About Me
- M. F. McAuliffe
- Portland, Oregon, United States
- Co-founder, co-editor of Gobshite Quarterly and Reprobate/GobQ Books
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Why does X keep coming back?
It was a large and widely attended retirement party at work: the new retiree had worked there almost 40 years. As the door opened again I registered the arrival of X, who had retired a little over a year ago, when I had transferred in. And also registered my flash of annoyance. I know she'd worked in that room for 20 years or more, know she was responsible for all the stately, decades-old plants, and that I love the plants. I know that. It's just that she's been here at least once every two months since she retired. She doesn't work here...What does she want?
And now I register my mother's not entirely put-on horror at my father, who retired from the plant he'd worked at for 30 years or more, and who “never darkened the door again.” I understand that, don't even think to question it. As far as I'd thought about it at all, I assumed that, as I resemble my father in many ways, this was just one more of them.
And so I came to think about the times I have gone back to former workplaces. One large building, I remember: when I went back to sub there a couple of months after transferring out, I realized I'd forgotten my habit of putting on mental body-armour as I traversed lobby. (The lobby is huge; it always evokes the word traverse.) When I returned there on a short-term exchange a few years later, I found it... Hard to describe. I did leave early, twice, not caring whether I was found out or fired: the first time I was internally screaming, the second I was about to burst into tears. To this day I don't know what happened to my mind or soul those late Tuesday afternoons, that I was ready to gamble everything we have and everything the job keeps in existence, in order to get out now.
Other places I have returned to, temporarily, for one necessity or another... have invariably seemed smaller, darker, dingier than when I was there; essentially & ineluctably external.
I have always worked by absolute necessity. I had to earn a living. I've never worked anywhere I would have chosen to, have always struck the best deal that seemed available to me. When I walk back into a place I've worked in, it always subliminally presents itself to me as a cave which I have to stoop to re-enter. Though my sense of my internal self is pretty much amoeba-shaped, I have always had to edit myself/become someone else to fit work. And so I think my experience of revenance is this: I'm no longer willing to shrink to enter that particular darkness, fit that particular Procrustean bed.
But my mother's employment... During the Great Depression she worked as a milliner in the only millinery shop still open in the city. The girls were laid off before public holidays and re-hired the day after. They were unionized, but the union had been bought off; my mother saw the coins go into the inspector's hand every time he visited.
My mother ran a table of 40 girls; each girl had to make 6 hats a day. My mother was to initial the note each girl wrote, declaring that she had completed 6 hats. She and the girls laughed all day long, my mother always said. They got together once a year for lunch for well over 30 years afterwards. My mother quoted them often, talked about the things they did, the warden-like nature of the assistant-like manager(ess), and the meanness and hypocrisy of the owner. The daily matter of the 240 hats was handled by one girl, an expert forger, writing the notes, my mother initialling them. The hats went into storage, the notes went to the warden-like woman. The totals were never checked, and so this went on for years, until my mother married my father and so was legally forced to leave.
And so my mother never did try to re-enter her former workplace; if not forbidden by law it would have been so unusual as to be suspicious. And she liked working, had great native intelligence and shrewdness, liked running the table. Though she would really have preferred to be a hairdresser, her work never sounded as though it had crimped or crippled her.
I have no idea what my father thought of his job; though he was a man of great fundamental decency, I have no idea, any more than anyone else in my family, what my father actually thought about anything.
So now I come to look at it after all these many years, I can see why X might want to return to the room I'm in now.
Me, 5:30 p.m. on my last day (if I haven't already said bugger it and buggered off early), I'll be gone for good and all.
And now I register my mother's not entirely put-on horror at my father, who retired from the plant he'd worked at for 30 years or more, and who “never darkened the door again.” I understand that, don't even think to question it. As far as I'd thought about it at all, I assumed that, as I resemble my father in many ways, this was just one more of them.
