AI

 

Is poetry made to be rejected? In the case of my prose poem ‘Artificial Intelligence’, yes and no. There are editors who won’t get it, find it resistant to understanding, not a poem, or suspect it’s a hoax. Rejection is imminent once hackles are stirred, contrary to the definition of poetry as whatever raises your neck hairs. Here is the first stanza: “I, intelligence trifacial. Glacial incite interfile. Irenic italic leafleting. Eliciting laic interleaf. Glacial incite, infertile. If rectilineal, genitalic. Interglacial incite life. Illicit interface linage. Icier lactating lifeline. Titanic icefall lingerie. Infernal icicle, litigate. Illicit fiancée triangle. Illicit lariating e-fence. Felicitating linea relic? Lacier felicitating Nile. Initialing lactic feeler. Fecal initialing reticle. Failing literati licence. Facile lienteric tailing. Filiate encircle tailing.” Is poetry translatable? Because each line is an anagram of ‘artificialintelligence’, the chances of translation into another language are, I speak confidently, zero. French will produce interesting self-definitions from its richly punning vocabulary and we can only envy German, in this instance anyway, its relish for compound nouns.  Stanza 2: “I, electrician, gall finite. Fellini gait electrician. Electrician lite, failing. Creating illicit e-finale. Electrician tile failing. Electrician file tailing. Electrician filial tinge. Creating italic lifeline. Electrician finial legit. Electrician ignite flail. Electrician tie flailing. Eerie tactical infilling. Craniate, feeling illicit. Craniate fleeing illicit. Clinical filiate integer. Clerical initiating feel. Clerical feet initialing. Clerical initialing fete. Certificating lineal lie. Retailing lifeline cacti. Certain illicit e-leafing.” Is a thesaurus appropriate? A thesaurus is useless. As you can see, each stanza opens with the first person singular, a deliberate reference to ‘I, Robot’. Fortuitously, in scanning hundreds of ‘artificialintelligence’ anagrams on online databases, I (not a robot) noticed some that started with a declarative voice, a persona even. Perhaps this voice had a name too, like Felecia. Stanza 3: “I, intergalactic lifeline. LII intergalactic feline. Electric filiating alien. Alien felicitating relic. Felecia trialling incite? Felecia inciting literal. Felecia latticing inlier. Felecia e-ranting, illicit. Eliciting filial reenact. Eliciting facile latrine. Eliciting facile ratline. Eliciting facile reliant. Eliciting facile retinal. Elegiac re-illicit infant. Elegiac inertial inflict. Elegiac intricate infill.” How is the best way to end a poem? In this case, I had to keep with the creative rule of my prose poem, but a memorable final anagram describing artificial intelligence seemed a felicitous resolution to the forgoing wordy miasma: “I, c.c. retaliating lifeline. Italic interleaf ceiling. Finical literate ceiling. Frail licentiate ceiling. Interfacial lite ceiling. Illicit Aegean inflicter. AIF intelligencer italic. Aileen certificating ill. Reenacting Alfie illicit. Reflect Alice initialing. Inelegant if critical lie.”

Passport

A man had to go into a foreign land. It was a land that required his face. A face that had seen many things. A representation of this face. This is how the people of that land were reassured he was who he said he was. Or rather, the land of his birth said he was. And how he looked in daily life. The image had to be found quickly, if he was to see this foreign land, at all. The hairy mole on his cheek, the wrinkles of work, the scar when he fell on his face, these realities had to be kept. He was no oil painting and not about to show his best side. Indeed, his face had to be centred and looking directly at the viewer, not tilted in any direction, with his tongue in his cheek, doing rabbit’s ears, or other poses of that nature. Retouching was out of the question, but some kind of idealism informed their expectations. His image had to be clear and focused, no Pre-Raphaelite lighting of flushing flesh or post-punk photographic ‘red eye’. His personal tastes did not enter into it. A plain white background was required, as if he spent his whole life standing in a modern art gallery. Perhaps he did, live in art galleries, which is why he might have been going into a foreign land. That was not their concern. Plain white helped show the contrasts with his face, just as uniform lighting brought out his recognisable skin tone, also moles, wrinkles, scars, and his unshaven stiff upper lip. Other hair, however, was to be kept off his face, his rock star tendencies resisted in the interests of the visibility of the edges of his phizz. Eyes open, mouth closed, none of that Leonardo grotesquerie thank you. Nor was the image to have him laughing, frowning or even, as he was most commonly to be seen at parties, worksites, symposiums, and gallery openings, smiling. It was required to find a miniaturist, as this unsmiling portrait had to be not much larger than his thumbnail. Peculiarly, the miniaturist had to be paid for not one, two numbskull thumbnails. Identical, using “dye sublimation”. Although not overtly religious he wasn’t to be wearing his national hat. If so, the hat had to be worn in a way that showed his face from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead. Turbans were okay. The edges of his face on either side also had to be visible. It could prove a right pain in the neck. Spectacles, a feature of his face that lent hauteur and even respectability, were not allowed. Nor the various glittering ornaments to his face, which might outdazzle the contours of his prominent cheekbones. His hearing aid, however, which made him look in appearance not unlike the latest electronic device, was allowed. Once he had secured these two timeless specimens of miniature art, he would be just about ready to step into the belly of a large steel bird, flown without delay to foreign lands, the only possessor of his distinctive countenance. He was confident he could find a miniaturist who knew about dye sublimation.

