one who fights against

my reading of blogs has been constrained as i make a final attack on the thesis, so i’m possibly a little late in reading the full discussion on lyric poetry, & many other arising issues, that was originally on pam brown’s blog, but is now hosted on its own site.

i won’t volunteer anything on the issues raised, but the dynamic interests me. who knows who, & what sort of feelings are bubbling beneath the surface posted opinions? there are times when the things we usually keep for a more ‘gossipy’ forum almost emerges…

it’ll probably become a landmark document simply because of the various ‘known’ poets that have weighed in. (excluding kickknees, of course. his take on things makes a mockery of the whole serious discourse).

showing off, oblique

this is the final online venue for announcing my latest career move. ASA & Ozco have granted me money to write. i am now an emerging writer. so for the first half of 2010 i shall be writing, which i would have done anyway, but i will have money for food, beer, childcare etc…

there are at least 2 of you out there who don’t utilise the twitter, or mybook, so now you know.

congrats also to astrid, fellow emergee.

castle of youth

i can’t travel. i keep waking in the middle of the night, thinking i’m elsewhere, making movements to remedy the situation, to hop out of bed & locate myself in an alien landscape. i can’t sit still on trains because a huge tongan bloke on the way to the footy will always get on & crowd you into a 2 hour cramp that will last for days (he sits contentedly moulded into the space between seats, dozing, wheezing).

laura just kept opening bottles of champagne though we had no interest in the art. i watched swathes of simpsons & seinfeld, content to be un-adult, because foxtel is only for hotels. 

i’m reflecting in a grander way & so you will just have to wait for that. try not too anticipate to hardly.

you are the author of this post

in the idea for a story i take the car off the paved roads & venture down one of those unsigned tracks in the mountain country. it winds & winds, but eventually i confront an explorer, aged almost 200 (looking much like the last knight of the holy grail in that indiana jones movie), still exploring.

we discuss the idea of physicality. driving a car, i claim, is the last truly physical action we learn. we learn to eat, to walk, to control our bowels, to write, to engage in various sporting activities… but then we learn to drive. it’s difficult because we’ve already mastered so much & feel complete. once we’ve learnt the skill though, we shut the door on bodily learning.

the explorer disagrees. he thinks sex is the last thing. but i win because he doesn’t really know what a car is, mine being the first he’s ever seen, & therefore doesn’t have the knowledge to argue for too long.

needless to say, the explorer imparts various secrets to me. then we develop a furious feud, wrestle furiously, & both fall to furious deaths at the bottom of a cliff. luckily we realise we are not dead after thinking for a while that we were.

i will be in newcastle soon, part of the critical animals program under TINA. i will be doing things – writing in a collaborative space, reading stein aloud, & talking about experimental poetics. the explorer is coming with me (i don’t let him do anything without me – the world is a scary place).

in the experimental poetics discussion i will be talking about a poem of mine that is soon to be published in black inc’s Best Australian Poems 09. i will discuss how i used the experimental method of ‘plagiarism’ (to which i will give the more academic term of ‘trace’) to generate this particular poem.

my poem ‘learning about explorers’ is in this journal ecopoetics. i haven’t seen the journal yet. i wonder if anyone has a copy… my explorer is no help with this matter. he’s actually been quite gloomy since i brought him into modern society / my house. & he keeps bitching on about how he’s an idea stolen from a coetzee essay, has no real identity as such, blah blah blah…

glob

i wrote the asal paper on blogging. talked it up even. & now find i have nothing at all to blog. & less motivation. this might change of course.

jesus needs no evidence

In kindergarten & year 1 I would always thrust my hand up prematurely and spurt out a wrong answer. It got to the point where the teacher made a specific point of sitting down & talking to me about ‘letting other people have a go’. In response to this perceived failure I started hanging with the wrong crowd – it consisted of one boy, the oldest boy in the class. We would stalk the boundaries of the playground in order to do things like throw handfuls of sand at trucks; or, use concrete as an abrasive to sharpen paddle-pop sticks into knives; or we might go & shout things at the kids on the senior side of the school, urging them to chase us. I think it ended when we were caught throwing wet paper all over the roof of the boy’s toilet, & when my family moved away from Melbourne.

