Conference

 

Over the past two days I attended a conference organised in Melbourne. There were 53 participants, none of whom I met personally. Those I spoke to I found to be distant, some so distant they were over the horizon. To ask a question or answer a question we had to unmute, or raise our hand. They were zoom talking heads on the electronic iconostasis of my screen. Most of the Brisbane delegates were down with covid, sitting in their respective kitchens, in homes surrounded by receding floodwater. It was good to see them, and even hear them after they remembered to unmute. Auckland was short sleeves and sunshine while other places preferred to be unvideo, totally in the dark. Gone is the room’s rapt hush during a keynote speaker, the knowing laughter of recognition as she describes professional mishaps on a shared basis, the dog that ate the dogmatics. Sharing during this week’s conference mainly involved complicated infographics we had to squint to read. It’s a world distant from that of youth. Travel to exotic conference centres is redundant, as participants sit at their respective work desks (‘See Also, Kitchen’) sniffling on mute, jotting down dot points not included in slide shows. The conference, informative, was remote and non-tactile (except for the mouse and the teacup), with its theme of libraries raising the annual question, What is a library? As participants’ faces were hidden by the next presenter and his exponential exhibition, it was hard to read the mood. Names were buried in the chatroom. Do digital librarians have uses for print books? Do they believe in shelving? Are microfiche shinier than silverfish? Do users ask a librarian the reference questions, or always consult their screens? What is a library called that has no books? Are we uploaders, downloaders, or frontend loaders? Planners, or scanners? The paper answering these questions, equivocally, will be published in the next issue of the e-journal, if I can get past the firewall.  Other presentations addressed the emerging issue of holdings. Where once the objective was to increase the print collection, now it’s to reduce the print collection. Is it compactus, or discard? Duplicates, damaged, unused, what to keep? Archival is survival. Space is precious, textbooks are online, students need more areas for their laptops and teacups. The conference broke for lunch in the privacy of our respective habitats, never a word spoken. The latest release of windows in Melbourne displayed steady rain. After which we returned to that World Library, the internet, to a speaker on rare books of the 21^st century. Interactive thoughts went through my head. How many formats can humans invent? Should AI do all the cataloguing? Libraries own the books but do they own the e-books? Are they across all the other formats that were absolute once, obsolete now, and rare as incunabula tomorrow?     

Bone

 

Actually, it is their place to move across a landscape. Balance requires some Contour firm to be upright. Be Cause. Artificial intelligence may say this, a thousand ways. But here this is the original transcript, the A-text, not the B-plan. Title: Choreography of Calcium. Aeronautics must get down to the layperson’s level, ground level. Down on the ground again. For verily, of the Earth they were created. Out of the effort to stand erect they stumbled forth. Internal compression drafted the frame, it started somewhere. Fabulous frame forth go. Gravity made them, all creatures great and small, standing on their own feet, little links of toe bone. What the. Recline with every joint at rest, Earth in a holding position. Fine. Great. Hefty and many learned dissertations will be written. Fieldwork on ribcages will proliferate in Journals. Aeronautics gets down to the lay of the land. Ground level. Trolls will pitch how the space race has crossed a finishing line. Haha! Anti-trolls will find waterfalls on Venus. Houston, they have a problem. Internal compression. Inkling of inglenook bones. Jarring of just so jaunty bones. Jumping Jupiter! Kneel they may upon the sacred stone, hard like stone themselves. Lo! Science fiction never counted on porousness, white holes. Every sentence must be rewritten. Cancel Mars at this rate, the grand canal, could Martians so much as stand straight. No, not ordinarily. Problem. Question. Request. Spacemen specimens of decalcification input data as they embryo go from deck to dial, galaxies at portholes. The more they float the softer their bone tone. Months with the comets wear down the sockets. Time soon to re-enter their skeleton atmosphere, gravity compressing the fixtures. Up is out there or down and out or here and now of there and then, in outer Space. Transfer the space race trillions to renewable do-ables, bonehard facts. No star trek osteoporosis limps the command deck on zimmers bent forward with replacements. Let them face facts. The weight downward of Earth keeps bones thick. Flesh likes it that way, compact against the elements. Upright vertebrae. Whereas up there, out there where there’s all the time in the world, bone thins and fractures without a foothold. White holes might be terminal. Only a test run to Jupiter can say. What the. Soft bodies in capsules, joined and white-bright, don’t touch the ground. Touch the buttons for mission to airlessness. Their fingerbones change in gloves of skin, eyes wanting UV moon views. While down there, which is blue down weighed down there white paisley ribbons over continents, where islands could be stars, down where gravity made them front up to the X-ray yes she said yes alas poor Yorick and the whole Zoo, too. Their yearning Ground Zero.

Photograph: Keith Haring work, taken at the Haring-Basquiat exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in late 2019. This wakese spacewalk with the alphabet is written in response to articles that are coming out in numbers about astronauts’ loss of bone density after long trips outside the Earth’s gravity. Here’s one of them: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/30/lost-in-space-returned-astronauts-struggle-to-recover-bone-density-study-finds

 

Ego

 

Question 19: Can a poem be a mini-essay? Just musings? How do you structure it? Inside a poem, more likely hidden as exposed, is an idea. In this respect a poem is a mini-essay. It might be nothing but a musing, no structure, quarter of an idea, a fanfare of syllabic sounds, but it’s a start. On the other hand, poems can be complete essays in miniature. Their structure does not have to be thesis-antithesis-synthesis. They may open with the conclusion, proceed largely by digression, and conclude inconclusively. May turn musings into works of art.  Say everything in fewest words.

 Question 20: Should you keep your ego out of poetry? If poetry is personal then ego is there somewhere. ‘Song of Myself’ knows where it’s coming from and when Walt Whitman unabashedly declares “I contain multitudes”, is he talking about all humanity or just himself? We think of poetry as communication involving someone else, whether an absent or present lover, upward to a Globe of Shakespeareans or amphitheatre of Homerics. To work, ego will take a backseat, not the front row. Awkwardly, even if we never speak in the first person singular our words can be all I, me, mine.

 Question 21: If poetry is easy to write then why doesn’t everyone do it? Well, is poetry easy to write? Moreover, does it work? More likely to say: though everyone can do it, most don’t, even if they did once. The movement from childhood to adulthood should mean poetic maturing, not putting away of perceived “childish things”. It’s a lifetime thing. Some works materialise with the wave of a wand. Others are like building an Ikea cathedral. Meanwhile, lots of people see no point in making poetry. It never occurs to them. This makes poetry special, not elite or niche.