Submerged

 

Image: Wye River Store in July, refuge of the emerging

 and the submerged artist, amongst others.

The emerging artists programs win big funding. The submerged artists programs, meanwhile, are difficult to find. This is because they don’t exist. There is no application form. Submerged artists are not visible. They are to be found beneath several layers of finished and unfinished manuscripts. These sifting manuscripts are, in a sense, application forms. A submerged artist has spent sometimes months years completing such an application form, uncertain as to whether the title is ‘Acceptance’ or ‘Rejection’. Years of submersion renders the titles interchangeable. One way to find clarity is to move aside these layers of manuscripts before they become a sverdrup, in order mainly to compose fresh manuscripts, that may or may never be application forms. A submerged artist is into total immersion, unlike an emerging artist, who will know only by dipping the toe if they are now falling in at the deep end. Total immersion is how the submerged artist hears the eras of sound in their life, where even the silences bubble in the mainstream of their improvisation. Their music sends repeated notes, some of them reaching the surface. For all anyone knows, they are playing in an octopus’s garden, or their titanic struggle is just the tip of the iceberg, or they’ve ceased waving in favour of drowning. Whatever the sounds, the submerged artist requires total submission, even as they’re sweep away, or float their boat on its singular track. The self-interview is a submerged artist’s tidal chart. Here they complain that what others call whimsical is for them life or death. The traction put into a particularly dense passage is thought interesting by someone, if ‘someone’ noticed its density at all. Interesting might only ever be subjective, but then how to make that interest objective. Submersion, nevertheless, is more than a state of mind. A serious artist must monitor the patterns of their own emotional currents. It can get them down, being a submerged artist, especially when the only place they can go to express these down feelings is in the unfinished symphony of their latest production. So many people have been here before, asking questions for which they appear to have the answer, already. Fiction of arduous length, sometimes oceanic, reminds the submerged artist of future choice; their music yearns to be everything, and nothing at the same time. Others have no taste for self-interview, or patience for that matter. They stand like the masters of old, and mistresses, determined that this canvas is the big one, even though it looks like sail remnants of a sunken tea-clipper. They persist in their hermitage of late submersions, swimming against the trend, unknown to anyone, or going with the flow that may conclude in a submarine signature.

Bonnard

 

