Intimate Antipathies by Luke Carman

Author:Luke Carman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Fond memories first: the greyskinned trees and the hill-dimpled fields of the Kingswood campus crowded up to the windows of empty classrooms, the idyll outside bisected by the distant murmur of the Great Western Highway. Our group would meet once a fortnight in those eerily quiet and disorderly rooms between the bustle of tutorials where Marshall McLuhan quotations had dried onto the whiteboards and I admit to rolling my eyes at the others when they buried their heads in notebooks or read deeply from their manuscripts. We were typical undergrads I suppose: a girl named Allison who was ostentatiously in love with the ‘bohemian’ boy, Eddy; two tiny twins from the Mountains who synchronised their outfits and plaited their hair like characters from a children’s cartoon; a shaggy bearded laddie from Kingswood who wore hipster glasses (this was in a time long before the term hipster came to mean almost anything to do with the white middle-class world); and a revolving host of wannabe poets and posers who so closely resembled one another that they have become unified in my memory.

To be sincere with you, I thought I knew more about every available world than all these comrades combined, on account of being beaten, repeatedly, by skater-skinhead-homeboys and meth-mangled housos on the streets of Liverpool in my youth, and also because I’d trawled through the mania of Henry Miller’s classics in the university’s Werrington library between semesters, alone on the empty hills of the campus while the others spent their free time playing pool at the uni bar, drunk, discussing sustainable ethics between the cracking clop of the balls and their timid hollering at the bar staff about the patriarchy. All they knew about literature, I reckoned, was how to make cutting remarks on Hemingway’s machismo.

One night, I was coaxed into the social world by one of the pixie-sized twins, who said, slinging her arm up towards my shoulder, ‘Stop being so negative, it’s such a clichéd attempt at seriousness through cynicism and it’s just sad – y’know there’s a lot going on that you can’t even imagine, can you? You won’t learn anything stuck in your room like a hamster in a colon.’ In the bar, name forgotten, Eddy scoffed when I mentioned loving The Old Man and the Sea for its flagellant misery. I didn’t mind him scoffing at my readings, but the next thing I knew his tobacco breath slid into my nostrils; he leant towards me on his pool cue, like a gargoyle clinging to a doorframe, and he said, ‘Hemingway’s problem was that he was afraid he’d never be as much of a man as Gertrude Stein.’ What did I care about Hemingway? I wondered, looking at the grin Eddy bore me as he moved back towards the pool table; Papa was just another headless horseman as far as I was concerned, but to say something like that about the man – something Eddy had no doubt stolen from a YouTube debate between Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton – shook me around like an eight-ball.

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