Perhaps the best-written novel of the century, and the funniest
Read the opening pages of the Miles Franklin award-winner below ^ Plus Parts 32 and 33 of The Demon Inside David Lynch
In today’s issue:
—’His stories were too much for a brain, rolling in stitches up there, like he was spinning some ancestor power, and you wanted him to stop telling stories like that, he got no business, but him telling them repeatedly all the same and never stopping, yep, right, like he was the national newspaper, or something called social media cancelling everybody else, and all the while only ever predicting nothing good would come out of a worldwide doom’: the opening pages of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Award for best Australian novel, and one of the greatest examples this decade of elegantly scuffed prose.
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—’But next a demon came at my face and I knew exactly who it belonged to, it was mine and mine only as it bit and slashed my face off, and now it was no longer a demon but instead a vain recluse with nostalgia in his eyes, jiggling his fingers beside my face and ignoring me when I begged for no more pain’: Parts 32 and 33 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.
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THE SHORTLIST FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD 2024
Only Sound Remains Hossein Asgari
Wall Jen Craig
Anam André Dao
The Bell of the World Gregory Day
Hospital Sanya Rushdi
Praiseworthy Alexis Wright
The winner, and the best-written, is
NEW GODS
Kulibibi. Baba yalu kurrkamala, jaja,
(butterflies are flying everywhere)
Waanyi dictionary, 2012
1
Oracle 1…speak.
Beginning with story…
Once upon a fine time for some people in the world, but not so plenteous, nor perfect for others, there lived a culture dreamer obsessing about the era. He was no great dreamer, no greater than the rest of the juggernauts in his heartbroken, storm-country people’s humanity. They knew just as much as he did about surviving on a daily basis, and about how to make sacrifices of themselves in all the cataclysmic times generated by the mangy dogs who had stolen their traditional land. These people, after the generations of dealing with the land-thief criminals like many others around the world, had turned themselves, not into a tangled web of despair, but into some of the best fighters of all times. They used pure guts for improving life, and said they were in it for the long run. Theirs was a sovereign world view – the main view acceptable to their governing ancestors, a law grown through belief in its own endlessness, and through re-setting the survival barometer from millennia a couple of hundred years ago, by evolving a new gauge – something like a moth’s sonar, for only hearing what it wanted to hear. But, to be frank, the facet worked like a shield, for seeing what they wanted to see of the world, or to shut the whole thing out forever. And for deciding whether they wanted to speak at all, for sometimes, this world never spoke for years, then when it did, spoke wreckage words – like a piece of heaven heavy with intent, firing on all cylinders from the sky.
So this dreamer fellow really had some nerve speaking doubt stuff in the God gravitas of these clergy-oriented people, and like, acting as though he was a better type of Jesus, more Messiah than they were themselves, while preaching from the unpopular pulpit of himself out on the street corner every other Sunday in front of all their self-defined denominational churches, and always, like too many times before, asking the same old question: Hey! Mob! What’s the future going to be, whatnot!
There was not a single soul in Praiseworthy who believed this fellow was real, for asking such a ridiculous question in this day and age, and right in front of the world’s greatest human survivors. Weren’t they the real business people of all times? Extinction-less tempest people from enduring one million storms, come from the ark of infinity right down to the last baby. They were now forced to speak, and yelled that they knew a thing or two about being trodden upon, and of being more on trend than the rest of humanity about how to look after the future. They would tell you themselves how they had to assert too much nervous-wreck type of anger in their voices: We studied everything you needed to know about surviving from the biggest library in the world – country. You only had to take a quick look around Praiseworthy to see all the stories were about surviving. You do not need some redundant bullshit-artist person continually harping on with his eternal question, You mob ever tried thinking about what the future of the place got to look like?
The world spins, he was told this fact thing pretty much frankly by the multitudes of insulted people. It always spins. The world is like a big spin dryer.
