctuated by strange eruptions of silent cinema, of Chaplin, of film history made personal … not the film of a dance but a dance itself around pure presence … something unique and precious.’ Maximilian Le Cain, http://lecain.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/a-few-reflections-on-manifesto-of.html