And so I came to think about the times I have gone back to former workplaces. One large building, I remember: when I went back to sub there a couple of months after transferring out, I realized I'd forgotten my habit of putting on mental body-armour as I traversed lobby. (The lobby is huge; it always evokes the word traverse.) When I returned there on a short-term exchange a few years later, I found it... Hard to describe. I did leave early, twice, not caring whether I was found out or fired: the first time I was internally screaming, the second I was about to burst into tears. To this day I don't know what happened to my mind or soul those late Tuesday afternoons, that I was ready to gamble everything we have and everything the job keeps in existence, in order to get out now.
Other places I have returned to, temporarily, for one necessity or another... have invariably seemed smaller, darker, dingier than when I was there; essentially & ineluctably external.
I have always worked by absolute necessity. I had to earn a living. I've never worked anywhere I would have chosen to, have always struck the best deal that seemed available to me. When I walk back into a place I've worked in, it always subliminally presents itself to me as a cave which I have to stoop to re-enter. Though my sense of my internal self is pretty much amoeba-shaped, I have always had to edit myself/become someone else to fit work. And so I think my experience of revenance is this: I'm no longer willing to shrink to enter that particular darkness, fit that particular Procrustean bed.
But my mother's employment... During the Great Depression she worked as a milliner in the only millinery shop still open in the city. The girls were laid off before public holidays and re-hired the day after. They were unionized, but the union had been bought off; my mother saw the coins go into the inspector's hand every time he visited.
My mother ran a table of 40 girls; each girl had to make 6 hats a day. My mother was to initial the note each girl wrote, declaring that she had completed 6 hats. She and the girls laughed all day long, my mother always said. They got together once a year for lunch for well over 30 years afterwards. My mother quoted them often, talked about the things they did, the warden-like nature of the assistant-like manager(ess), and the meanness and hypocrisy of the owner. The daily matter of the 240 hats was handled by one girl, an expert forger, writing the notes, my mother initialling them. The hats went into storage, the notes went to the warden-like woman. The totals were never checked, and so this went on for years, until my mother married my father and so was legally forced to leave.
And so my mother never did try to re-enter her former workplace; if not forbidden by law it would have been so unusual as to be suspicious. And she liked working, had great native intelligence and shrewdness, liked running the table. Though she would really have preferred to be a hairdresser, her work never sounded as though it had crimped or crippled her.
I have no idea what my father thought of his job; though he was a man of great fundamental decency, I have no idea, any more than anyone else in my family, what my father actually thought about anything.
So now I come to look at it after all these many years, I can see why X might want to return to the room I'm in now.
Me, 5:30 p.m. on my last day (if I haven't already said bugger it and buggered off early), I'll be gone for good and all.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Callou, callay!
Callou, callay!
The galleys, the galleys
for White Concrete Day!
The galleys, the galleys
for White Concrete Day!
And the first chapter of Swimming with Heraclitus, "Stephen and the Others," has just been published, here.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Zvonko Busic - cross-posted from Gobshite Quarterly
when auden spoke of a mean & low decade, he had no idea of the resonance of those words...
our hearts & minds go out to gobshite quarterly contributor julie bušić ‡, whose husband zvonko bušić passed away at the beginning of this month. he was given a state funeral, as indeed he was a fierce advocate for croatian independence.
labeled a terrorist in this country, & sentenced to 30 yrs, often in solitary confinement, in this country.
he was sentenced in 1976, & tho eligible for parole in 1979, served significantly more than his sentence, thanks to the vindictiveness of the reagan administration, & shrubya 1's & shrubya 2's cabals—this despite petitions & protestations from the croatian ambassador to the united states, prison staff retirees, & prison chaplain.