Then this atmospheric pressure blackfella – still acting like God, thinking he was on top of the story universe, in with some fancy contemporary scene – started asking what was the comfort zone, what level, what was living to tell the tale like, of being a survivalist of the situation? He was seeing it all as a hundred per cent thing in the funniness. His stories were too much for a brain, rolling in stitches up there, like he was spinning some ancestor power, and you wanted him to stop telling stories like that, he got no business, but him telling them repeatedly all the same and never stopping, yep, right, like he was the national newspaper, or something called social media cancelling everybody else, and all the while only ever predicting nothing good would come out of a worldwide doom. You got tired of hearing gloominess all the time – with all his remembering of this and that of the twenty-first century hot load in planetary catastrophes of global warming or global viruses, and never tiring of talking about all this stuff, this great mess, while people were saying that they preferred listening to magpies that sung to the moon, and the night-time hopping mouse was having an anxiety attack from hearing this catastrophic stuff, like another dry thunderstorm, when it had to sneak out from beneath some bit of scrubby dry grass where it has a nice hidey-hole thing in the soil, from where it cuts through that spinifex highway along the aeon-old ancestral tracks, hopping along a bit happy, a bit relieved it was still alive and not struck by lightning into a splat while heading way down south, cuts across west this way, east that way, leaving golden moon-shone paw prints behind in the sandy soil, and then what? Well! Hold everything! It too remembers catastrophic times, then quick speed, heads straight back up north, races back over its original tracks to where it had just a moment ago left, and jumps like lightning under the same stump of grass now turned the colour of grey gloom.
Well! One thing! We know all about global warming and deadly viruses. This was what the countrymen repeatedly and exhaustively explained to the zeitgeist Cause Man Steel over and over, that he did not need to lay his life on the line for them, they would take care of business…but, you know what? Cause never liked listening to others. He was saved by his own brain. The old country men and women, totally exasperated, even murderous, wanted him dead. They wanted global warming, wanted the lot, wanted to hasten the thing up, because on Praiseworthy country, people of traditional thought preferred silence and never wanted to speak another word, nor wanted to watch any more stupidity, nor see anything ridiculous, nor think about any of the crazy things other people did with their lives to cause ancestral storms and mayhem. So, they said: Listen, shit for brains! It never gets lonely and wrathful here, because country here always look after its people, because people here look after their country.
No matter what you care about in this world, or whether you give two frigs, there will always be times, when nobody will like hearing a scary future thinker’s doom stories about the destruction of the globe. They do not want to hear anyone who thinks that humanity is out of sync with the wrathful planet, or someone who called himself a planet fixer of cataclysmic change; or, some kind of influencer, likened to one of those modern gods of social media. Nobody wanted to have an anomaly man like this in Praiseworthy. He was told to shut up. Why had they survived since time immemorial? Their ancient law. That’s what. This was what took care of business. Not idiots. There were far better oracles than him to listen to who knew white murderers were everywhere, and who could fathom the depth of consequences to the living world from ancestral laws being broken by the destruction of countless sacred ancient law places and culture people across their holy continent since white colonisation. Sure! He was told these things many times, but sadly, their kind of ancient oracle-ising was not in sync with Cause Man Steel’s vision of the modern world. They joked about death wishers, laughed themselves silly about having this doom dreamer living illegally among them, but in a nice way, just to show that they thought about the world too, and named him Widespread – for the breadth of his ideas spreading all over the place. Or, they called him Planet – because he was always talking planetary stuff. Or else, they called the weirdo by his real name – Cause Man Steel – cause, cause and effect. He was hard all right, like the power ancestor’s essence in Australia’s iron ore.
