An ex-girlfriend of mine turns 28 tomorrow. I have spent the last few weeks writing her a sonnet, to the surprise and consternation of the friends with whom I have discussed it. Continue reading
Faded Lovers, Arcane Gods
Posted in Love letters with tags Letters to a Young Poet, Low Rider, Rainer Maria Rilke, Silver Surfer on October 17, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
Your Voice is a Caress Most Definite
Posted in Love letters, poetry, sonnet with tags Petrarchan sonnet, sonnet on October 3, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
Your voice is a caress most definite
On velvet footfalls your words descend
The vertiginous staircase within my head
To take up mysterious residence
Modelling from the darkness a bower
Where meaning is resonant temperature
That blossoms across my eyelids into colour
A verdure of mysterious flowers
These flowers turn their faces narcotic
Toward the distant sun of where you are
With a febrile yearning in their motion
Reaching toward that place exotic
Whose voice describes a sunset-coloured shore
Whose windswept weave is salted with its ocean.
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Suicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Esther Greenwood, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar on September 24, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
4.
‘Wrapping my coat around me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and began taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.
At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.
The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of the vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.’
p.163 Continue reading
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Suicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Westside Barbell on September 17, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
3.
“I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.”
P. 152
I watched my grandmother Joanna die, day by day. Continue reading
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Suicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Buddy Willard, Esther Greenwood, Simone De Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Karate Kid, The Second Sex on September 13, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
“A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”
– The Bell Jar Page 90.
Simone De Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex that because men are encouraged to fight, they come to trust themselves and their ability to grapple with the world and its challenges. Continue reading
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Suicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Ariel, Colossus, Rodney Hall, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar on September 3, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
1.
‘There’s two acts of creation at work in the novel: the writer’s, and the reader’s.’
– Rodney Hall.
Some books, you read them and they go right through you like a glass of water. Other books seem to take up residence and become a part of who you are, like marrow, or muscle fibre.
I recently read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for the second time.
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Sylvia Plath: Godmother of Punk Rock?
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory, Real Men with tags Ariel, Black Flag, Buddy Willard, Catcher in the Rye, Colossus, Esther Greenwood, Henry Rollins, punk, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar on August 6, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
If you google Sylvia Plath, it’s hard to find her described in any terms other than the superlative. ‘One of the finest lyric poets of the twentieth century,’ is pretty close to the general assessment. Continue reading
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Rodney Hall: A Stolen Season
Posted in Fiction, Reading, Real Men with tags A Stolen Season, Autumn of the Patriarch, Belize, Central America, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Saunders, James Joyce, Mayan, Miles Franklin Award, Rodney Hall, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Ulysses on July 16, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
At the gym – working on the gun show.
Rodney Hall is one of Australia’s greatest living writers. He has been nominated for the Miles Franklin Award seven times and if he wins this year, it’ll be the third time he’s gone home with the prize.
I have known him for eighteen years and he never fails to deliver on the subject of literature. He has been kind enough to wax lyrical at the Theme Park on matters literary and a few others that happen to intersect within his purview.
T.P: I’m guessing that if the Miles Franklin Award was predicated on biceps, you’d win that. Continue reading
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Vegan Apocalypse
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Jan Fran, The Cornish Arms, Vegan on July 8, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
Last Saturday, I caught up with a couple of my closest friends at the Cornish Arms Hotel. One of us has severe dietary intolerances and we opted for the Cornish Arms because the vegan menu most closely resembles a cuisine his gut can manage. Continue reading
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Bert Kreischer and the Mechanics of Subversion
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Ali Wong, AR15, Baby Cobra, Barack Obama, Bert Kreischer, bump stock, Glock, Hannah Gadsby, Hard Knock Wife, Homer Simpson, Las Vegas Shooting, Melbourne Arts Centre, Netflix, Sandy Hook, The Machine on June 29, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
I went to see Bert Kreischer last Saturday night. I realised, once he came onstage and took off his shirt, that I had seen him before: he tells the story of his student trip to Russia in the viral video ‘The Machine.’ Continue reading
Theme Park at its Darkest 