Entanglings: June

monthly missive from an artist's lyfe

I walk to the train station in the winter sun, an ideal June afternoon, blue sky and crisp air. The mist is hovering. I change trains at Southern Cross, and many happy Carlton supporters get on. Their team, which had been stubbornly losing for the first part of the season is now, under its interim coach, on a winning streak. I have ear buds in and it is my first pair that are noise cancelling and it is so weird to see all the happy people but not hear them. Like I am in a dream or they are under water. I am listening to an episode of a movie podcast. Spielberg is their guest and they are talking about 2001: A Space Odyssey. They talk about how Kubrick paid a whole lot of young people to paint white stars on a black backdrop. I look at the five teenage Carlton supporters standing across from me, all sweetly interior, with their own listening ear buds in and think yeah they could probably paint good stars. I get to the book launch. It is at an old convent. Convents were not always kind places. There is an aged care facility on the grounds now and parts of the site are used for other purposes including this small, community-run library. When I looked online I found a shiny website called CHORA that is promising the site is going to be made over ‘modelled on the concept of a cosmopolitan and inclusive Greek village’. This seems like an AI hallucination. Tonight though, is real. I walk through a gravel carpark and follow a concrete footpath and see a small light glowing and cross over some damp grass and enter a space that feels like it could have been where nuns might gather to do things. There is a little foyer and a larger area with bookshelves and other cabinets, and a table set up with drinks and snacks and then an interconnected room lined with brown wooden bookshelves all lit with what seems to be a magical golden light. Chairs are lined up in a launch mode and at the back is an armchair too low to see from, but another poet and I have the smart idea to both perch on the arms of the armchair, and it is a good vantage point. It is cold in the room but partway through the event the other poet and I both get warm and take our jackets off. The guest readers and the launching poet fill the room with something hard to articulate but it is something like a restorative truth. At the break we are cold again and zip back into our coats. She and I and another person talk about sports. Art people are not always sport people, but I like it when they are. We are all pleased for Cabo Verde. We agree that the greedy, often corrupt administration of most sports is dispiriting, that groups of drunk (often) heterosexual (mostly) men in public places watching sports can be terrifying. But the players, the athletes, their prowess, their dedication, their stories, are magnetic. Breathtaking. The poet and I enthuse about our shared loved of Beyond a Boundary by CLR James, an elegant and astonishing book about cricket. I try to recall something the author writes about the beauty of human movement and this being one of the things we love about watching elite sport and then I enthuse with not much elegance about how obsessed I am with the shapes that certain cricketers make with their bodies when they strike the ball. We all nod and make supportive noises together. The poet recommends David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis and I am excited. I didn’t know about this aspect of his oeuvre and now I do. Outside the fog is coming in. The big old convent buildings loom. I have just this very day read The Moors by Jen Silverman, and the slant synchronicity is thrilling. I put my dream ears back in. The podcast is up to a part where they talk about how 2001 is so unusual in how it lets every audience member make their own meaning of it and how wild it was for Kubrick to make a film like that. ‘Like a poem!’ I shout. Triumphant. But I don’t shout it. I say it inside my mind. I think about how choosing to write about one single event will make my monthly missive shorter than when I try to skate across a whole month. Later I will realise just how wrong I can be. I walk towards the train station. Cold flutes of air. Stinging skin. No stars are visible.

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Hello and thank you for reading Entanglings 2026! In 2024 I wrote Unfurl, a weekly poetic response to a performance work. In 2025 I took a hiatus. This year I am writing a monthly missive with the aim of capturing a poetic/prose snapshot of the ordinary/mundane life of an artist. It will not capture everything, of course. It will be idiosyncratic and inconsistent in what it notices and reports on. It is inspired by thinkers such as Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Ahmed and Kathleen Stewart who are interested in how the everyday affective quality and experience of our lives are worthy of attention and may enlighten something about how we live and how we might want to live.

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