Reasons you will love him - Re:reading the dictionary

Tim Sinclair is brilliant. He is the Captain of Poetry at PAN magazine and also a poet. A good one, not one of those crap pretend ones. I've been waiting ages for his new verse novel to come out. His last verse novel, Nine Hours North, a verse novel for young adults, was fucking great, which is weird because I hate both verse novels and young adults.

When Tim announced he was releasing an echapbook, in the middle of revising drafts of his second big book, I became angry. Surely it is the duty of a Tim to finish a book as quickly as possible so that a Dale may read it? When I asked him about this he said no, no it's not actually a duty and he is working diligently on said new novel, as I bloody well know.

The new echapbook (I will make that a word) is called Re:reading the dictionary. Tim said something along the lines of it being an accidental book that came about as a result of his unnatural love of the dictionary and the more natural human desire to do other things when they really ought to be finishing their new novel. At least I think that's what he said.

Tim is very busy and important so I have taken the liberty of interviewing myself* as Tim Sinclair about his new book.

DS: Hello 'Tim'.
DSasTS: Er, hello.
DS: Right, so the cover art is good. Who did that?
DSasTS: Kitty & Rosevich but you already knew that, seeing as how they collaborate with PAN magazine.
DS: Yes, fine. The words inside the book are also quite good. Who wrote those?
DSasTS: I did! You already know that too.
DS: No need to get tetchy. You seem rather violent for a poet. You're supposed to be all peaceful.
DSasTS: I am peaceful.
DS: So are you saying you're an elitist or something?
DSasTS: No. No, that's not at all what I'm saying. What are you doing?
DS: I'm practicing to be a hard-hitting reporter.
DSasTS: Fine. Good. Now about the book. It's an echapbook.
DS: I agree. It is an echapbook and it is brilliant. Why are you a poet?
DSasTS: It's available from my website Cottage Industry Press for a very small sum of money. Don't want to know about the book?
DS: You didn't answer my question. You're being very uncooperative. I think I should terminate this interview now for my own safety.
DSasTS: I don't think that's really necessary. If you would just sit still a second and stop doing that jumping around thing. You're being very distracting.
DS: Good. Fine. You can see how this is. The mind of the poet is a mysterious and important place. I have risked my life to bring you this hard-hitting inside view of a poet in his natural environment. It is with reluctance that I have had to cut the interview short and retreat to a safe distance. Interview over.
DSasTS: For fuck's sake!

There's a lesson in here. Poets, not as easy to impersonate as you might have thought.

Here's a proper interview with Tim about Re:reading the dictionary. Just in case you weren't satisfied with the above hard-hitting one.

You can find the real Tim Sinclair at Cottage Industry Press.


* I did not actually ask Tim for an interview, he probably would have said yes but that's really not the point. Right now it seems like a brilliant idea to pretend to be Tim. It would do well to note that the above is not at all what the real Tim Sinclair is likely to have said.  Hopefully this will not cause the real Tim Sinclair to become cross with me. Let's see what happens.

Go ahead and jump

Warning: Do not read if you are recently bereaved, possess an overly sensitive nature or are one of those people who enjoy yelling at writers when they write something you do not like (in fact piss off if you are a person who enjoys yelling at writers).


People are concerned about me, which is nice, but unnecessary. I'm entering a research phase on suicide prevention for my manuscript, hence the incessant talk about the topic. There is a little twist to my research, I want to find out what not to do in the case of coming into contact with a suicidal being. In fact I am determined to put together a large volume of information about pushing someone past their tipping point and right off the old cliff there.

Whoosh. Straight down. See ya later alligator. Splat, crunch, splatter, gasp, death rattle, gone. Hallelujah and good riddance.

I'm thinking about the kinds of things one could utter to a person perched on a precipice to encourage a good old jump off the mortal coil. Reading research papers on the topic of suicide has been so far quite unhelpful. They are full of the usual charts about risk factors, tipping points and the no-good nature of social isolation. What I want are some ideas for sentences cruel or callous enough to cause a confused being to stop their calculations and put all their eggs in a death-bound basket. What are the kinds of things it is crucial not to hear at a moment of indecision? How can one person talking to another fail to offer even a small pocket of hope or comfort when faced with such drastic circumstances? What is the string of words least welcome to a consciousness in agonising mental pain?

If you can help in any sensible way drop me a line.

A letter to F. in Western Australia

Dearest F.,

I've been slaving in an office for a few weeks, editing video titles and adding the appropriate rating. G. PG. M. MA. Tedious just about covers it. As usual I am dubiously and sporadically employed by real organisations. The rest of my time is spent more wisely on editing PAN magazine, making notes and drafting things for my manuscript and generally running about looking at things and wishing I didn't notice every tiny detail about everything. The footpath just three houses down the street has begun to exaggerate its folded crease as the tree roots underneath swell with time.