‡) her memoir of her experiences, lovers & madmen, was also made into a documentary film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp6pqS1-VMU
The New York Times article is here.
our hearts & minds go out to gobshite quarterly contributor julie bušić ‡, whose husband zvonko bušić passed away at the beginning of this month. he was given a state funeral, as indeed he was a fierce advocate for croatian independence.
labeled a terrorist in this country, & sentenced to 30 yrs, often in solitary confinement, in this country.
he was sentenced in 1976, & tho eligible for parole in 1979, served significantly more than his sentence, thanks to the vindictiveness of the reagan administration, & shrubya 1's & shrubya 2's cabals—this despite petitions & protestations from the croatian ambassador to the united states, prison staff retirees, & prison chaplain.
‡) her memoir of her experiences, lovers & madmen, was also made into a documentary film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp6pqS1-VMU
The New York Times article is here.
Circling Federation Square
I came upon Federation Square before I was aware of it.
I began to wonder as I began to pass these very asymmetrical glass shapes, windows, walls, if I had wandered into it. (How I could have just wandered into it, how it could have simply resembled … slate-grey … shops?) As I walked on to the end of the building and found the open space on the west side of the complex which led around to the river, I realized that Federation Square really was what I had come upon: the architectural wonder I'd read about on the net, four or five storeys high, asymmetrically designed in ways not possible until the twenty-first century. I was standing on, over, above, the old Jolimont railway yards.
This open space made no sense to me. The Advertiser sound-shell on the southern bank of the Torrens was my model for public event space – grassy slope shaped like an amphitheatre, the slope all but imperceptible as you stepped onto it, steeper further in, designed to tip the sightlines onto the stage; and the gentle coloured fountain in the river, lit by sequenced, rotating, water-diffused spotlights, the colours deepening as the daylight faded.
This area had no shape, no focus, no real seating; it was hung with huge flat screens, the antithesis of communal gathering, an eating area and handicraft stalls. I turned and went back the way I had come, into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (successor to the State Film Centre, two doors down from a high-end jeweller), but had no money for the special exhibits. The seating for the short-display documentaries – museum benches – was designed to move us on; the instructions for running the films were incomprehensible. I went to the Ladies' Room, steep and deep to get to, the temperature dropped a lot – and found the dark slate and dark paint décor in narrow passageways very like entering a grave.
Increasingly angry / dismayed / disheartened, I saw another way to the river, past the lozenges of the east glass wall. Facing the river, south, I found the paving stones from the Kimberleys underfoot, every shade of red from shell-tinged beige to burgundy and maroon. Directly across the river the Rowing Club's boatshed stood, a pale, pale yellow. I suddenly wanted to be there, next to plain wood and simple lines and unpretentious dimensions.
I turned to my right and continued my circumnavigation.
On Federation Square's western side, across St. Kilda Road from the Flinders Street station, I came to that odd communal space again; walking into it suddenly, my mind preoccupied with understanding the overall layout, I registered, found myself blinking and in the act of forgetting a fugitive silver flash. Beyond a cascading brain event I shouldn't have seen a silver flash. I turned back and found I'd just stepped past a row of lightweight cardboard face-masks, some of the current Australian cricket team, mounted on the short metal posts meant to separate the food-cart area from the more Forum-like area. The cricketers were due to appear at that very spot in a few days. The flash had been underlying metal of a post glinting through the eyehole, a hungry, malign, metal god.
I recognized the kids in their 20s who were working on this publicity stunt: they work in Portland for every company staging a free film preview with quizzes, t-shirts, prizes. They're all all a-buzz, on short-term contract and a second's notice; they all want to break into one part or another of the entertainment-publicity complex; they all function on high-octane fear. I was appalled to see this kind of hyperinsecurity here; Oz had been one of the most highly unionized countries in the First World.
Walking into this space again was the last of my circle. Looking east, into its continuation, the Forum-like space was surrounded by buildings, sinister blocks of black topped by satellite dishes and microwave towers. One red lantern stood at one black window, declaring a Chinese restaurant. That seemed to be its only window. I could imagine it: interior, lacquered, stifling.
