Other writing

Other writing
by Jill Jones

I will place various other kinds of writing of mine on this page from time to time. This will include reviews, interviews, articles and fiction.

To begin with, here is a (slightly edited) piece I performed at the Australian Society for Australian Literature (ASAL) Conference in Perth in 1993 as part of their well-known Parody Night. It won first prize. It is partly a self-parody and you probably have to know a little something about my work and Australian literature in general to get it fully (who, you might ask, is Fidelia Hill?) as well as some of the famous roles sung by Maria Callas, but it isn't too impenetrable. The poems of mine to which the piece makes most reference are Soap opera salad and The phantom division from my first book The Mask and the Jagged Star. They also appear in my latest book, Screen Jets Heaven: New and Selected Poems. And Honi Soit, of course, is the student newspaper at Sydney University. But enough explanation.

Feral Kitchens:
The subversion of the post-culinary discourse
in the early works of Jill Jones

I present this paper as a post-futurist paranoid discourse. In it I wish to narrativise, factise and reposition current critical strategies that have interrogated sites of desire, from a theoretical rendering of nodes of post-antipodial consciousnes, which prefigures both a neo-domestication analysis of fictive moments and paradigms of ambivalent co-surrogacy in the early, ie. pre-full frontal transgressive distopian texts of Jill Jones.

Since her series of hyper-novelistic multi-disk CD texts beginning with her Booker Prize-winning Cooking on Moderate: Other People's Leftovers, most critical attention has focused on the quasi-mutant discourse of collective dysfunctional dietisation in Jones' work, as well as her much-publicised association with the ex-PM about whom she wrote a number of crypto-authoritarian elegies on his death (from mysterious circumstances in post-holocaust Bankstown).

But it is to the early texts I wish to turn, drawing on Smith's analysis of Brown's ficto-critico articulation of the calorific figuring of post-menu formulations in Sydney's neo-Bohemian circles at the time of the 2000 Olympics. As has been established through thematic interrogation of the linguistic patterning of Jones' shopping lists, it is almost beyond doubt that she was involved, at an eccentric almost allegoric level, in a parasynchronic friendship with a mysterious figure known as Dorothy, who has claimed that in another life she was an Egyptian princess (but doesn't everyone), as well as a Russian count, Orlandovich, who was the real author of all Shakespeare's plays up to April 1 1603, as well as key sections of Christina Stead's American novels, known now as the J text.

We are all familiar with two key obsessional proto-mythical motifs in Jones' work - the fetta cheese and the phantom ring. In my reading I have uncovered a subversive variality which indicates a startling new insight - documentised closely in my new book, Deglazing the Source of the Goose: Cooked Birds and Crook Picnics in the 1990s.

What is the fetta cheese? What place does its seductive degeneracy have in the symbolic order? Fetta, of course, is aligned to the fetid, a prominent signifier of all unfinished business. This means, of course, that the text is provisional, inviting us to partake in its slippage, no doubt caused by the liquidised matter on the kitchen floor, as it were, of our critical apparatus.

My greater concern, however, is with the phantom ring. Even a cursory and conventional reading position (two pillows and a light shining over the right shoulder) will insist in exposing textual elements which lead the critical reader to historicise Jones' articulated resistance in a defamiliarised milieu. The phantom ring sits in direct symbolic relation to the fairy ring and represents Jones' transgressive rejectification of the post-colonialist retrodiscourse by aligning herself with a pseudo-Celtic post-afternoon pre-night arena of signification. In other words, Jones sold-out early in the game and further analysis of her later texts will cover the extent to which she collaboratised in cannibalising antipodial textual intercourse.

To add to my case I have unearthed a previously unpublished early poem which further illustrates my point. It was serialised and illustrated in an obscure student newspaper - as they say, honi soit qui mal y pense.

Sub Liminal Salad
or
Maria Callas and the Post-Culinary Heresy

In our last fight you said I was as fat as a chaise lounge,
while I felt as brittle as a chair, thinner than haiku,
more abject than a soggy pavlova.
Waving my broken Walkperson in the air I cried, limp
as public servant, "they have eaten me alive,
they've put me on the cover of a book, tits to the wind,
exposing me as a site of desire." You said something about
sight to behold, seize her salad and, mistranslating Baudelaire,
exclaimed "absinthe makes the heart to wander".
You've made a picnic of my heart - hypocrite lecteur,
mon semblable, mon frere. I was watching the dust
in the wind - was it Southerly or Westerly? Maria Callas sings
from a radio: "Art and Love, these I have lived for."
The TV replies: Dorothy, this sure doesn't look like Kansas.
Well, where the Foucault we? The cat grinned, turned upside down,
a feral liminal moggy. No wonder I'm soggy, glazed
in the ladies lounge with no praxis to grind anymore,
troping through the kitchen to be confronted by
an absolutely ordinary Greek salad. It isn't fair,
I was looking for an escape hatch but you've made
Melba toast of my mind, a Fidelia Hill of my soul,
and a Pavlova of my heart.