Blinded by the White Light

Three days after I had been lucky enough to score a copy of Mark Flynn’s new collection of short stories White Light, my son, home from school, cast a knowing eye over me and said, What have you been doing? Nothing I said, a ridiculous smile o n my face, No, he insisted, you’re stoked, you’ve been up to something. It was true, I had been reading O’Flynn’s story ‘Stealth’ that morning and the elation had not worn off.

‘Stealth’, like stealth had crept on me. We were jogging along and I was thinking, hey all good but a bit blokey, and what about the kid, he’s not adding up. But then, well, I can’t tell you what happened that flipped the story from droll to hilarious as that would be a spoiler but, even now a week later, the image of what I am not going to tell you makes me laugh. Then the whole story clicked together and the guy, Barry - the son, Ross Livingstone and the CFA were inter-meshed in a way that mixed the laconic with the absurd, blokey with feminine and the vernacular with the linguistically exhilarating just about perfectly. When I was laughing a lot I heard myself say.’ I love you Mark O’Flynn.’. What I really meant, of course, was that I loved this short story by Mark O’Flynn, but hey anyone who can make me laugh like that is right up there.

Now I’ve finished the collection and have thought about emailing Mark O’Flynn to ask if he’s got more stories hidden somewhere but that would be a little too much like stalking. But perhaps the sensible thing to do would be to go find one of the novels he’s written!

White Light is published by Spineless Wonders

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

Blinded by the White Light

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