By then I'd had enough. I walked across the road and took a photo of the complex from the Young & Jackson's corner. It was the noon light, I suppose; the whole thing looked, not like concrete, but like sagging cardboard.
But it was the holes that got to me, nagged at me – the strange holes in the concrete façade of Federation Square, in the sagging skin, the fabric, the outer protective layer. The odd holes. The deliberate, constructed, odd … holes.
Holes in the banknotes. When the same friend took me to the bank to cash a traveller's cheque they gave me pieces of paper with holes in them. Plastic-filled holes, to be sure, but things with gashes in their fabric nonetheless. To prevent counterfeiting, the friend said; the new designs being so complex they're easily mimicked (the shape of the hole in the $5 note a flying bird within a superimposed circle, the design inside the circle a eucalypt flower and leaves). There were holes in the currency, in a thing where you need the appearance and reality of solidity banknotes being national PR documents, even more than postage stamps.
Holes in the facades of many of the buildings around Federation Square, in Flinders Street and Little Collins Street. They were surrounded by scaffolding, being repaired, I suppose – how much repair could all those recent-looking buildings need? – but looking in the meantime like rotting financial structures, and at their feet the overtopped and bandaged churches, the modern-looking but uncomfortable seats, the idea of public amenity.
Holes in the social fabric. A disproportionate number of poor, for a rich country… Even in 1981 the estimation for people needing government subsidy for something or other was close to 30%.... and now, just as in the U.S., a man asleep or unconscious at the foot of one of the great office towers in Queen Street is both noticed and ignored, is deftly stepped around; at his knee the puddled lake of a pale, Caucasian hand.
Hole in the ozone layer. At its most extensive stretching over Uruguay and southern Victoria. The sky is rotting, Wm. Gibson mordantly observed at Powell's, in 2000.
The allegedly porous border (imitation is the sincerest form), the hole that was no hole, was a distraction, a constructed displacement-activity and -anxiety.
The hole that didn't exist was there to disguise the holes that did, that were and are being gouged in the social, economic, and ethical structures of the country and the earth's protective skin. This hole stood in place of the rest just as banning smoking in or near all public property had come to stand in place of reducing pollution.
The hole that still doesn’t exist deflects public attention from real and urgent and desperate problems; it forestalls agitation and protest; it makes legislation not drafted by and for vast and interlocking vested interests, all but impossible.
I began to wonder as I began to pass these very asymmetrical glass shapes, windows, walls, if I had wandered into it. (How I could have just wandered into it, how it could have simply resembled … slate-grey … shops?) As I walked on to the end of the building and found the open space on the west side of the complex which led around to the river, I realized that Federation Square really was what I had come upon: the architectural wonder I'd read about on the net, four or five storeys high, asymmetrically designed in ways not possible until the twenty-first century. I was standing on, over, above, the old Jolimont railway yards.
This open space made no sense to me. The Advertiser sound-shell on the southern bank of the Torrens was my model for public event space – grassy slope shaped like an amphitheatre, the slope all but imperceptible as you stepped onto it, steeper further in, designed to tip the sightlines onto the stage; and the gentle coloured fountain in the river, lit by sequenced, rotating, water-diffused spotlights, the colours deepening as the daylight faded.
This area had no shape, no focus, no real seating; it was hung with huge flat screens, the antithesis of communal gathering, an eating area and handicraft stalls. I turned and went back the way I had come, into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (successor to the State Film Centre, two doors down from a high-end jeweller), but had no money for the special exhibits. The seating for the short-display documentaries – museum benches – was designed to move us on; the instructions for running the films were incomprehensible. I went to the Ladies' Room, steep and deep to get to, the temperature dropped a lot – and found the dark slate and dark paint décor in narrow passageways very like entering a grave.
Increasingly angry / dismayed / disheartened, I saw another way to the river, past the lozenges of the east glass wall. Facing the river, south, I found the paving stones from the Kimberleys underfoot, every shade of red from shell-tinged beige to burgundy and maroon. Directly across the river the Rowing Club's boatshed stood, a pale, pale yellow. I suddenly wanted to be there, next to plain wood and simple lines and unpretentious dimensions.
