Primitive promotions

After four years writing my doctorate Walking for food: Regaining permapoesis, and two more years researching and writing The art of free travel: A frugal family adventure (forthcoming UNSW Press), I'm musing about what next to focus my attention on. Here are some sketches:

This subject comes from an interest in critiquing popularist activism that avoids larger questions about civil-settler culture and the role of agriculture in making cities, and how cities originally divided labour producing not just pollution but historians, artists and like-specialists who, in turn, helped construct total ecological abstractionism.

Examining all that is under lock-and-key and why home, food and mobility are reliant on debt, and how debt ecologically, politically and ethically bankrupts through the marriage of industry-science and growth-economics.

The subject focuses on a pet hate: If you act or think differently you're an ideologue, while if you passively go along with consumer-pollution ideology, you're not. Unpopular Acts examines how our corporate-science society is the most boring ever to exist, and investigates that very brutal word 'normal' and how school shapes us for being normal corporatised citizens absent of ecstasy and looseness.

Read more...

A brief journey through ecological crisis (a brief history of privatisation)

plough (agriculture)

> 10000 <

hierarchy (debt)

> 5000 <

literacy (industrialisation)

> 300 <

skyscraper (cheap oil)

> 80 <

hypertechnocivility (blood minerals)

> 30 <

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead showing skyscraper font born out of the monocultural field.

Read more...

First draft, sent...

My supervisor/editor, Kate Fagan, received today the first draft of my manuscript Walking for Food: Regaining Permapoesis. After three and a half years the work is by no means over, but it feels like a significant achievement.

First draft, Walking for Food, 2013

Read more...

Walking for Food

I've been in Hobart for twelve days staying with my friend Glen, attempting to put together a first draft of all the chapters I've been working on over the past thirty months that constitute my doctoral research work, 'Walking for Food' (working title).

While at Glen's I was able to forage in his local neighbourhood. I brought to our table rosemary, figs, mallow, dandelion, hawksbeard, apples, feijoas, fennel, borage flowers, stickyweed, rosehips, crab apples, and up on Mount Nelson high above the suburbs I came across the one fungus I saw in hobart, the curry punk (Piptoporus australiensis), which I consumed only as sensory delight. Walking and foraging helped me loosen up my sedentary studious body, but I also resorted to quick break outs in Glen's apartment overlooking the Derwent River.

Arriving back in Melbourne yesterday morning I wandered once more disappointingly into The Age while I waited for a cup of tea and read another stupid article on foraging. Will the bourgeoise please take a plate of death caps now. Actually the article was not really on foraging at all but on secreting, privatising and selfishly capitalising on the autonomous food commons. Arseholes!

Photo: Meredith O'Shea

On my last night in Hobart I was a guest speaker at a dinner-debate titled 'Eating Wild Fungi: Fun or Foolhardy', an event that was part of a national symposium of mycologists and fungi enthusiasts that aimed to generate more awareness of the important role mycelium plays in life production. I wrote this little number while at the symposium.

At the dinner I was on the affirmative team with Tasmanian food writer Graeme Phillips and my friend Alison, a photographer and fungi educator who I've been doing an informal apprenticeship with while helping her out with the brilliant workshops she runs. We argued for a return to commonsense and self-accountability, not the continuation of the nanny state. Naturally I found this debate a platform to critique anti-ecological society, its estrangement due to a lost connection with food. We won!

Then after the dinner I hooked up with Glen for a final bash at Hobart nightlife, and headed to the Brisbane Hotel to see the FUN FUN FUN world of the 5678s. They were very cheap, cool and mingled with the common mycelium after the show. I had a chat with bassist Akiko Omo about all things punk, fungus and Hobart.

My love and gratitute to Glen for a wonderful time, and who shot this final peg as an encapsulating image of an awesome journey, at once intellectual and biophysical; metaphoric and metabolic; theory and practice; fun and fungi.

Read more...