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Review of burning rice by Eileen Chong
Amber Beilharz
May 15, 2012
burning rice by eileen chong
Australian Poetry 2012burning rice is part of the 2012 New Voices series and the debut collection from Eileen Chong. The publication is a sleek, pocket-size 40 pages. Here lies great poetry, tight phrasing and an innate way of telling stories. The title evokes a nostalgic sense of home and food; the notion of absence circulates the poems, reminiscent of scents and fragrances. What strikes me first is Chong’s ability to immerse the reader in two landscapes: the old and the present and this imagery is unswerving, charming and utterly absorbing. Think the sacredness of bathhouses, mooncakes and photo albums braided with beautiful descriptions of quiet and reflected moments. In any other context, these glimpses could have been mundane but here they’re given breath.
The poetry feels like walking through a family home, all those details, ornaments with stories behind them. There’s a familiarity in reading these poems, despite the cultural difference. In ‘Before Dawn’, Chong textually dedicates the poem to her grandfather with wonderful use of language, shifting to present from passing: ‘Father of my father, I was not quite seven / when you died. We drove in darkness / before dawn broke’. In ‘My Hakka Grandmother’ there’s the lines ‘run / through the fields, feet unbound /’ and ‘rice husks, like your dark hair’ evocative of childhood and that memory of food and love combined. This poem describes well the borders of otherness, specifically in ‘I wonder where our bloodline begins. / We are guest people /’. In ‘Kelong’ Chong reminiscences 1980 via the use of photography, the imagery is haunting in ‘He holds the ghost / of a fishing line but has caught nothing’ and ‘my grandmother steams / the orange fish in a wok, when you grandfather picks out / its eyes with his chopsticks’. Like Chong, I can also taste ‘the sweet flesh’ and the poem conjures up a cinematic photograph that I hold in my mind.
In ‘Elementary Chinese’ Chong cleverly interprets Chinese characters literally by paring the radicals of the words armour and bird to equal duck: ‘a bird wearing armour is a duck’. On surface level the poem reads like a definitive list of obscure images or a riddle, the way you interpret the poem is essentially a linguistic puzzle. These lines are definitely playful! The line, ‘The sea: a mother wearing a hat / by the waves’ conjures up the frill on the sunhat and the sound of the ocean, accompanied by a sense of unease or uncertainty.
Halfway through the poems become smaller in size, but this spontaneous brevity gives enough space to let the other images stir and settle. ‘Clockwork’ is striking in its imagery:
and count. Weigh the shadow of the egg yolk.
The sonographer measures your minute spineand hands us a print of a ghost-speck
labelled ‘baby’ as I peel on my clothes.What I love so much about these lines is the precision and care, echoing that of the sonographer’s but also the way Chong manipulates expression. ‘ghost-speck’ is haunting and the reveal of ‘baby’ brings us into realisation of new life.
I am particularly taken by ‘Lu Xun, your hands’ in which Chong describes Lu Xun, Mao’s favoured poet of the 20th century. Lu Xun is really a seminal writer in Chinese Literature, whose work calls up sensations of being homesick and this is echoed strongly in Chong’s collection. This poem takes a romantic and admired tone, especially within ‘your hands / are clasped behind your back, / across the black silk / of your scholars dress’ and ‘Your thoughts / unfold before me, beginning / at the moss-green rocks. They linger’. The line breaks are most beautiful and suggest pausing to reflect and meditate on and within Lu Xun’s influence.
Eileen Chong figures out her heritage via food and ritual. This is a wonderful, rendered first collection which is warm, playful and reminiscent of the things we love and the landscapes in which we do so. You can purchase burning rice here.
Erotic Fan Fiction at The Wheeler Centre
Jenna Sten
Jul 13, 2010
Marieke Hardy, responsible for Charlotte/Wilbur degradation/masterpiece
I’ll admit it. Between the ages of thirteen to sixteen I was an avid reader and writer of fan fiction. Brace yourself because I’m about to declare something nerdy in the extreme. My friends and I called ourselves the Marauders (if you don’t understand the reference then you are officially cooler than me. If you do, you may still be in the running – we would need to swap details to confirm). I was James. Enough said. Anyway, writers of fan fiction like to fill in the gaps. Though much fan fiction is not erotic, leaving out the vast amount of fan fiction that plays out the hilarious fantasies of fans would be a glaring omission; every reader of fan fic knows about the R-rated tab. Basically, erotic fan fiction is about taking characters beloved by many and turning them into sexual deviants – it’s wholesome family fun! (more…)
David Foster Wallace
Johannes Jakob
Jun 24, 2010
Let’s first of all start with the first time I really took notice of David Foster Wallace. A few weeks after his death in 2008, a girl in the same class as me gave a presentation on his story ‘Forever Overhead’. She was pretty much crying for the duration of it. I only had a general knowledge of Wallace. I knew that he was a bit of a cult figure, and for some reason that made me wary of him. I’d never read any of his work, including the story that was being discussed, and had only the vaguest understanding of his recent death. Basically I assumed that this girl was just extremely nervous or self-conscious about giving the presentation.
