Entanglings: May
monthly missive from an artist's lyfe
Theatre continues apace. I see jewel-like meditations on being young and stuck, young and bearing the weight of caring for loved ones, young and horny and hilarious. I see plays about race and power and gender and power set now and set in the past that move audiences to standing ovations. I see ragged joyful experimental performances and slick, polished storytelling performances that weave the audience in and use them cleverly. At one of the plays the woman next to me seems to have difficulty sitting upright. She slides towards me for the whole show while I sit rigid trying both not to disturb her and to subtly teach her the proper way to sit at the theatre. At the end she rises as if refreshed from a deep slumber and says: ‘Well that was worth leaving the house for!’ It is the season of Eurovision on SBS and many sports on platforms one must pay to watch. Indian Premier League on Foxtel / Kayo. AFL on Foxtel / Kayo and Seven. French Open on Stan. Netball on Foxtel / Kayo though it will change to Nine in 2027. Diamond League athletics is the best because it is free on YouTube. Autumn in Naarm sets in. Finally, leaves to scuff through! A new bagel café opens near our house. I learn how it feels to be a cop or a forensic pathologist or a lawyer or a doctor when I watch a tv show about a theatre company and find myself nerdily wanting to correct specific details about the lived reality of working at a theatre company. Of course television shows about cops and forensic pathologists and lawyers and doctors and theatre companies are not purporting to be ‘real’ in any sense. They are made to entertain us. Day-to-day reality therefore must be amended for dramatic and / or comedic effect. I look forward to the tv show about poets about which I will have many corrections. I host two bookish events and read poetry at a third. I get nervous. Audiences are kind. They leave cosy homes on cold Autumn nights not only to scuff through leaves but to listen to words and ideas. I read a poet’s poems to help them decide which poems to put in a small self-published book. I do some grant writing for an arts organisation. It is rushed. I try to cram knowledge of the organisation into my head and spit it out of my hands. I hope I actually help them get some money, but who can say. I attend a critic studio workshop where I am reminded I am not a great critic although I enjoy the workshop very much. I try to write one good poem. I write many ordinary poems. I read a book in preparation for a theatre development. A book written the year after I was born. A book written clean and deep and sharp. About race and power and gender and power set on other planets than the one we inhabit. In the book, which is also interested in time as a mutable concept, an adult character says to a child: ‘Yes you can be four and nearly five at the same time.’ Being alive is strange. Ageing and dying are real but the numbers we apply to put shapes around the thing we call time are arbitrary. I have a birthday. I am 52 and then nearly 53 and now I am 53. I see an ad on social media for a film by Wes Anderson about Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt with Bill Murray and Winona Ryder. It is not real. Just a made-up thing. ‘If only Anderson’s Heidegger-Arendt project was real’ says the headline of an article lamenting AI bullshit. The things we yearn for are not always possible. They do not always come true.
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.