Day 50: Hera Lindsay Bird, Gil Brewer, Philip Brophy
The letter today is B.
Hera Lindsay Bird - Pyramid Scheme
This poem is a funny, crazy, beautiful adventure.
I have been thinking about the failure of my school teachers to make us care about poetry. Our only exposure to poems was Dorothea McKellar's Sunburnt Country which is the most worthlessly kitsch poem this country has produced. If they showed us something like HLB, I would have cared much earlier.
Gil Brewer - The Gesture
Nolan placed both hands on the railing of the veranda, and unconsciously squeezed the wood until the muscles in his arm corded and ached.
This story has an ending that makes you reread it again from the start, paying closer attention this time.
I found this in an anthology of noir stories, but instead of a grim industrial city, it is a sunny tropical island in Florida and is a very similar story to Salinger's sunsoaked "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish". I think this story is much dumber and simpler with less psychological interest, but it is still a good, yet forgettable, noir story.
Philip Brophy - Commercial Mural Paintings
One of my favourite essays on art, essentially musing on the place of painterly skill in contemporary art post- art school, and arguing that a handpainted mural for Final Fantasy XIV outside a JB Hi Fi provokes far more questions from viewers than any Artistic dreck in the Archibald Prize. I more or less agree, and find the places Brophy goes in this (rather unfocused) essay very thrilling.