Anyhow! This planet fixer ended up wasting away among the others who did not give a rat’s arse about saving a dying world, and in the end, he became as skinny as a rake. He stooped so low from carrying the weight of the entire world on his bony shoulders, that his face was almost touching the ground in front of him, like he was studying the dirt of the planet itself, same as a greedy camp dog sniffing along the ground. Yep! This was the local influencer: a modern god preaching about the planet collapsing. They call this type of person a collapsologist, someone specialising in collapsology – this was what he claimed to be doing, putting himself in front of the collapse – to hold the thing up, as though he was the most knowledgeable wise man around, when everyone else in Praiseworthy already knew the mise en abyme ways of the Earth to the nth degree of each cataclysmic change in either the minuses or pluses of overheating in the twenty-first-century buggered-up world. Yep! Again! Let it be said: this man was a live pulpit, a kind of Marvin Gaye singing about What’s going on in never-ending parables, as though he was personally responsible for the composition of some big new revolutionary recreation story cycle for the world mind you, even though in normal reality, it was more like driving a petrol-guzzling sedan anyhow over goat’s tracks, than walking across the planet as some kind of medieval crusading warrior man from Praiseworthy, like God with the weight of the world strapped over his back.
What’s going on?
Wanyinbu-nanja.
What for?
Then, it’s like this: in a magical gleaming day of supreme sunshine, something fantastical occurred, which was like a catharsis bingo moment coming on for this one small colonialism-style hot prick of a place on Earth, when Widespread discovered the odyssey plan.
Planet wanted to give his humble culture people the gift of infinity, although they already had the all times surviving stories planted squarely in the culture’s soul. Doesn’t matter about that. The plan was a real goer, a rhapsody superglued on the door of the main cupboard for ideas in his head, and in a pivotal moment of broadcasting – widespreading the thing – he said, Listen, my humanity. This is what we gotta do.
Basically, the plan was for his people to ride straight through the century on the back of the burning planet, and live to tell the tale on the other side. This was what the ancestors had done for countless millennia. Check the facts in the climate change stories they had left behind, which were about how it felt to be a survivor of all times, of being changed, evolved, looking challenge after challenge in the eye, but always surviving in the end.
Then, you know what happened, somebody went and killed Aboriginal Sovereignty, infinity itself.
Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize – Fiction
Winner of the 2024 Stella Prize
Winner of the 2023 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards
Shortlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award
Winner of the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award
.
In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both ecological disaster and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: a national donkey transport scheme that will guarantee his people’s independence forever. He finds, however, as he bundles feral donkeys into his Ford Falcon and dumps them en masse in the cemetery, that not all of Praiseworthy agrees. Outrage ferments at his desecration of traditional land, while Cause’s wife Dance seeks refuge with butterflies and dreams of moving their family to China. Bad feelings reach fever pitch when citizens catch wind of the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, Cause’s eldest son. All are distraught – all, that is, except eight-year-old Tommyhawk Steel, who, with his brother gone, gleefully pursues his dream of becoming white and powerful. Told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned, Praiseworthy is a marvel of explosive sentences, a shock to allegory, an outraged cry against oppression, and a biting satire for the end of days.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
Set-Piece with the Insurance Forms
In Part 6 we get a real low of Dougie lows. After Janey-E scolds him for a boring three and a half minutes, he spends the next minute and a half slowly drawing a ladder on an insurance-claim form. Not the most TRE®-provoking moment in TV drama, though it is quite dismaying when you learn that this ladder’s meant to represent both the one on which Osiris climbs to heaven in Egyptian mythology and the one from which Tim Finnegan falls at the start of Finnegans Wake.
But now gather round the set and prepare to shudder, people, because Dougie’s picked up another insurance form. He now spends more than a minute slowly drawing on it another ladder. He then draws some stairs that could also be chevrons or someone’s EEG.
‘Thank fuck that’s over,’ says shuddering Les.
But the claim-form ordeal isn’t over, Les, nowhere near over, because later in the episode a couple of these forms are examined by Dougie’s boss Bushnell Mullins. He asks Dougie about the scribbles. Dougie gibbers. By this point our toes are in a pretty bad way. But at last this spectacularly dull sequence ends and we can relax.
