The Marge Advice Line: Stacy

by Jesse

No context needed.

Dickspeak, pt 2

by Jesse

Katy Perry recorded “UR SO GAY”, which sounds homophobic, but of course, she’s using the other, fashionable version of the word, meaning anything generally bad. Anyone who thinks that sounds offensive should just Jew off. And stop being so bloody black about it.

(Simon Amstell)

The other day a friend of mine gave me a link and urged me to look at it. It was this:

by Jesse

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. (Orwell, 1984)

Dickspeak, pt 1

by Jesse

Hey guys. You know how some nights you’re in the shower, and you’ve already, you know, washed your hair and shaved your face and cried and thrown up dinner and mashed it down the drain with your toes and then you’re bored but you don’t want to get out because it’s cold?? Well here’s my advice: rather than simply stepping out of the shower and saving some water, scan your many products for entertainment! They are goldmines. Marvel at how quickly our English language is degenerating into marketing cant meant to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, meaning! So George Orwell was right after all. Don’t believe me? I guess it’s time for Jesse Reads Products.

Review: The Magician King

by Jesse

Hey guys. Hey, you know I was joking, right, when my review of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians was so unconstructively negative that I ended up just taking the piss out of the author’s baby? Good. I thought so. Actually I loved The Magicians. I loved it so much that I wagged school today because the sequel, which is called The Magician King, “came out” — although I later learned that in fact today is the American release date, and the Australian one is in like two months. When I found this out I was scared, angry, and confused. When you lose a loved one, it’s the little things that get you: realising you’ve set a place for them at the dinner table; picking up the phone to call them only to realise that you can’t. I keep picking up my pen and notebook to write a review of The Magician King, and always I collapse, immediately, into tears, thinking, “I just have to write this review.”

Lev Grossman’s The Magician King is coming!!

by Jesse

I am, for the first time since The Deathly Hallows, quite excited about a book. In two days, the too-friendly sales assistant at Dymocks will hand me my copy of Lev Grossman’s new novel The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians, which was a bestseller in the U.S. but mostly ignored here in Australia. Many people called The Magicians “Harry Potter for adults”, which was . . . pretty not accurate. Harry Potter is good, while The Magicians is shit. But I still love it. It’s loveable shit. It’s the kind of shit you can rub into your eyes, or squeeze into your mouth, and feel quite sustained.

Owl

by Jesse

the poem

William’s father owned a house, a crumbling wooden shack on stilts, located somewhere deep in the Australian bush. To get there, William’s father took the only road — a bumpy track of dirt that snaked through scrub for hours, with turns at random intervals. (A sharp right here to circumvent a spider’s lair, etc.) Just crickets, birds and horse-flies lived so far away from town.

I don’t like photos.

by Jesse

No-one in my family does. I don’t like having shots taken of me. I don’t like it when people put up photos on the wall. (I don’t know whether to look at them or if that’s awkward.) I don’t like photos when they don’t have anyone in them, like some of my dad’s photos. He reckons he’s a photographer. Whenever I go to his place these days he has all these arty shots up in the kitchen, just a bunch of photos of empty rooms. I can’t stand them. They make me think of those movies where a character is deleted from existence and that person fades from all the photos. When I see my dad’s photos I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him and scream, Who has been erased from your memory, dad. Remember. Remember.

Review: Quiet City

by Jesse

I wonder whether I’m right in guessing that Connor O’Brien is heavily Kurt Vonnegut-influenced. Most young writers are, so it’s a pretty safe bet, but in Connor’s newly published collection of short stories, the first story, titled “So There’s Life, And Then There’s This”, is so Vonnegut-esque. It’s got that Vonnegut theme, the dehumanising effect of technology. It’s got a dark, absurd humour, and a gut-wrenching twist. In my opinion, the first story is the best one in the collection, and the rest are pretty great too.

Woodford, pt 2

by Jesse

The Chai Tent is a cool venue at Woodford where cool cats come to chill. The music there is mostly chalkboard—which means that anybody who wants to perform writes their name on a chalkboard and then if the audience gets bored they have to eat a piece of chalk and then say “chalk-bored!” which is always a bit of fun. Apparently, the sort of amateur musicians who think that open-mic nights are good exposure are mostly young women who sound like Sarah Blasko or Regina Spektor or Missy Higgins. I know everyone compares young female musicians to other female musicians. Maybe if all female musicians didn’t sound the same we wouldn’t have to.