Journal Catch-up 21

Just two Heats in this catch-up.

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Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 9 (Giramondo 2023)

There are five items in this Heat, and I loved three of them. (The other two are pretty good as well.)

Bonny Cassidy’s ‘Memory Book’ is a poignant memoir of dealing with the shifting sands of her father’s dementia. ‘No one is responding in the way I thought they would.’

Ender Başkan has three poems whose energy and flow make me want to hear him perform them: ‘funk n wagnalls, collect the set’ is, among other things, a comic reflection on an immigrant family’s valuing of education; in ‘family holiday’ the poem’s speaker travels on the Spirit of Tasmania with small children; ‘erotics of bookselling’ is a fabulously unerotic string of phrases from the day of a bookshop employee.

The stand-out item is the late Antigone Kefala’s ‘Last Journals’, the third instalment in her series of journals. The first two were full-length books – Sydney Journals (2008) and Late Journals (2022, my blog post here). Unlike the entries in Late Journals, the entries here are dated, from 5 January to 19 September 2022. Antigone Kefala received the Patrick White Literary Award earlier in that September – ‘Everything comes in its own time,’ she writes, ‘but not in yours.’ She died on 3 December, less that 11 weeks after the final entry, which ends, ‘Drifting … Not an an ounce of focused energy …’

My blog custom is to single out page 76 for a closer reading. As happens surprisingly often, page 76 of this Heat is a useful lens through which to see the whole of Antigone Kefala’s piece. The page has three entries – for 3, 11 and 17 April – and they reflect a mind actively engaged with the world even while burdened with a sense that the end is near. There are acerbic comments on politics (‘Everyone knocking out Morrison … his own people, a pity they did not do it before’) and the weather (‘It will take some time to dry out, but the rain will start again soon’). She celebrates the publication of Late Journals, is visited by her publishers, and anxiously hopes for a mention in the press. She starts casting about for a new project (‘Looking about for a book to start translating something – this should give me a direction’). She mentions talking to a friend on the phone, ‘using the mobile so we could see our faces’, and comments, ‘These terrible transformations … who wants to see one’s face when talking on the phone …’

What emerges is a picture of a writer, committed to her work, immersed in a community, who faces the difficulties of ageing and the approach of death, not with calm or resignation but with something more like weary annoyance. Her entry for Monday 11 April ends:

Living is problematic, but dying is problematic too.

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Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 10 (Giramondo 2023)

This issue kicks off with ‘Life’s Work’ by Isabella Trimboli, a terrific, multi-faceted article on journals that ranges from her own practice to a five-hour cut of a movie diary. She’s specifically interested in ‘diaries from women who were not writers by vocation, that had never known true recognition, that wrote about themselves obsessively and with self-scrutiny’.

I confess that the rest of the journal didn’t sing to me.

One piece begins:

Simón entered my room and gave me a look.
Unconsciously, and then consciously, I pressed my body into a pose, breasts forward, ass to one side, and lifted the sheet, an invitation that suggested this was how I always lay before 10 a.m., like a steamed clam.

(Ellena Savage, ‘Bare Life’)

What follows isn’t terrible, but sexual intrigue in a shared house with a smattering of philosophy about Covid shutdowns isn’t my cup of tea. And I know it’s a lost cause, but that ‘ass’ – along with a ‘diaper’ elsewhere in the journal – gets my back up. It’s an Australian literary journal, do we have to use US language?

Another:

Someone did give birth to me. Why remains unclear. Maybe they wanted to be loved, or it just sort of happened.

(Harold Voetmann, ‘Common Room Rocking Horse’, translated by Johanne Sorgenti Ottosen)

Sorry, but I find that hard to take seriously, and it’s not funny.

Then there’s this:

The house had bricks the colour of runny shit and a linoleum floor that was so thin you could scrape a hole in it by pushing back your chair.

(Kat Capel, ‘Sightseeing’)

As you might almost guess, this turns out to be a story of unconventional sexual compulsions set mainly in a share house. I’m too old.

And then this:

This looking at myself, touching myself, it all started a long time ago. In nursery school, in fact, when I was five or six years old.

(Lin Bai, ‘The Light in the Mirror’, translated by Nicky Harman)

That’s the inauspicious opening of what turns out to be an extract from Lin Bai’s 1994 novel, A War of One’s Own, which, according the brief author bio (on page 76), ‘was an instant success and established her as a pioneer of women’s literature in China’. The Wikipedia entry on the novel doesn’t mention translation, so this may be the first time this writing has been translated into English. If so, hats off to Heat and Nicky Harman. But, quite apart from my distaste for extracts from longer works, I won’t pretend to have enjoyed it.