Except we can’t relax at all, can we, because Mullins now examines yet another form with a doodled ladder and set of stairs/chevrons/EEG blips. Dougie blinks and struggles to drink his coffee. Mullins examines another form. Dougie gazes uncomprehendingly at a poster. Mullins examines yet another insurance-claim form on which Dougie’s depicted a ladder and some stairs/chevrons/blips. Les downs Methotrexate for his arthritis. Mullins examines another form, and another, and another, and another. Nine forms in total he examines, not in some kind of sped-up montage of insurance-form examinations but one slow examination after another, after another. Then he goes back and re-checks the eighth, just to be sure. He re-checks the ninth. He switches back and forth for a bit between the eighth and ninth.
And again relief and gratitude course through you when he decides to stop at only nine insurance forms.
‘Why not ten insurance forms?’ Les asks the ceiling or maybe, unknowingly, the entities.
‘Why not far more than this?’ Trinna replies. ‘Why not ten thousand?’
‘And why is The One only eighteen hours long? Which philistine Showtime suit person placed any time limits of any kind on this sublime insurance-form set-piece?’
‘And why is The One not running until the end of time on every television set in the world, featuring only these examinations of the sublime scribbles of this Dougie?’
‘And why would anybody in the world ever consider doing anything else with their time but watching it?’
Picture unyoung mondains in their trousers, cropped, low-bummed, tight, dreams-contaminatingly tight—picture these exquisites in their trousers gathered in the Institución Nacional Lynch or MoMA or a treehut to watch The Return, each of them grooving along to Dougie and Mullins and the forms. They’re having a rare old time, they’re telling themselves.
But if you get up close, e.g. if a certain Satanist rostered one weekend at the Institución lets you zoom in its cameras on a certain minstrel, you can see in his expression more, much more, than just enjoyment. There’s a twitch at the corners of the eyes and lips and beard, a struggle of some kind with the wry amusement he’s managed to plaster across his mouth if not his eyes. There’s a resemblance as well to the slippages and warpings that can beset the face of an addict full of self-hatred because they can’t lay off the booze or meth. Different parts of his face sag for a bit, his cheeks, his jowls, the skin around his eyes, before he winces and cringes like he’s smelt or remembered something terrible. But then it registers with him that he’s shaming himself, so the face tries to return to what passes for normal for this minstrel, or even poignantly to suggest it’s having fun. Except the self-hatred is still ingrained in his face, with the result that a battle develops between the self-disgusted sags, winces and cringes and the attempts to deny or rectify them, with advances and retreats in every direction from both warring sides. It’s horrible to watch, horribly fascinating. It’s also the face of lots more Institución, MoMA and treehut connoisseurs of this unforgettable scene.
Nothing will ever persuade most of them that they’re the victim of a demonic joke, because they’ve crossed the Line. They faked it till they made it and now they’ve lost their moorings in the real, similar to the Line people cross when they switch from heavy drinker to alcoholic or social tooter to outright addict. And this is why such people often go plecto when anyone suggests they’re no longer in control of what they say or do, because even though it doesn’t feel as though they’ve lost their mind, at some level they kind of know they have. It’s the frenzy of kayfabe 3 cognitive dissonance rather than the relatively calm total denial of the mark in kayfabe 1.
Tell an early-stage alcoholic that’s what they are and they might be annoyed but not so they obsess over the comment and cook up revenge fantasies. Very different with many late-stage alcoholics in kayfabe 3. Tell somebody who watches a telenovela that it’s junk and they’ll shrug the comment off. Follow a greying mondain in an infinity scarf from the Institución then keep muttering on his Metro that ‘The forms set-piece is junk, the forms set-piece is junk,’ and you’ll wish to step out of range of his scarf-swinging and attempted hair-pulling. He’ll still be looping your mutters through his mind long after you’ve fled, because at some level he vaguely knows they were accurate and he’s been lost in the cluelessness of the mark and is no longer capable of independent thought.