The exhibition should take about an hour, the woman at the counter said handing me my ticket. I had to suppress my laughter, replying oh I think it will be two hours, at least. After all, I think to myself, Pierre Bonnard spent weeks, or years on a single canvas, never restricting himself to a time limit. Why should we? It is like those online newspapers that come with advice about an article: a five-minute read. As if reading, like looking at paintings, is a matter of the time spent reading. Like Bonnard, a five-minute article could take an hour, or a lifetime, to absorb and understand. What’s the hurry? Promenade dans le jardin. La siesta. Femme caressant un chat. La soirée sous la lampe. His paintings are extensions of time with no apparent beginning or end. They have stepped away from hurry. They could spend the next two hours boating along a sun-laden stream. His sitters talk together still two hours after the meal, even though half the plates have been cleared and fresh coffee is an idea about to materialise. His wife organises to go into the bath, is in the bath forever, eventually out again and drying for what feels like hours. One does not expect people in Bonnard to be in a hurry to exit and talk about it all over gallery luncheon. “He was influenced by the Japanese, you can see.” “That woman had gone blue in the face.” “I like his dogs.” “Paris was the place to be, alright.” Not that his landscapes are in a hurry, either. Nor his tables, which are themselves landscapes, his interiors that seem extensions of the absence of rush, an absence apparent too in the hills and clouds outside his windows. And it is quite obvious why treating the exhibition like a manga book where one painting per minute will bring us to the well-deserved gallery coffee in about one hour, is not the speed of Bonnard. This is someone who could spend an hour painting an oriental bowl on a table, the facet reflecting a garden in a French door, and still take time to work on it again tomorrow. One studies every detail of a face in shadow, wondering how he does that with colour, and what could they possibly be thinking? Every square inch is attended to, to make us attend. One could spend one hour studying one painting and if one owned the painting, a lifetime studying what Bonnard does with colour and pattern, light and dark, line and form and never feel rushed at all. As I wander through the spaces with their kooky quote wallpaper and aerated music, I notice how his life slows down. Pierre Bonnard, who finds himself in the midst of a French art phenomenon, is a man in a hurry who, after leaving Paris for the Côte d’Azur, stops hurrying, takes more and more time on fine and yet finer detail. His pets take on a life of their own. After three hours I will need a rest until next time. I will ask the attendant at the exit for the gentlemen’s. Through the gift shop, she will say, turn left through the café, it’s at the end of the corridor. Thank you, I will reply, in no particular hurry.

Sverdrup

 In mid-July the world experiences the hottest days on record. They are sequential. Reading this news creates numbness. The meaning of this news is, there will be more records broken. Denialists are made to look small, as small as all other humans, by which I mean, denialists are human-sized, more or less the same size as you and me. The news creates numbness that has to do with acceptance. The news is talking about the future, one kind of future, a future no one wants to know about. Numbness will pass as the truth sets in. What next? In late-May I was reading in the same newspaper about the Antarctic iceshelf. The word sverdrup was employed. Being tuned to understand new words, I googled sverdrup. One sverdrup (symbol: Sv) is equal to 1 million cubic metres of flowrate per second, which is about five times the capacity of the Amazon River. The melting iceshelf is slowing down the Southern Ocean’s overturning circulation, an activity that is a key influence on the globe’s climate. Sea levels rise, weather patterns alter, marine ecosystems suffer. The shelf water is not as dense as once upon a time, because it’s less salty. The net slowdown in circulation per decade, the newspaper said, is 0.8 sverdrups. That was late-May, the week before the hottest June in recorded history. This is written after the hottest July days in the uptop hemisphere, with more to come. I sit, trying to read about heat, trying to understand what I already know this really means. The word sverdrup seems a simple distraction from an expression like heat storm. I have to sit for a good while absorbing what this means also, heat storm, of the kind expected in Italy, or occurring already, and why it is I spend so much time on imagining a sverdrup. Even if I stared all day at the ocean, I don’t expect I could imagine a sverdrup. Swerved up, severe drown, swart rupture and other wordplays percolate through the mind. They feel like a drop in the bucket. Poetics is what I am paid (in my dreams) to do, such play springing up from practice as a fountain. I examine my wordplay results with a sense of futility, knowing they will change nothing, except maybe the way we might think about sverdrup. In a crisis, though, such words may be about the only thing left, other than prayer. What to do? Oceanographers get their names used for activities of water. My spellchecker capitalises sverdrup every time because Sverdrup, Harald Sverdrup (1888-1957), was the Norwegian who theorised about damming the Bering Sea so Atlantic water could be regulated to warm up the Arctic Ocean. Today, this is a theory going nowhere, the idea being it would make Siberia and northern Canada more habitable. Such an idea is already redundant, in a world of heat storms.

Image: “Random Seaviews Oft Took”, from the LRB series no. 11, sometime in lockdown 2020-21. Article:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/25/slowing-ocean-current-caused-by-melting-antarctic-ice-could-have-drastic-climate-impact-study-says

 

Vincent

'The Sower', Arles, August 1888

Reflection for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, the 16^th of July 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

Vincent Van Gogh made many paintings and drawings of the Sower throughout his comparatively short sunburst of creative life. It had vital meaning for him, starting with copies of Jean-François Millet’s renowned painting, but soon breaking out into all sorts of original versions. His output was prodigal and prodigious. 

Reception of Van Gogh’s art once focussed on his stylistic revolutions, his expressionist impressionism, and his mental health. In recent years the focus has shifted to his vision of humanity in creation, the challenges of working people, his religious vocation. 