The image of her in agony as she spoke about the story stayed with me though, and was made worse by the fact that no-one else I spoke to seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary during her presentation. Eventually it clicked though, that it was about him dying, his having died, the awful circumstance of signing up to give a presentation on a beloved author and then him dying a few weeks before you gave it. There was more to it than that, of course, but let me get to that later.
This girl maybe a year later told me that she was not as ’serious’ about writing as me, that she wasn’t quite as into it as some of the other people in that class, but that she was altogether pretty happy with the various subjects she was studying. I guess I thought something like ‘that’s probably true, she probably isn’t as dedicated to writing as me’ and had a smug little moment to myself.
It took me a long time to figure out that she was way more serious about the whole thing than I was. Books had affected me strongly, sure, and author’s too. I was upset when Vonnegut died, and I continue to despair at Pratchett’s illness. But the anguish that she felt at David Foster Wallace dying? I hadn’t even come close. My idea of being serious about literature was way detached from that sort of thing, was maybe more about showing off and a kind of literary careerism than I’d like to admit to myself even now. And so I finally read Infinite Jest, and a lot of the above is out of hindsight, because now I am in that same position where thinking about his death makes the bottom of my eyeballs ache. Where if he died now I can imagine it physically distressing me, making me somehow ecstatic with sadness.
Animorphs
Johannes Jakob
Jun 18, 2010
I’ve spoken to a few edcommers (and read their blog comments), so I know there at least some other people out there who not only read Animorphs but devoured them eagerly. There seems to also be a general consensus that Tobias was totally hot, despite (because of?) being permanently morphed into a hawk and then becoming mentally more and more hawk-like.
For those of you not in the know, Animorphs was a YA series about a group of American kids who had to stop an alien invasion. But to help them do so, the friendly aliens gave them the power to morph into any animal (or alien) they touched. The only caveat being that if they stayed in the ‘morph’ for longer than two hours, they would be permanently stuck in that form. Which is trouble if you turn into a hawk and are just so dreamy and cool that you get carried away with all the flying and are suddenly stuck being a hawk forever. Learning about consequences, guys. (more…)
Reading Space
Adolfo Aranjuez
Jun 09, 2010
In my childhood I used to descend into the subterranean levels of my family’s holiday home in the Philippine mountains. Down there the incandescent light bulbs always seemed dimmer, less able to illuminate the shoulder-width corridors that led to the myriad tenants’ rooms I was too wary to explore. Down there I seemed to always find myself hastening, quickening the shifting of my legs towards somewhere else – to the exit leading to the greenery, to the stairway from which I came – anywhere but there. It was as though I could never return to the safety of the ground level again, caught in the clutches of imagined catacomb-demons.
But I had also treaded the winding steps that brought me to the second storey of the same house. Although not entirely an attic, it contained what were to my nascent mind various items of ‘treasure’: unused bed sheets that smelled of pinewood; the odd cockroach egg, which, mind you, I never touched; packs of yellowing playing cards abandoned in the far-right corners of unlocked drawers. There, where I could stumble upon and revisit ostensibly magical paraphernalia, where firewood crackled as I watched from a balcony, where I could examine guests as they entered and egressed, I felt like things were less sinister, safer.
A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell
Johannes Jakob
Jun 01, 2010
I guess there is a lot of double meaning in the title of this book. Does common mean frequent, or shared, or lowly, or what? And then pornography, which refers to the literal porno and sex in the text, but also voyeurism, and frivolous art. All of which overlaps and gives you a pretty good feeling of the book, offering a valuable counterpoint to the brilliantly clean prose throughout. The only potential meaning I would hasten to remove from the title is that there’s anything lowly about the lives that Sampsell has written about.
I don’t want to say that he’s unflinching in the way he describes his life, because that somehow suggests he would flinch away from some of it if he were a little less brave. Which maybe is true, I don’t know. But what he really achieves is a sense that this isn’t anything to flinch away from, anymore. The book is made up of short anecdotes from Sampsell’s life, mainly his childhood and youth, but the first of these is from his recent past, a panic attack, where he finds himself unable to face his bedroom and drives aimlessly through the early morning, naked and frightened. Which he attributes to, six months after his death, finally finding himself grieving for his father. Who was an asshole, by all accounts. Including the books’.
But so the prose. It makes his father sympathetic and unsympathetic very elegantly. There’s no revisionism and there’s no cruelty in the writing. It doesn’t trivialise anything, it doesn’t glorify anything. It feels common, in the way that word has the potential to also mean beautiful. It’s all true, is the point, but not in that awful agenda-heavy honesty that so much memoir suffers from. I usually can’t bear to read about people’s misery, or childhood, or whatever, for more than 20 pages. But Sampsell’s prose has an un-needy honesty that lets it all just do what it needs to do. Sampsell has no designs on the reader. If anything, his agenda is one of catharsis and/or self-confrontation. The pornographic part is that he allows us to watch.
