farsouthproject
@farsouthproject
Des Barry author Chivalry of Crime, A Bloody Good Friday, Cressida's Bed @JonathanCape; Far South @serpentstail. Shorter prose New Yorker, Granta, 3ammagazine. Butoh Performer. Film/poetry links vimeo.com/farsouthproject
Winter evening walk on local beach, Port Phillip Bay... Long horizons, south east to south west... Brighton to Geelong...
After reading What's Welsh for Zen by John Cale, just watched Ciao Manhattan a mix of fiction and real footage of Edie Sedgwick and other Warhol superstars from The Factory years. In many ways the insanity portrayed has echoes of the mess in which we find ourselves today. A true American tragedy.
Read Ulysses in 1983 while living in Rome. Read again 10 years later in New York while doing MFA at Columbia. Privileged to take part in a seminar on Joyce and Yeats with the great Walter Litz. He encouraged me to write A Bloody Good Friday. Ulysses one day in Dublin, ABGF one day in Merthyr Tydfil.
Just watched Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched - a 3-hour history of folk horror in film. Recommend it highly. It has a lot to say about what attracts us to hauntology given the uncertain world we live in.
Dust jacket quite similar to this one. Can't remember where I got it.
What's Welsh For Zen. Only dipped into it from time to time. Now reading it cover to cover after listening to a lot of La Monte Young, Angus MacLise and Terry Conrad. I get a deeper perspective on Cale's psychology and Warhol's Factory. Beautiful book. Early photos and drawings. With Victor Bockris.
Wall-Painting of Cranes at the Whole-Springs District Offices, poem by Tu Fu (early 8th Century C.E.) translation by David Hinton. This poem has everything - Tao Time Space chi-mind (the 10,000 things) artifice art nature beauty decay soaring joy... what tames that? Quietly mind-blowing...
Well almost impossible but here are three that came to mind. Libra by Don DeLillo, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ Rembrandt...Belshazzar's Feast.
1/2 I watched Barabbas last night HT @wilsonjettone.bsky.social. Things I remembered from childhood experience of it: Barabbas released by Pilate; he becomes a gladiator; his cropped grey hair; his link-up with Christians post Christ's crucifixion. No memory of the middle or the nature of the end...
Discovered this image when researching Remedios Varo (Kati Horna, Leonora Carrington). Les Noces by Wifredo Lam, in Mexico at the same time. Cuban descendent of Chinese migrant. Met Picasso in Paris. Draws on Afro-Cuban imagery. Unexpected inspiration in the not entirely related research process.
An evening's redness in the west.... Midwinter Melbourne sky...
Horizon below Mount Cole with crescent Moon and Venus (below to the right) after sunset last night
Hard to catch a shot of a roo on the run - Mount Cole yesterday
Summit walk today... coming back down, these rocks were exposed by the fires in 2024 that burned away the shrubs and ferns. Trees still black. These rocks are so beautiful. I wish I could get a photograph to give an idea of the scale of them.
Back at Mount Cole (Bereep Bereep) where I shot Temple Lament... wallaby just outside having its evening forage...
Current reading - NYRB Classic - Down Below - Leonora Carrington's nonfiction account of her breakdown and incarceration in an asylum in Spain. 30-page intro by Marina Walker is useful for someone new to Carrington's work. The 68-page account itself is pretty harrowing and (for me) essential reading
Last night's viewing - a change of pace - Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway based on a Jim Thompson novel. Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw on the run and one of my favourite actors Slim Pickens in a small but key role. Quite a contrast to Buñuel and Cocteau of the last few weeks. Another from @kanopy.com
Replying to @wordkunst.bsky.social The back cover of the volume gives an overall picture of what's inside. Profusely illustrated as they say by artists including Calder, Chagall, Robert Motherwell, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, essays by Anais Nin, Henry Miller etc. Issues 1-6. Mostly made in Mexico.
... textures of sand, wrack and volcanic rocks of a groyne beneath the blue sky and beside the still deep blue sea.
Last night's viewing continued our Buñuel Surrealist home film festival with Viridiana. The would-be nun plunged into the depths. Made me think of De Sade's Justine. Like a reversible mirror image of The Exterminating Angel where beggars take the place of the bourgeoisie at the banquet table.
And the latest novel from @rid9way.bsky.social - Dooneen has also arrived in Melbourne at @paperbackbookshop.bsky.social on Bourke Street