Day 46: John Kinsella, John Cheever, Elizabeth Hardwick
John Kinsella - The Bulldozer Poem
Bulldozers rend flesh. Bulldozers make devils
of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do
as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they
tear the earth’s skin – from earth they came.
Bulldozers are made by people who also want new
mobile phones to play games on, and to feed families.
Bulldozers are observant of phenomena – decisions
are taken out of their hands. They are full of perceptions.
They will hear our please and struggle against their masters.
Bulldozers slice & dice, bulldozers tenderise, bulldozers
reshape the sandpit, make grrrriiing noises, kids’ motorskills.
Bulldozers slice the snake in half so it chases its own tail,
writing in front of its face. Bulldozers are vigorous
percussionists, sounding the snap and boom of hollows
caving in, feathers of the cockatoos a whisper in the roar.
Bulldozers deny the existence of Aether, though they know
deep down in their pistons, deep in their levers, that all
is spheres and heavens and voices of ancestors worry
at their peace. Bulldozers recognise final causes, and embrace
outcomes that put them out of work. There’s always more
scrub to delete, surely . . . surely? O continuous tracked tractor,
[...]
Part of a 3 page poem by probably the most esteemed living poet in Australia. There is the obvious environmental message and it gets even more "call to action"-y as it goes along. Normally I'd find didacticism boring, but the poem was written to be read-aloud in activist situations, specifically the Roe 8 protests in my city.
Roe 8 was a big protest in 2016-2017 where the Barnett government tried to bulldoze one of the last big wetlands in Perth to shave some minutes off the highway commute, and thousands of activists managed to stop it through months of obstructing and disabling the bulldozers. It was pretty cool. As a result, most of the wetland was saved.
To the ex-premiere Colin Barnett: fuck you. To John Kinsella: thank you.
Well, I like how this poem explores the phenomenology of the bulldozer's inner mind. I especially like the bit about the aether.
John Cheever - The Enormous Radio
[Listen to the audio reading here] (https://youtu.be/qh24kv58yJ8?si=HsXrXkx0nJT9o3N7)
A suburban gothic story published in 1947 about a normal married couple whose gigantic new radio broadcasts the sounds from their neighbours' houses, revealing their secrets and private miseries, which get more alarming as the story progresses. The woman gets addicted to listening, and becomes depressed by what she hears (is doomscrolling just human nature?). Her own homelife begins to mirror that of her miserable neighbours, and the story ends with the radio being fixed, yet it broadcasts miserable world events instead.
Moral? Turn off the fucking radio/tv/computer/phone. Go to the library or something.
It is a cleverly constructed story with a ripper few pages at the end. For some reason I associate Cheever with realism, but this story very fantastical and imaginative, similar to my other favourite story by Cheever, The Swimmer - one of my favourite short stories of all time.
I say this after every good story but this makes me want to read more from his collection. (I bought this hardback for a woman I was dating a about 4 years ago, but forgot to bring it, and then quickly after she broke up with me by slagging me off on twitter for some undefined reason and I never got round to finding out why I was slagged off or dumped. I just shrugged).
Elizabeth Hardwick - Zelda
Hardwick is my favourite literary critic so far. Even when I am unfamiliar with her subject, her essays are always enlightening and written in such a fantastic style.
This one is about Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of Fitzgerald Scott. Its pretty depressing. Heres a paragraph that knocked me out:
The picture of Zelda we get from her letters is a disturbing one. The marriage was a misfortune, for they were prodigal partners, like a business sparked for collapse because of the ghostly, paralysing similarities of their nature. They enjoyed their exaggerations and follies when life work; otherwise their compatibility was a disaster. Each needed just what the other lacked. Zelda was, for all her beauty and daring, hiding a deep sense of personal ambition, of feeling that there was something unique and possible inside of only she could get at it, use it. Her energy and discipline never came too much. There was nothing she had mastered at quite the right time in her life, and perhaps it was, in the end, her suffering and madness, her breakdowns that frightened her finally into seeking some sort of health through these frantic artistic efforts.\ Naturally, brilliance could not flower.