It seems I was always an immature child. I was enrolled in school at the young end of the spectrum because I was intelligent enough but nowadays people think differently about this sort of action. I was always uncertain of how to interact with other kids, over-thinking the simplest of friendship gestures. It’s almost certainly the reason my parents vetoed a move to have me advanced a grade in year 3. I didn’t understand why. I believed it was a deserved chance to show everyone how good at things I was.

But really. At this stage, at Forest Hill School, once a week afternoon sport consisted of football. Rugby League. There was only one class at in each year level, & accordingly all the boys in my class formed the Forest Hill Rugby Team. This was the weekly sport on offer during winter. If you were a girl, you engaged in various indoor craft like activities. Girls don’t do sport in winter. It gets muddy. I was left in the middle because I wouldn’t play league. It’s a decision I stuck with. I would wander the grounds of the school like some vampire, peering around corners, constantly afraid some teacher would lambast me for ‘non-joining’. One afternoon I was made to go & join the boys. I remember it actually being not that bad. I just joined in passing the ball around a bit. More poignant is the memory of one of my classmates saying to the teacher afterwards ‘Derek came and helped out at footy today’. Obviously I was a cause for group concern.

Narratives were valued at times though; I think perhaps this was at the end of my primary time, year 6, when girls & boys started ‘going out’, & writing ‘X 4 Y’ on pencil cases etc. We would have story-writing time. You could go it alone, or you could compose something with a friend. I believe my sense of story was valued here, because I did at times have to choose which friend I would write with from a group of eager partners. One morning two of us wrote a satirical sexual romp featuring two unpopular kids in the class. This is what I had – I would write the things legibly that the other kids could only shout at each other over lunch. We had a boy wake in bed with a girl, leap out of bed, realise he was naked, get back in the bed… & so forth. We had class excursions where our teacher would be busted with pornographic magazines. You get the picture. I assume not too many of these stories were ever shared.

My scripture workbook from this period (once a week Christianity was impressed upon us) shows that I’d expressed my awkwardness in this forum too. Alongside garish cartoons of Jesus I’d written ‘Yeah, but how many people did Jesus save, & what were their names?’ The scripture teacher had used this, as well as my many disciples festooned with fake moustaches & glasses & cigars, as evidence to claim I was not taking her class seriously. Who knows if that was true or not.

One day the whole class waited across the zebra-crossing to beat up a particularly un-liked kid. Everyone waited so I waited. I didn’t like the kid. He offended pretty much every one. But I wouldn’t have done any beating. It just seemed like a thing to do to wait there for him – it positioned you as not him. There were no teachers. There was just the lollypop lady. He wouldn’t cross the highway. He waited, for what seemed like hours, looking at us & quietly talking to the lollypop lady. There were no mobile phones in these days. He looked scared. Eventually we dispersed & I have no memory of if there was any fallout.

It was somewhere near this time that someone threw a rock at me across the dirt track as I rode my bmx home. I realised later it had made an indent in my stackhat, possibly an inch deep, no doubt enough to have killed me had I not been wearing it. What could I have possibly done to deserve this? Me, potential arbiter of all things, gentle over-thinker & teller of biting un-truths?

Why we want to stay in bed on rainy days and read books (or at least talk to work colleagues about how good doing such a thing would be ideal on ‘days like today’). A final explanation.

There’s nothing better than curling up warm & cosy on a wintry day. Better yet if the day is profuse with rain. These are the times you just love to be snug & warm against the elements. But a vantage is always necessary on the outside world, or else some other physical reminder that the weather is grim, some signal of difference. A shaft of bracing air periodically dusting your face – while the rest of you is huddled amidst blankets – will do. Or the more immediate & famous occurrence: the window offering a morning view of a stormy sky, accompanied by the sonic reminder of rain on glass pane. A complete cocoon wouldn’t offer the sensory experience of ‘juxtaposition’, and therefore will prove inadequate. There must be a small archer’s gap in your parapet.

Every now & then I daydream about constructing the experience. Outside the university café there is an artificial lake, and I particularly remember one grey & drizzling day when I sat near the café with a coffee (undercover of course). I imagined floating a bed into the middle of this lake. There I would lie snug while water & rain mingled just past my nose. I wrote a poem about the idea. The poem was clichéd & didn’t do the image justice.

Similarly if I see a grand view, I imagine having a house poised somewhere in the elevated landscape. I create fantastic bay windows where one might recline in warmth & watch such things as mist pool around distant cliff & troughs of land. I don’t anticipate such positioning would be inspiring in any artistic sense; I simply think it would be comfortable, nice.