Like the neo-Nazi militiaman whose worldview has been shaped by the Daily Caller and Fox News, or the apostle who believes Mr Morrissey’s novella and ‘Asian Rut’ should have won him the Nobel instead of Bob Dylan, this Manbam’s been sissy hypno’d into a different dimension from yours and mine, practically, and that isn’t easy to hear on the Metro let alone admit to yourself, especially the sissy-hypno part, and so all those looped thoughts mean he projects his fury not at himself, the mark suckered by the series, but (the usual consequence of denial being projection) at anybody who dares point this out on public transport.
Take it from someone who has more experience in this area than he’d like. As the boulevardiers grooved along to the forms, did you see the cocaine on their nostril hairs? Did you catch the overripe-fruit smell of psychosis that was disgusting the Institución’s guards and cleaners? This is what we’re up against.
None of which is to say that denial is always a bad thing. Life can be so horrific that were you to fully appreciate its horrors, your mind could possibly shatter. One way to get through coaltong sessions is to pretend they’re just a dream or film you can observe as an outsider if you want, or if that doesn’t work then pretend it’s strangers doing all this to you, that’s if you don’t just send your mind off to Buckie Thistle beating Elgin City, or to family car journeys and picnics before Maddy and Demmy and Suds crossed the Line. And of course some leaps of faith can be crucial in recovery, such as fake it till you make it or handing decisions over to an imaginary higher power, while suspension of disbelief is essential to our enjoyment of storytelling, and may even be a fundamental part of what makes us human.
But I think I’ve seen enough of denial, both in myself and others, to be comfortable saying that the refusal to accept an important truth is nearly always a bad thing, and to be sure it is in the case of the rottenness of the forms set-piece. I’ll be straight with you. Denial’s the only state of mind that worries me any more, that it might somehow creep back in and without me noticing warp how everything looks, like the funhouse mirrors gazed at by Santa Rita’s anorexics. Or worse, that I never got shot of the denial in the first place.
Vertical Insertion
[Ella]
Mateo stood under a blue spotlight in his Frank Booth leather blousson and loudly snorted two lines of cocaine. He ran fingers over his hips and thighs, over his mic, over the twin pronging parts of his beard, then to the tune of ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ he sang about his work, some more about his work, how he got taken on at El Mundo, how he mastered criticism while editing the arts magazine at Universidad Carlos III, some more about his career, his favourites among his song lyrics and among articles he had published, on and on as tiny 4-AcO-MET/AL-LAD Mateo-Franks in miniature bloussons swirled around him bowing to every lyric, every reminiscence^^.
This had happened before, of course. I had heard this number many times before. So it would always seem curious that it took until tonight for the bolt of thunder to strike.
My arms dropped to my sides, my beer fell from my hand and rolled away. Pain got hold of my chest and legs. I was struggling to breathe. I fell onto the beery floor. More pain seized my legs. A haze of some kind floated above me and I told it to phone an ambulance. There was some melancholic smell in his flat, like very old pan de frutas.
What happened after that I did not know, but when I opened my eyes I saw a paramedic frowning at my legs. I tried to straighten something alien and cut and bruised. My own toes, I realised, which had come bursting right up through my Laura Palmer schoolgirl pumps. I remembered not to claim the pain as mine, as Ella’s hurting, but just to see it as it was, pain only.
The paramedic said, ‘Breathe slowly. Try to bend those knees in the other direction.’
Pain only. It helped, or it did for a time at least. But next a demon came at my face and I knew exactly who it belonged to, it was mine and mine only as it bit and slashed my face off, and now it was no longer a demon but instead a vain recluse with nostalgia in his eyes, jiggling his fingers beside my face and ignoring me when I begged for no more pain. My legs were winched again where they wanted not to go, as though pulled by cranes of a building site.
It hurt, then it did not hurt, like my life with Mateo was draining from my body, and in that draining was the defeat I had perhaps been seeking for six years. I shouted out very loudly and deeply, the shout which made known to the world the most horrible thing in the history of art: The Return’s absolute rock bottom.