Sam wrote earlier about short/long works, and I will confess to reading this in 24 hours. I have a feeling it might be even better if savoured a bit more, considered and churned over. I love these one- or two-page chapters some books are moving towards, but sometimes there needs to be like a sticker or something on the front that says: ‘Read this slowly. It deserves more than a day in your immediate consciousness.’
15 Minutes of Fame
Jodie Kinnersley
May 25, 2010
As many of you may know the Emerging Writers’ Festival is going on right now and there’s so much great stuff happening. Last night I made it to the Wheeler Centre for the first of the 15 Minutes of Fame launches. It’s a fun little event that will launch or relaunch 16 books, journals and zines over four nights. What’s more it’s hosted by Estelle Tang, a young woman with many skills including a most resonant and alluring voice. It’s on at 7pm every night until Thursday. And did I mention they serve lovely wine!
The first in the spotlight last night was the ever-charming Karen Andrews and the ‘landmark’ book of blog writing she published, Miscellaneous Voices. Her project of publishing blog-writing in a book is a deceptively simple idea but very innovative. I find the process and the problems she had to solve endlessly interesting and the metaphors that come out of it translate so well to all sorts of writing and publishing. I was struck by the imagery in a phrase one reviewer used to describe the editing process the posts went through as ‘gussied-up’. It’s quite vivid and I think I’ll keep it in mind when editing my own and others’ writing. (more…)
The Assistant by Robert Walser
Sam Rutter
May 18, 2010
Robert Walser, a Swiss-German writer from the Modernist period, is something of an enigma. Initially prolific, his work was readily published before World War I and it is even said that Kafka would read aloud Walser’s stories to his friends. He faded rapidly into obscurity after this, passing from writing stories and novels to micrograms (short texts written in minute print on tiny cards, and in pencil, so as to be even closer to disappearing) before checking himself into a mental asylum high in the Swiss alps in 1929. Apparently, the last thing he wrote, upon his entry into the asylum was “I’m not here to write, but to go crazy.” And so he never write again, and on Christmas day in 1956 he went for a walk in the snow, where he was later found, dead.
The Assistant is an odd little novel, a piece from early on in Walser’s ouevre. The protagonist is an assistant to an inventor, a gentleman from rural Switzerland whose machinations never quite work out. The book is essentially composed of the impressions of the Assistant as he flits through his own life, failing to engage with it but observing the lives of others with addled detachment. We can see here Walser’s protagonist as a precursor to some of Kafka’s main actors, and there are even links to Watt, Molloy or Malone from the novels of Samuel Beckett. The prose is characterised by a frivolous veneer that attempts to screen the bewilderment and even terror occasioned by the onset of modernity, and colour is used throughout the novel as an important descriptor of mood and place.
Walser’s work has only increased in stature since it was re-discovered in the 1970’s, after being championed by critics such as Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, and celebrated by important German-language writers such as W.G. Sebald and Peter Handke. This edition is a new translation from Susan Bernofsky, and aside from a few typographical errors serves as a good introduction into the work of a fascinating writer.
Robert Walser, The Assistant, 1908. (trans. Susan Bernofsky, Penguin 2007)
Missionary accomplished
Sam Cooney
Apr 27, 2010
Not only is the good old missionary position generally the most fancied (at least amongst those less adventurous), but so too is our latest issue (#80 MISSIONARY) proving to be popular with the punters as well as with the pundits.
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Sam Rutter
Apr 15, 2010
With each piece I read, I like the work of William Faulkner more and more. It’s as if you want to cheer for his ability to get away with using such rich and expansive language across the entirety of a novel. For me, Faulkner is like three courses of dessert. He writes in a style you wish you could get away with:
When they passed it Temple saw, leaning to a cupped match, Popeye’s delicate hooked profile beneath the slanted hat as he lit the cigarette. The match flipped outward like a dying star in miniature, sucked with the profile into darkness by the rush of their passing. (pp. 346)
This novel is definitely one of his more accessible pieces, and may have been written as a bit of a money-spinner for the author. Nonetheless, all your trademark Faulkner elements are here: temporal disjuncture, linguistic deviance and rich, rich metaphor.
The characterisation is interesting and the inevitability of the plot reeks like a huge decaying garden, mixing the perfumes of gender, race and sexual issues, with of course heavy overtones of the old traditional south: there’s Temple Drake, our tragic heroine, a fallen gentleman, bootleggers, murder, a rape and all of it set in Faulkner’s own fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
William Faulkner. Novels 1930-1935. Library of America, 1985.
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