The most simple explanation for that just described would be to say that warmth (with a vantage on, & proximity to, wetness & gloominess), & security (with a vantage on, & proximity to, vastness & wilderness – scope), both of these things offer us a sense of human mastery while still allowing enjoyment of a brief immersion in natural power. (Being caught out in the rain isn’t so great when it will probably kill you. Climbing a mountain is difficult if you have to pitch a tent & kill a snake to survive. We want to enjoy these aspects of existence, but, you know, comfortably.)

But staying in bed reading books while it rains outside also offers us a glimpse of ourselves as more than products of our social roles. The grandeur of the chaos outside, balanced against the solid warmth & security of the individual inside, foregrounds a strong (warm / happy) sense of the individual. & it allows a vision of happiness, because ‘oneness’ with the vast chaos is suggested – annata / ‘no-self’ bringing about paradoxical freedom from any constricts of ‘the self’ – but at the same time your relative positioning makes you feel secure in your own skin, symbolically represented by the blankets, or the four walls.

There’s a rarity to such occasions too. There are demands on our time. Meteorology still isn’t exact – we can’t plan effectively for a rainy morning in bed with a good book. And not many of us live in mountain retreats. Hence we value the experiences anecdotally like gold. The experience of ‘juxtaposition’ is the real currency of feeling.

view

this review of the best aus poems 2008, is rather interesting. firstly, because simon patton starts out by saying ‘Since, on the whole, I found the poetry less than satisfying, I would like to discuss in some detail the weaknesses of contemporary Australian poetry, before moving on to some of its successes.’

and wow he does discuss those weaknesses. one has to give initial credit for this type of review (which could only be published online) simply because patton does outline his views at length. even if you don’t agree with some of his criticisms, you can’t say he hasn’t provided evidence for the stance. (i did think the removing of names amusing though…)

i think i probably liked more of the poetry in this volume that patton did. but having said that, i don’t think i’ve read a review of these ‘best ofs’ that really asked what their critical function is within australian poetry. & it’s good that someone attempts that.

& of course, the real vanity of my post revolves around the tipping point which made me think ‘yes, i should blog this link’: it is the very small section where patton outlines what he does like in the collection. he firstly isolates pam brown’s ‘train train’. this is the poem i selected as editor, way back in 2007, for fourW. i think i’m the real winner in this review. & i want everyone to know this. i know a good poem, even if peter rose (& a lot of really good australian poets) don’t.

but then i do like those adamant shapes too… guess you can’t ‘win’ every review.

 

(btw, would reattaching all the names to patton’s review make his attacks on poems seem more personal? a pirated version of a poetry review…)

you have to make me

In the beginning there is spring and an evening of warmth. Stories about how things end, terminally, tend to begin with a beginning, like it or not. Some heat remains in the side of structures when you touch them, as you do; parties always spring up in response to the weather and the excuse is greeted with the enthusiasm of impromptu guests, and so people will arrive with ready-made gestures, glints in the eye, slaps on the back, et cetera – fresh glistening bottles held aloft and bulkier six-packs carried by the hip; I ride the 28 because here on the bus one might consider suicide. I do this for what seems like ‘ever’. But a different street arrives and I think about sex, then groceries, then finally literature versus pop-culture (I come to no conclusions). My state of mind is quite good – sure. I’m not looking for trouble. There will be people of a wide and varied eccentricity to meet. That’s cool. Living often has some kind of point. There will be girls glowing with all the colours of spring dresses. I sit there on the back seat. A cigarette behind my hand, I blow smoke out the window. It feels good. This was to be expected.

People are swilling around the house. Old friends discussing commonalities with confidence; new friends checking the place out, admiring various views and pieces of obscure art. I’m neither an old nor new friend and don’t know the host at all. I hope I’m correct in assuming who the old and new are too. This could possibly be important later, say, if I’m in some trouble and need a friend. For now I push through people, doors, stairways, and no-one seems to care. One of the bathrooms (the only room not offering any type of view) contains a bath around three metres long. It’s packed with ice and all sorts of drinks: to this I add my bottle and remove a better one. The bath is really quite astounding. I wonder at the scope of the other bathrooms. Anything seems possible. Dan told me at work where this party was, and he arrives in due course, suitably drunk.