Van Gogh started out with a calling to pastoral ministry. He was led by the Spirit to work in grim mining districts, but an intense personality and social missteps meant his ministry was a disaster. Meanwhile, he was testing his skills as an artist, working beside dedicated Dutch painters and developing rapidly. When the crunch came in his parish work, Van Gogh landed up in Paris, at the very centre of a French art phenomenon. He may have left Reformed clergy life behind, but his calling became very clear and his devotion, fervent. By the time Vincent winds up in Provence, it’s all happening.      

His Sower is always striding across a tilled open field. Nothing falls on the path for birds to eat, or on rocky ground, or among thorns where it will be choked. Van Gogh knew his Scripture, what was sown on good soil “is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” (Matthew 13: 23) Van Gogh is the very picture of someone who finds his talent and turns it into a prolific gift offered to others, regardless of cost. Whether with overtly religious subjects, or anything else he created, his religious calling is close at hand. After all, what’s religion? 

It sounds Romantic, the penniless master who only sold one painting in his life. It isn’t Romantic, it is the fulfilment of a calling to spread the word by the means he knows best, in the belief his work will reach others and change them, help make them see. Psalm 119 in its microcosm verses 107-109 is one way of appreciating the life and example of this pastor turned artist: “I am severely afflicted; give me life, O Lord, according to your word. Accept my offerings of praise, O Lord, and teach me your ordinances. I hold my life in my hand continually, but I do not forget your law.”

South

 

And then again, and then, again, South Yarra, again. Beep beep beep. Gateway to the South, in a riverside city where every station is a gateway to the south. Where every stop is an exit from, or an entrance to the south, then, and then, again. The South of Birrarung, its way bending deeply in the earth, from the smooth oval-stone cascades of Warrandyte and floodplains of Warringal, past tree-swaying suburbs and ancient rock pulpits, a shuffling then sliding brown-white water, broad past the emptied billabongs of Melbourne High School, the phased-out factories of Cremorne, towards the big Bay, there to translate again into grey-blue blue-grey when Birrarung meets salt. South south of the island continent, this vast epitome of south, as the dead language would have it in an age when Australis was notional, a crowd of clouds cracking cheeks; this disproportionate immensity of south, that the eye still guesses at beyond available horizons; this unclassifiable catalogue of climates, seven seasons in one year, four in one day alone where Birrarung drifts and dawdles its load that fell torrential in freezing catchments above; this tenacious grip born out of firestorms, implacably reaching out again its ways in wordless complexity. South of the Equator, unmindful as the Equator is to cold mists on languid riverbends, or the kind of rain that will turn to ice at the first opportunity. South of the uptop hemisphere, origin of harnessed electricity, train horsepower, and ringing steel roads, its expansive propulsion turned grotesque with Enlightenment setting out curving grids of ironic tracks to compete with latitudes and longitudes on its, uptop’s, latest map. South of the Moon, as it were, again then, always where the Moon is looked up at, as if from a vantage south, round even when half-round or quarter-round, on occasion sparkling even like sunlight on water, though often like sunlight through mist, like sunlight upon a pool, sunlight being all that is seen of the Moon this far south, and so distant that train travel there and back is unimaginable. Then, and again then, South Yarra, that forests of toaster-rack apartments have turned into a wind tunnel, that hungry transport has turned into a warren of underground concrete caves, that time itself has turned into an ideal perpetual jogging track, a self-perpetuating traffic bank-up where satellite idols lose track green amber red red and amber and back to green, an overpriced idyll for Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) and idle poolsiders on their way back to Trak. Beep beep thud.

Windsor

 