Last weekend I travelled to Canberra with my brother and his girlfriend to visit Dad and the other wonders of our nation's capital. I found them to be much the same as last time I saw them, which is good in the case of my father. My brother and I planned to take advantage of Canberra's lax stance on smoking pot and get high in a hedge maze by the lake. When we got there the hedge maze was missing. The miniature train driver said the government had the hedges removed. I was wondering if maybe too many people had the same idea and there was a meeting in parliament about whether or not the government ought to provide a large hedge maze in which stoned people frequently ran about in and got lost. It was a great shame about the hedge maze. I was hoping to able to sell my brother to someone dressed as David Bowie.

Several weeks ago I was invited to read a short story at Penguin Plays Rough. I decided definitely not to do it due to high internal levels of fear. I was however forced to do it by the inimitable Pip Smith who runs the show. In the end I did not vomit, faint or run away and the thing was got through tolerably well. After the reading Spencer and I drank an enormous volume of beer, Pip folded a sum of money into the palm of my hand and it turned out to be the highest paid ten minutes I have spent in my life. Unless you count inheritances, of which there have not been many, but it doesn't take more than a minute for someone to die. On second thoughts that's not really earning is it? Now if I murdered someone and inherited money from that act then it might be considered earning I suppose, so no earning at all in this case.

Yesterday my mother telephoned to yell at me. Fortunately I was not the topic of her yelling, she needed to express some violent anger on a topic and decided I would do. After the yelling ceased she instructed me to get myself down to the harbour and report on the water. In an amazing coincidence that had been my intention all along. I rode the train down through the tunnels under the city until it emerged suddenly, without seeming to climb, at Circular Quay. The day looked a grey one but I was unsure as to the real colour of things as I was wearing unfamiliar sunglasses. The sunglasses belong to a friend of mine. He gave me a lift home in his car and in order to avoid sitting on the things I stuck them in my pocket. My only failure was I did not take them back out of my pocket again until I was inside The Peach. I have confessed my accidental crime to him so I do not feel as guilty as I otherwise might.

My only purpose for going down to the harbour was to visit the Satyr statue by Francis (Guy) Lynch. It was placed in the botanical gardens, just near the Opera House gate sometime in the 1970's, I believe it was originally sculpted in the 1920's. The face of the statue is reportedly based on Guy's brother Joe Lynch. Joe is the subject of Slessor's brilliant lament Five Bells. Five Bells is of course wildly popular, one of those Australian poems repeatedly set in the school's English curriculum forever and a day but I don't think you should hold that against it. The first time I properly read the poem I was at university and definitely uninterested in all things poetic. At the time I wanted violent contemporary fiction and wildly intellectual essays and nothing else at all would do. I read the thing because I had to, but made no internal note of it.

It wasn't until I was hanging over the railing of a ferry searching for jelly fish and ghosts that I remembered this line, "Deep and dissolving verticals of light". I hung perilously over the ship's railing reciting, "Deep and dissolving verticals of light", and watching the light split the "waves with diamond quills and combs of light" and plunge single-fingered through water, fish and ghosts and time waving weed that I remembered the poem at all. Bloody hell a lit match head just flung itself off the end of the match and scorched a permanent mark between the 'v' and the 'b' on my laptop. I suppose I should give up on matches and move across into lighters but I do love the sound of match being struck, nothing quite like it.

All the notes and drafts for my manuscript cross and recross the harbour. The idea of Joe Lynch seems submerged not just in our national poetic consciousness and the harbour itself but in all of my recent thought. It is possible that I have fallen in love with the man, this "Joe, long dead, who lives between between the five bells."

I was distressed to hear of the recent loss of one of your friends. I hope that you can find some solace in your impending adventure overseas.  Write to me dear F. for I always miss you. Here now is a photograph I took of myself with Old Joe.

Awesome

Did you know there was such a thing as The Awesome Foundation? Well there is and they have just awarded PAN magazine a $1000 no-strings-attached grant. Awesome.

Combination lady death-farmer tea party

I wore a slip today. All day, for the first time. One of those white nylon slippery things with lace trim and darty bits around the bra area. When I remembered I was wearing it under my dress I felt vaguely like a lady, a proper grown-up lady who is organised and dabbles in witty inappropriateness. But that was only when I remembered.

When I arrived home at The Peach I was tired beyond reason. Tired beyond the ability to make even a stab at pretending to be polite, like a potato digger returned from twelve hours hard labour in the field. That's when one of The Peachettes declared she would not pay one third of the electricity bill but some other mad proportion that she would calculate based on fuck-knows-what and then email to me.

I wanted, no, I desired with all my being, to magic a pitchfork out of the air so I could stab her like a sack of grain and toss her to her bloody death off the edge of The Peach Deck. It occurred to me at that point that I was not so much of a proper lady. More like a combination death-farmer lady bringing bloody physical destruction and organising tea party settings for witty appropriateness followed by gin drinking at my desk in nothing more than a slip and some pearls. I'm fairly happy with that combination.

Position Vacant in Slammatown - Temporary Secretary