He is confident and familiar but manages to recognise me and engage me. ‘Andrew,’ he says with joviality, glancing above the head of someone in front of him and taking a few steps to gain earshot. ‘How are you? Great you could come along. Did you find the place alright?’ I’m happy about this exchange even though my name is not Andrew, as you know. Dan will report later that I seemed happy. I tell him about the empty bus, the short walk through a maze of semi-urban streets, the obligatory tree and grassland. He looks impressed but I think perhaps it’s my habit of injecting excitement into the banal. Old friends tire of it. They quickly move on to new and more relevant reading material. ‘You know I love how you get something out of everything you do Andrew,’ Dan says, confirming the previous intuition. He is thoughtful for a second. ‘I would have been bored shitless catching the bus. But I must introduce you to Alex when I find him. He is quite a character. And his wife Madeline: you’ll find her intriguing, believe me.’ I picture her shrinking heads for a hobby, or performing nude gymnastics. Dan takes advantage of my pondering to drift off into a procession of people that are waiting and ready to get his opinion on some matter. He is obviously more successful in the workplace than I am. The ambient scent now changes to cooling sweat and English after-shave. What was it before? I wander over to inspect the art-works. They are there to be looked at. All is wonderment.

A young man is already giving a guided tour of sorts. He is tanned. His hair would look messy from surfing but it’s swept back with some kind of product. He professes to know quite a bit about the various pieces and people are listening to him. Many of them drink champagne. ‘And this is one of the later works…’ he says in one of the brief snatches of words I manage to catch. ‘Yes I would never have thought to look at it like that,’ says someone standing nearby. I am closer now. The surfing art-critic tour-guide has the hands of a construction worker. He smiles and leads the group over to the next piece, telling them in a knowing manner that they will ‘feel the whole range of human emotions before the evening is over.’ I wonder if these people are tourists, not party-guests at all. One girl near me has a camera around her neck. I follow them and try to become part of their group for a while. The surfing art-critic clearly knows a lot about this art. During a convenient lull I ask the girl with the camera if she knows the leader of this group. (The glory is in the details.) ‘I just met him in the front garden when we got here,’ she says. ‘He was admiring the circular driveway. Tom, my husband – he’s the one standing closest – just so happens to have landscaped the yard. He’s very good friends with Alex you know.’ She talks while still looking at the paintings. ‘And did you bring the camera to photograph your husband’s work?’ I ask, trying to connect. Frantic qualification ensues before I can stop it spewing forth: ‘You don’t work for the social pages do you?’ ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ she says, finally looking at me. She doesn’t laugh. She turns back towards the leader who is talking again. His talking calms listeners.

We stand around for a while. It would be nice to be a part of something, if only to be remembered for that. But then the group moves along and she moves with them. I try to move with them, only to find myself muscled out.

Alex confronts me in the bathroom with the ice. ‘You motherfucker,’ he says, a glint of insanity playing about his eyes. ‘Hold on,’ I say. I can be very placating at times. I back into a corner. I nearly fall over a basin. ‘I don’t know you.’ He is not placated. ‘I’m Alex. You’re in my house, drinking my beer. I saw you talking to my wife.’ He is intent; he fixes me with a gaze. ‘I’ve talked to a few people,’ I venture (a cowardly way of speaking; I shudder to think of the retelling). But then a girl walks in. (There’s always a girl.) Alex turns and smiles, tells her about a special bottle he has down in the cellar, then slaps me on the back, even winks suggestively at me over his shoulder as he leaves with the girl. From down the hallway I hear him asking her if she’s met his wife. I get another beer. Alex is destined never to mention me after this evening.

The scene outside is beautiful and poetic but she’s talking of bad things. (She isn’t Alex’s wife. Some things will never be explained. It seems no-one has ever met her. I picture a woman pale and translucent from a lack of sun, tied to a chair in a basement. It really doesn’t matter.) But this is Jen and she has a history of her own, it isn’t attached to the party in any way. Apparently boyfriends beat her; agents have ripped her off. It’s almost post-card perfect as swimmers emerge and frolic. The ocean is dark in the night and faces get half-lit up when passing the fire. And there’s an optical illusion of moon to decorate our scene. I’m obviously happy by now to sit back. Even though when I think about things (then and now) nothing much in the way of drama presents. A couple of incidents – but nothing soul-destroying. I’d talked to people; people had talked back to me. So what happened? Jen seems to be the girl of your dreams from a movie that you would love until an actual meeting – her life such a mess of anxieties, much worse than your own. It becomes apparent she is a girl of contradictions. You might wonder how she ever appeared so beautiful and other-worldly. She is really drunk and her voice is quavering. Her story involves things (I maybe told myself then) that you don’t speak of to someone you’ve just met. But then I don’t tend to meet many people. Especially now. Perhaps this is how people really behave. Out in the world.