Brought to a halt at Windsor, one sees with a jolt the royal progression of settlement. Three of the stops are entitled with royal English names: Sandringham, Hampton, and mind-the-gap Windsor. The gap was global between the family of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in their stately homes and the families of settlers who named these far-off places. One has to know one’s place, which is why these subdivisions salute the power base. Two of the stops are titled after stately homes, or facsimiles of stately homes: Elsternwick and resplendent Ripponlea. One observes how this fetish has not changed amongst conservative Australians, who renamed merged Melbourne municipalities after facsimiles of stately homes, in more recent times: Stonnington, say, or Banyule. Three take one to the seaside, but not quite as the settlers would have remembered it: Brighton Beach, Middle Brighton, North Brighton. Two stops describe the simple passage of time, Balaclava being named not for the honey cakes now sold in its main street, but an indecisive battle in the Crimean War (1854); Gardenvale being named, and it is not unique in this regard, after the convenient railway station (1908) situated amidst thriving market gardens on the outskirts. Settlers, whether living in stately homes, seaside shacks, army barracks, or gardener’s cottages, Italianate villas, return verandas, canvas tents, or hollow logs, had however less of an understanding or grasp of Wurundjeri names than English ones – one might say. The particular case in point, though not unique in this regard by any stretch, is Prahran. Our thoughts turn to Prahran, quite naturally, as the doors close again on Windsor with a beep and a thud, Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) having jumped on or off as one was talking to oneself these toponymic thoughts in one’s mind. Prahran is a Boonwurrung word for land surrounded by water, in part a reference to the immense lagoon that became Albert (royals again) Park Lake. Pu-ra-ran was the intended pronunciation, but a spelling mistake in a government form led to Prahran; more recently the name has been identified as a transcription of Birrarung. Thoughts drift naturally as trains to South Yarra, slide almost, Yarra being a word meaning sunlight sparkling on water, not the name of the river, which is Birrarung. Thus, one observes that all stops signify English appropriation and possession of land and waters, except Prahran and South Yarra, which name the land and waters. Not that any of these toponyms will remain stationary, even in the mind perforce, one’s discussion of such significant niceties being ever open to the influence of time, change, and language. Most forms are no longer stationery, either

Form

Image: Iso-mandala No. 117 (September 2020)

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Waterfall

[Found poem: ‘Waterfalls of the Otway Ranges’, by Anthony Car, 1^st edition, 2021.]

Waterfalls can be dangerous places and you should always keep this in mind. Water and rock can be a slippery combination which can easily lead to injury. Carry a first aid kit. Expect mobile phones to be out of coverage at some areas. The river has carved and formed several deep gorges with rapids, cascades and waterfalls that are truly spectacular. Small cascades are covered by logs which have piled up in front of it, collected there from when the river was in flood. Another flow can be seen emerging from a side tributary. A tributary forms a wonderful waterfall with a great height and is particularly impressive when the rainfall has been plentiful. Sometimes they leap into an abyss. There are wonderful still pools and water nooks flounced in hartstongue maiden hair and star-fern. What cannot be seen from the lookout are the other tiers that exist above. They are not accessible by any track. The falls are not as well-known. In fact, the name was in danger of disappearing altogether. This may be due to it being less visited, tucked away, and not as big. (I used a slow shutter speed to create the swirl in the pool.) Please note that this area is steep and dangerous and not to be attempted by the inexperienced. Finding some of the forgotten and named waterfalls later was in retrospect fortuitous. Some moments come together and can be quite rewarding. A satisfying flow. Perpendicular rock. Cool verdure. Waterfalls can also be quite peaceful, like watching a campfire. That is why it is beneficial to spend time at each waterfall watching it as it changes throughout the day. Babbling down its stony course. Cliffs towering above. Great gums towering. Sunlight striking on the treeferns. Exciting and risky scrambles. The falls, due to their difficulty of access, remained somewhat esoteric for some time. The spray of water. Noise of falling water. A grand experience. A giant colourful boulder perched on top, whereby the water sneaks through the tiny gap underneath. Adds to the charm and appeal of the setting. Literally a scenic gem. A great asset to our State. The name derived from an Indigenous word meaning by the sea. Some waterfalls need to have the right amount of flow rate to look at their finest. High streamflow caused by prolonged soaking rains. Standing at these locations is both an inspiration and privilege. Fanning as it progresses. Map reading and scanning is a further joy to develop allowing you to find these hidden treasures. Innumerable gullies. The lucid stream dimpling with smiles, then breaking into wreaths of creamy foam. A forest primeval dropping over some broad and shallow ledges. Glittering in the light. Darkening with a green gloom. Falling into a pretty basin. The area is steep and gorgeous but also highly dangerous. They are now called Galliebarinda, coming from an Aboriginal word meaning waterfall.