I turned to my right and continued my circumnavigation.
On Federation Square's western side, across St. Kilda Road from the Flinders Street station, I came to that odd communal space again; walking into it suddenly, my mind preoccupied with understanding the overall layout, I registered, found myself blinking and in the act of forgetting a fugitive silver flash. Beyond a cascading brain event I shouldn't have seen a silver flash. I turned back and found I'd just stepped past a row of lightweight cardboard face-masks, some of the current Australian cricket team, mounted on the short metal posts meant to separate the food-cart area from the more Forum-like area. The cricketers were due to appear at that very spot in a few days. The flash had been underlying metal of a post glinting through the eyehole, a hungry, malign, metal god.
I recognized the kids in their 20s who were working on this publicity stunt: they work in Portland for every company staging a free film preview with quizzes, t-shirts, prizes. They're all all a-buzz, on short-term contract and a second's notice; they all want to break into one part or another of the entertainment-publicity complex; they all function on high-octane fear. I was appalled to see this kind of hyperinsecurity here; Oz had been one of the most highly unionized countries in the First World.
Walking into this space again was the last of my circle. Looking east, into its continuation, the Forum-like space was surrounded by buildings, sinister blocks of black topped by satellite dishes and microwave towers. One red lantern stood at one black window, declaring a Chinese restaurant. That seemed to be its only window. I could imagine it: interior, lacquered, stifling.
By then I'd had enough. I walked across the road and took a photo of the complex from the Young & Jackson's corner. It was the noon light, I suppose; the whole thing looked, not like concrete, but like sagging cardboard.
But it was the holes that got to me, nagged at me – the strange holes in the concrete façade of Federation Square, in the sagging skin, the fabric, the outer protective layer. The odd holes. The deliberate, constructed, odd … holes.
Holes in the banknotes. When the same friend took me to the bank to cash a traveller's cheque they gave me pieces of paper with holes in them. Plastic-filled holes, to be sure, but things with gashes in their fabric nonetheless. To prevent counterfeiting, the friend said; the new designs being so complex they're easily mimicked (the shape of the hole in the $5 note a flying bird within a superimposed circle, the design inside the circle a eucalypt flower and leaves). There were holes in the currency, in a thing where you need the appearance and reality of solidity banknotes being national PR documents, even more than postage stamps.
Holes in the facades of many of the buildings around Federation Square, in Flinders Street and Little Collins Street. They were surrounded by scaffolding, being repaired, I suppose – how much repair could all those recent-looking buildings need? – but looking in the meantime like rotting financial structures, and at their feet the overtopped and bandaged churches, the modern-looking but uncomfortable seats, the idea of public amenity.
Holes in the social fabric. A disproportionate number of poor, for a rich country… Even in 1981 the estimation for people needing government subsidy for something or other was close to 30%.... and now, just as in the U.S., a man asleep or unconscious at the foot of one of the great office towers in Queen Street is both noticed and ignored, is deftly stepped around; at his knee the puddled lake of a pale, Caucasian hand.
Hole in the ozone layer. At its most extensive stretching over Uruguay and southern Victoria. The sky is rotting, Wm. Gibson mordantly observed at Powell's, in 2000.
The allegedly porous border (imitation is the sincerest form), the hole that was no hole, was a distraction, a constructed displacement-activity and -anxiety.
The hole that didn't exist was there to disguise the holes that did, that were and are being gouged in the social, economic, and ethical structures of the country and the earth's protective skin. This hole stood in place of the rest just as banning smoking in or near all public property had come to stand in place of reducing pollution.
The hole that still doesn’t exist deflects public attention from real and urgent and desperate problems; it forestalls agitation and protest; it makes legislation not drafted by and for vast and interlocking vested interests, all but impossible.
Poor fellow, my country.
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