She takes the joint and says it might be too much for her. She smokes and then lays back. I have to stop myself imagining the pitch rolls of dizziness that might soon become nausea and a violent need to go home to your own bed. I look out at the sea as I smoke. It’s good to decide this is a good thing. In this instance I let the colours and electric dots impress themselves upon my vision. Enjoying the sensory alertness of being so tired. People still swim or emerge from swimming. There is no end to the party; Jen quietly vomits next to me. In the end I start thinking there can be no end, and I cannot hope to emerge. There’s usually a coherent whole to give evenings shape: even the out of control ones would end with the retelling:

‘last thing I remember was saying lets play for beers, then I woke up in Annandale, curled up in a corner hugging a bottle’.

Ha. Good times. Now though, things can’t just end here with the retelling because it precedes the events. I’m in temporal trouble. I’m stuck in this Friday and it’s almost refusing to melt into that ‘The victim was returning home in the early hours of Saturday morning when…’ newspaper column. You don’t even read those things fully, unless there’s some sexual deviancy in the recount.

Jen is no help – now or later. Dan must be confidently lost. Alex lost his mind in the ice-room, seemingly or not. I’ve lost my monthly bus pass. I don’t mind the long walk, even at this time of night. Things always turn out well for me. The beach sand is fine and silken. Silken as.

compleat explication

At the writing workshop on Saturday I realised I really did want a couple of the threads within the poem to be more present. I wanted the reader to be with me in the moment of poignancy that spawned the image. It’s unusual, but nevertheless this prodded me, made me think I could write something about the poem that would be more in line with my aims. The discovery was that I here had an aim. I like that feeling.

The hidden snap that emanates from my neck is pedestrian. We all have these moments, odd structural shifts in our body that aren’t easily explained. You can research such things, sure, but you often don’t. There’s a complete science of cracking knuckles out there somewhere. Similarly, that clicking sensation you might have felt inside your skull can be explained, and there are some interesting medical factoids that could come out of such an explanation. But we leave these things alone and don’t puzzle too much at the unexpected announcements of bone and joint fluid. Perhaps this unexamined aspect is what is presented as the beginning of a poem. Perhaps it is the real subject of any poem, and can be explained as such, much like just about anything. From this point all that is needed is tool of comparison.

It becomes jugs full of ‘illusions’, a farcically standard cocktail made with midori. There was a time when I would go out with friends as an inexperienced eighteen year old alcohol expert, and we would order these things like wine aficionados, observing the gradations of colour, the waft of melon, the taste of expense. In a sense the metaphor comes about in just the same unexpected way. This is what the two things have in common and this is what they give each other. Parallelism and nothing more. It’s almost as tacky as the stuff you’ll find on the wall of a Hog’s Breath Café, but does the trick, in a way you presume no one would really utter aloud of the restaurant. The specificity of the year and the pat arrangement of feet just trails along out of the drinking idea. Feet. Who uses those old things anymore?

When I presented the paper on blogging in Canberra (the one that’s taken up so much space on this here blog), I worked myself up to the moment (even madly emending paragraphs minutes before the scheduled start, propped next to statue of Winston Churchill) and then felt kind of spent. I had no desire to talk to anyone anymore. I went outside and kept walking even though there were more official proceedings. I walked until I found myself in Civic, in a bookstore, and then in an Irish Pub. So many of these things are just pushed into place by their relative temporal closeness. It’s just a bit fresher than other more apt memories. That’s why things turn up. I reverse the logic of it all for a bit of ‘poeticness’, but that’s easy, and not too important. This is the mood, sitting in the pub, reading (but not Byron – he jumps out of Craig Shuftan’s book as one of the first ever emo rockstars) and observing the persistence of smokers as they persevere with their twin sins out on the pavement.

