Show Me The Treasure

at 11:03

While the Tin Candelabra only makes its shadow known in this photograph of Tin [tenth] wedding anniversay amusements this may have appealed to the witty surrealism of the Victorian smiths who made these momentoes. This display is in the American Museum of Folk Art , 53rd Street West, a smallish museum. A smallish museum is, in my view, is a virtue in itself.

The scale of a Museum really is the deciding factor of its relationship with the visitor. Twice I stayed for a week in an apartment block in Rue de Benjamin Franklin in the 16th arrondisement in Paris which housed the George Clemenceau Museum. Though ruefully, it being so close at hand, I never managed to actually visit, I knew it was exactly the same scale as the apartment I stayed in. One can inhabit a museum this size, very quickly you are in loco parentis, assuming the role of caretaker and collector. When the museum expands to a certain point, say that of Museum of Butter in Cork ( which I've written about in Meanjin, Vol 69, Dec 2010) or Lisbon’s wonderful Museo de Musica, one shifts into something a flanûer. You are not sure what direction you should go in but it cannot matter; you will not get lost or bored. At the end of this scale is the Louvre, magnificent but disorientating, even alienating, with its endless kilometres of hallways and levels, some underground like the Tombs of Atuan, some involving Escher like sets of rising stairs, and endless amounts of art which seem to look down on the visitor who is such a philistine as not to give them the proper consideration due to them. It may turn out that all you can recall later is the crowd around the Mona Lisa and the putti on ceilings. You are estranged, lost and must keep referring to floor plans if you are to regain the world outside. To me this is like being lost in the Mirror Maze at Luna Park, everything starts looking the same, only progressively more distorted. There is a puffy anxious feeling on regaining the light of day and a feeling of drained blankness like a portion of your brain has been siphoned off into art storage. Much better, for me, is the feeling of inspiration and empowerment from visiting the smaller scale of a Musuem, such as the Museum of Folk Art or the Museum of Butter, which set me off on an epic poem, lengthy discussions and an essay on Museums in general and Museums of Food in particular.

While the Tin Candelabra only makes its shadow known in this photograph of Tin [tenth] wedding anniversay amusements this may have ap...

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Curiosity Cabinet

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.