While I was still a young man, it became fashionable among some of my contemporaries to practice what they called meditation and to read books about a variety of subjects that might have been called collectively Eastern spirituality. I could never have brought myself to read any of that sort of book, but I was sometimes curious about the practice of meditation. On several mornings while my wife and children were still asleep, I sat cross-legged on a patio at the rear of my house in an outer northern suburb of the capital city. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply and evenly. I then tried to perform what I believed was the next part of the process of meditation: I tried to empty my mind of the pictorial imagery and the snatches of songs or melodies that comprised its usual contents. If I could perform this task, so I supposed, then I would find myself in the presence of my mind alone, and I was curious to learn what would be the appearance of a mind devoid of contents: what my mind would prove ultimately to be composed of.
Gerald Murnane, Border Districts: A fiction (2017)
I never succeeded in emptying my mind.
One of the first things I do whenever I move to a new place (trust me, I’ve lived in enough cities, towns and villages to know what I’m talking about here) is to visit — and join — the local library. There’s something comforting and consistent about libraries the world over that grounds me.
Growing up in Australia, the town library was always free to join. The same applied in Sweden, where I lived for 11 years. Sure, you might need to pay a token amount for a late book but if you were interacting with a good librarian — and let’s face it, they’re all good — they’d usually waive it.
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The media frenzy in the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, with groundless speculation on likely winners accompanied by breathless reporting of bookies’ odds, unconsciously skewers the practices of the “literary elite”: a fictional apparatus that only serves the purposes of those who do not read or write.
The decision to award the 2024 prize to Korean novelist 한강 (Han Kang) demonstrates, for me at least, that the Committee values bravery and a commitment to ideals. Her work is extremely difficult to read: not in terms of its “readability”, but rather the devastating way in which she writes about what people are capable of doing to each other.
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The last time a poem of mine appeared in a journal was back in 2013. But in the intervening years, the dim flame of my poetic muse has been sustained by the appearance of some of my published poems in a number of anthologies.
Suddenly, these old poems have a new agency. They just “hit differently” the second (or sometimes even third!) time around. Sure, there’s only five of them, but that’s, like, one every two years. And in the absence of any other kind of engagement with the publishing space, I’ll take those odds.
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Davey Dreamnation (1972–?) was an Australalian musician, vocalist, pirate and record-label owner who now lives “in the third person”. No, wait. That’s not what I meant to paste there. But then, where should I begin my Substack origin story?
Maybe I could start by explaining how I came up with my semi-fictitious alter-ego’s name, by fusing the title of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation album with one of my own diminutives. But then, who was I before this Davey came along?
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