But why not? I don’t know. I wasn’t even too sure what ‘presage’ means when I came upon it sonically at the workshop. I know now, but only just. It doesn’t mean that much. But I had a feeling it wouldn’t. I combined this ignorance with a similarly ignorant manner of broadcasting what might not be fit for publicity. Anita Heiss was tweeting details of a date she was on, telling hundreds of people how things were going, down to something like ‘we’ve been holding hands’ issued from her bathroom. The likelihood of referencing that in a poem was intriguing and therefore it presents, however, without her name attached. So you see the voyage I go on. It’s refreshingly normal.

I’ve now reached the point that drove me to attempt this tract. The stories of child minding. That’s what I wanted to get across to you. These stories are very close and personal things, things that I probably can’t tell because of that. And yet, I splashed out the poem; at least to me, the poem revolves around them. Told to a trampoline because you (the you in question my love, and not ‘you’) were on a trampoline when I started speaking of the stories. He was six years old when I was left in charge (the checkers were not that age, but could have been I suppose – this was a point of workshop confusion for some reason); tazos are small collectible objects that were coming in chip packets in those days (I don’t know what they are doing with themselves now…); the ‘tone’ relates to a phone call that turned into another phone call and a lot of emotional upheaval – it’s one of the small parts I am not going to expand upon.

For some reason, the NSW Premier’s Prize shortlisted poet Sarah Holland-Batt praised a certain ‘violence’ in poetic images in perhaps three separate workshops while she was in town. Because of my job, I was privy to all of these workshops, and noted the repetition, this above all other things. (We take one small thing from most larger things – during Nathan Curnow’s stay it was ‘If you’re performing a poem about the circus, don’t wear a clown suit. That’s completely out of context and quite funny but we have heard ot before haven’t we…) As a meaningless response to Sarah’s advice – which is by the way, very good advice – I threw in the line. Is it joking? And if the stories about childminding are the most important things, why do I throw in a ridiculous in-joke like that? No one will understand. Am I courting a status of ‘misunderstood’? Yes and no.

Story the second: I was nervous about the second debut of child minding. The boy was, and occasionally still is, a sleepwalker. At this stage of familial life I had no idea what I would do. So I worried it into a stultifying nervousness that was to no point, because he slept soundly. The heat of after that is somewhat an attempt to structure relief. And structuring things! My goodness! I awoke last week straight into the thought of how to write a poem. Should I be conceiving the images in all manner of situations, not simply when sitting down at the computer? With this in mind I found myself locating the most local of images and figuring myself into it: the eyes adjusting to the reality of air after sleep; the teardrop that can result. I simply become this large in the poem. It’s non-poetic but cleverly so, and so forth.

Later I’m thinking about this version of myself as teardrop. I’m trying to imagine that if I keep rolling it over in my mind, it will become legible, it will become real in a different way to that that is rendered concrete by hitting ‘save’. My mind is my database as I drive out to work, and now (as this manner of writing has no doubt led you to expect) we all realise the face of our car stereo was stolen from the car. It was my fault – I just left all the doors unlocked. I always do. And so now the consequence is I have to drive everywhere without music. I think maybe it will allow me to think more, but it hasn’t really turned out that way. I feel sleepy while driving. It’s a worry. But we keep driving because we were initially and now we drive through a different morning, where I’m frantically trying to sketch out a picture of the fog over the river. The river disappears on a foggy morning, and so you drive into a peculiar globule of white, akin to floating, but not quite. That’s there. The Gobbagombolin, the name of the bridge, has it’s own interesting story that could be delved into. It relates to two Indigenous tribes apparently – there’s a mythic love story that may have resulted in a love / death / merging, and the merging of two names into the awkwardly named bridge (which locals shorten to ‘Gobba’).

Finally, there’s the boring old reversal where I have an inanimate object do something, but here it’s an idea. The image confronts you – peruses you instead. I think to myself this is awesomely cool. The final failure of the poem is another idea for a poem. Me up in the Blue Mountains, thinking to myself, ‘construct this view…’ The real subject of the poem it seems is the lining up of failed poetic impulses. This might be a good idea. No. What about this? No. Maybe that’s what I’m hurling out at you. And of course that last sentence was written as I printed off copies of the piece for each and every member of the workshop group. I felt the thing needed something there, and hastily shoved it in. But why? Someone picked up on the fact that he title connects with this last sentence. I was neither happy nor displeased at that. It just does. I like the sportiness of all that, and now I shall actively presume this great long expulsion of words will be taken in good sport too.