Featured in
- Published 20241105
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-01-2
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook, PDF
Though he lives in a rundown unit
above a busy intersection,
the pyjama man
imagines that the sounds of the traffic
are the waves of the ocean.
It is not automobiles
that are passing by his window;
it is the crashing of waves into the shore.
He finds the sound of the ocean therapeutic
and becomes a man of peace.
His friends tell him it is the traffic,
the relentless sound of the traffic,
that has driven him mad,
that has caused this fantasy.
Their negativity
makes him even more determined
to believe the delusion.
Share article
About the author
Damian Balassone
Damian Balassone’s writing has appeared in a variety of Australian and international publications, including The New York Times, The Australian, Light, Abridged, The Spectator,...
More from this edition
Moonshot
Poetry in the tenth set he sent the tennis ball on an interstellar galaxy quest, a sudden outburst which seemingly served no visible purpose but still remained an...
Gay saints
Non-fictionWhat is it that makes cinema, for Pasolini, sacrosanct? The answer lies in his affinity for a painter who made only one fresco. Not only was Caravaggio’s reputation restored by Pasolini’s teacher and mentor, Roberto Longhi, but Caravaggio and Pasolini have the same taste in men. Swarthy, young and savage – as likely to sit for a portrait or engage in a bit of sloppy top as to stick a knife in your ribs. You wouldn’t want to run into his John the Baptist in a dark alley (unless maybe you would). It is not just the revolutionary psychology of Caravaggio’s painting that speaks to Pasolini but his selection of subjects – his sacralisation of the scorned, the unclean, the seething subproletariat both created and rejected by an indifferent urban landscape; Caravaggio’s ‘new kinds of people’.
Through the looking glass
In Conversation Photography and truth have always had a complicated relationship. Long before AI and deepfakes recalibrated our trust in the medium, we’ve seen reality reinterpreted...
