Computer courses are usually designed to teach software. Such courses set out to cover a certain number of features in a certain time. After 30 hours of instruction you receive a certificate that states you are competent to a certain level. This competence rarely comes with the confidence to set out and explore the next option/feature and the next program/environment.

Some things leap out and lick you. Puppy dogs, especially, seem to fill this position of desire-as-an-object. Puppy dogs are the manifestation of an unavoidable sensory connection: there is no resisting the tongue. While other animals and even people may wish to fill this category of desire-as-an-object, there is none quite so successful as the puppy dog at breaking the barriers of subject and object. Here desire seems playful, cute and a form of love that only the most cynical and hardened could resist. With puppy dogs we are the fools.

Life is extra-ordinarily simple when one solidifies objects of consciousness and calls them commodities. While this approach is more boring than death, more dangerous still is the attendant view that such magic objects should be for the purpose of replicating various audiences. The very idea of “genuine feeling” has the loud colour of poison: beware anything claiming to speak to or for you, especially if it does so with “genuine feeling”.

Texts are special objects of consciousness. In their formation and reception, they have about them features of enhancement that draw attention. These features, in their generation and interpretation, go through a variety of realisations. These realisations are always determined as material artefacts. Because they are material, the enhancements are then open to further structuring or formalisation.

First published by Nimrod Publications
University of Newcastle, Australia, 1984
ISBN 0 909242 11 9

The public role of poet, the cultural role of prophet and the social role of revolutionary, all offer to secure identity within the self-other relationship. There is no doubt that Baxter saw each of these roles as vital, but, by focusing on these roles, Weir has produced a distorted view of Baxter: a view that urges the image over the emptiness; man over god. One of the strongest policies behind the editing of the Collected Poems was the decision to only include poems that Baxter had himself selected for monograph publication. While this policy is retained for the Essential Baxter in terms of the poetry, it is wavered for the prose. While there can be no complaint with the inclusion of published book reviews, for example, the inclusion of manuscript material from a draft version of Jerusalem Daybook is highly questionable. Given that the Daybook itself is no longer in print, and given that Baxter selected not to published the passage that Weir gives in the Essential Baxter the reade…

After the first moments of discovery, everything becomes a down-load, a useless cross-reference. Calling up the 100 volume Complete Macquarie to note that the first use of ‘Duane Dibley’ as a term for disfigured identity was in an essay by James Jimmy James in 1990 is worth at least one snore. And then the instant replays of the mighty Dwarf clog ED-NET as Trudy dances the student smug. There needs to be a dump button, but no, the information goes on as if it was needed.

St Theresa is permitted her visions so long as her hand stays clear of her thighs.

History offers to make respectable lawn mowers and toilet brushes and the trivia of historical time. History promises to justify the sentimental fascination with the old and relics and the anachronistic. History is a great blot on design. History is what you do on a wet Wednesday when you show bored students the boring video of the making of the classic Coca Cola bottle, the ugliest bottle ever made.

Poets and back verandahs might not seem to be adequate to account for an entire nation’s ways of making. And yet, in the case of Australia, the whole of a mind-set can be determined, in its origins, through the simple everyday actions that form the contemplative time and space of doing. ‘What are you doing?’ finds its answer in ‘just sitting’. ‘Where are you going?’ finds its answer in ‘out back to sit on the verandah’. Beyond this, there are pieces of half inch steel that will always make-do for a barbeque plate. By following the cultural connections, Australians can find their own way home to the larger worlds of their ancestors. Like James Joyce, we can find the mind of our own in the other many minds that have been before us. We too, like all good settlers, can call up Adam and Eve, Saturn, Zeus, the wounded blacksmith and all the others ghosts who have migrated along with us to this place near the end of the world.