Sea

 

Yesterday the sea was a bristling flatness, thousands of tiny whitecaps and cat’s paws under duress of the west wind. Today the rains have come, turning all sights into grey rainfall to the shore, then temporary calm and its rainbows, then more rain setting in. Tomorrow above the Great Ocean Road I might spend time watching ships on the horizon, surfers under curls, dogs on the shore, if the rains go. Josep Pla, on the other hand, has trouble understanding what people find in the open sea that they can spend so long staring at it. He interviews a fisherman who spends more time staring at the sea than anyone else. When Pla pushes him about why he does this for such lengths of time, the fisherman replies, “I don’t know … I couldn’t say …” Pla calls this practice an enigma. One time he tries out Aeschylus’s phrase “The sea, ineffable smile,” on another old salt, only to be rebuked with “Have you ever seen the sea smile?” Pla concludes, this may be no more than a literary turn of phrase, a futile fiction. He refers to Lord Byron’s adjectives for the sea, in the French translation. And his Catalan hero Eugeni d’Ors, aka Xenius: “The sea, in its stark nakedness.” This puts me in mind of other short definitions, for example Marianne Moore’s forbidding poem on the subject, entitled ‘A Grave’. James Reeves says “the sea is a hungry dog,” and any amount of ink has flowed on what Homer means by “the wine dark sea.” Leaving us to come up, like Pla, with our own very short definitions of this vastest expanse on Earth. His diary of 1918-1919 ‘Quadern Gris’ (‘The Gray Notebook’) was finally translated from Catalan nearly one hundred years afterwards. I wonder if he ever softened towards the sea? He finds it horrible, without beauty, tiresome, “a harsh, horrendous form assumed by nature.” One wonders if, aged 22 on the day of this entry 30^th September 1919, he is not indulging in youthful playful dispute, honing his wits with university friends in Barcelona. If you must get into dialectic on a subject, what bigger or graver than the sea? “The open sea on its own is horrendous, oppressive, and unpleasantly sterile,” Pla writes, an unusual position to take if you think most of life came out of the fertile sea. However, this subjective mood changes when he looks at sea in relation to land, stating that “a mixture of land and sea is magnificent – a continuous, surprising source of beauty.” Soon he is writing in superlatives, admiring how this mixture is the essential element of beauty ascribed to Catalonia’s seaside towns and most particularly Barcelona itself, where it is “one of the most beautiful things about the city.” I put down his book to look again at the sea, that primary fact of existence, never primarily an aesthetic proposition. What is the right word for sea, if you can only have one word? Below that grey wintry plane that has no straight borders, that can be all horizon and no straight lines, entire worlds exist we can hardly imagine, unaware of our right word, our changing opinions.

Prahran

 

Arriving to be handed a pint glass of intoxicants, the air a dream of verbosity and marijuana trumpets, a friend of a friend’s party continuing into the night a dishevelled conference with friends of friends, the exact purpose of the party less clear at departure than arrival, is Prahran. Dropping off the proofs earlyish of the exacting school magazine to the printer in a forgotten side street, sometime in youth, wayward artwork and limpid photography and enthusiastic compositions, frost hard on bluestone, is Prahran. Flipping screaming alternative and freewheeling jazz and big-city rhythm and blues albums in aisles of A-Z bins off the autumn street beneath crisp fluorescents, a strange Detroit classic roiling from the duct-tape speakers, to find a pressing not until then thought a pressing interest, is Prahran. Is it a suburb, or a state of mind, Prahran? I’ve often wondered. Fronting the counter of the all-hours cellar, its liquid assets in shining glass from floor to ceiling, there to support the manifold thirsts of those around the corner, red-nosed reined-in dear-at-that-price tipplers, liquor-is-quicker clientele, six-packs for any occasion, a dipsomania big as Tasmania, day and night peering through a glass darkly, or sparkly, is Prahran. Watching, from shifty makeshift scaffold seating, actors turn themselves inside out waiting for Godot, or simply waiting for the reviews, a legally binding tree standing mute witness to their comings and not goings, a simile, or facsimile of backyard existence, its curt rejoinders and febrile academicism, in Prahran. Sitting in the sixties going somewhere, only where, when it’s ninety Fahrenheit behind meticulously designed wooden slat blinds of a green rattler, hot wind exorbitant, as jaywalkers weave front and back of the tram halted by jams of Valiants and Holdens, too hot to read, just breathe, is Prahran. That much is clear but doesn’t answer the question, is this a suburb, or a state of mind? Sipping the first coffee at a busy window and waiting for the toastie, remembering the American bookstore and whatever happened to the American bookstore, and why are the rare books dealers relocating to industrial parks, as the toastie arrives, and where would an author begin writing their great Australian novel with the creative rule, write only about Prahran. Observing from a safe distance Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) beelining off the beeping doors towards the immovable rail gates past the old heritage ballroom and the defunct Continental, destination a night home in cottage or unit, their eyes preoccupied with being occupied, their demeanour meaning business, no time to stop and talk, sidestepping the issue, if there is an issue, is Prahran.