YEAHS & NAHS: FREE YEAHS, ONE TIME ONLY!
ft. Will Cox, Nika Mo, Harry Cunningham, and I post hog!
Drongobubbas!
Welcome back to YEAHS & NAHS, YNR’s weekly recap and recommendations column for paying subscribers, where we catch ya up on what’s dardy as/blows chunks, and tell ya how best to get it in ya.
First things first: apologies for the lack of YEAHS & NAHS last week, as well as the lack of Friday Fiction (I’m sure you missed that one, haha!). I am getting bollocked every which way by deadlines and day job (disability support worker) and health stuff (constitution of 12th century Irish serf) right now, and it’s putting me a bit behind on everything. As soon as they find a cure for my many maladies, I’ll run this beast like a master lion tamer, fukn oath.
I’m loving writing these columns, but they’re a lot of work. Depending on how the next month or so plays out, I may have to make YEAHS & NAHS a once every two weeks thing, just for the sake of my sanity. I’m very much a “burn the candles with a flamethrower from all sides” kinda chump, but I’m getting on in years (34 is the new 72!) and I gotta rest every now and again, lest the vapours take me.
Still! YNR just hit 1100 subscribers! Dang that’s great/nutty! I can’t believe how well this thing’s going. Hard to convey how appreciative I am of all your support between all the ‘jokes’ about skull types etc, but just know I truly am grateful.
I’ve got such big things planned for YNR and beyond. If you’re diggin’ it/me, and you want to be at least a small part of those plans, then the best thing you can do is subscribe for a measly $5 a month. Beyond that, you can simply share YNR with everyone you know, and talk about it at the water cooler or tuck shop or petrol tank (Dutton style) or wherever you happen to wile away the hours.
Anyway, let’s hop to it…
THE ROUND-UP!
what’s been goin’ on, big dog!
privy goodly squire! wishlist NOCK LOOSE !!!
Hark ya bugger! My debut novel NOCK LOOSE (out July 1) is available to ‘wishlist’ right now, right here!
It’s a damn good book. I’m seeing advanced copies land in the mitts of some of my favourite Australian writers and reviewers, and the butterflies in my gut are all but transforming it into a goon cave (been using a lot of goon cave imagery of late [sorry] but I think it’s genuinely a beautiful phrase, like ‘cellar door’).
I’ve put all my chips in on this book being a ‘success.’ That looks like something very specific to me. In short, it looks like permission. I’m sitting on four other finished manuscripts. I want to start my own small press. I want OzLit to buck the fuck up and take a tilt at being good and cool. NOCK LOOSE is gonna be the foundation of this insurgency. Wishlist it, buy it, spruik it on Hinge (this has been working somehow!?!).
Geddonit!
THE BATTLER talks to Joana Partyka about cop oppression in the petrostate
and I have started a weekly Lefty shit-talk and news recap podcast called where we marvel at the horrible mugs of Australia’s would-be MPs, but also talk to journalists, academics, activists, artists, and other experts about the, y’know, current state of things (hint: bad). This week we spoke to activist and artist Joana Partyka of Disrupt Burrup Hub. I have known Joana for a couple of years now, and consider myself very lucky to have her as a friend and comrade in the Hell that is WA’s Forever Boom.
She has spent the past 2+ years having her life ground into dust by WA Police, the State, and the Mining Corpos for her climate activism. I interviewed her for Crikey at the start of this, way back in 2023. It’s a genuinely harrowing tale of how state violence is leveraged on behalf of the world’s most powerful corporations to crush what is ultimately non-violent dissent. Give it a listen wherever you get your podracing.
Peter Dutton is a Fucking WEIRDO!!!
In last week’s YNR feature, I talk about Peter Dutton’s life long habit of being a HUGE FUCKING FREAK and how that’s handicapping him in the election a tad.
Peter Dutton has a Problem: He’s a Huge Fucking Freak
In 2018, which was seven years ago (you take 20 psychic damage), in the pages of now defunct literary journal The Lifted Brow (you take suffer poison damage, -5 HP per sentence going forward) I wrote an overly verbose, far too long, incredibly autistic (even by my standards), essay in which
Read this bad boy if you want all my thoughts, but needless to say, he is a god damn orc, specifically, this one:
A HORSE HELD AT GUNPOINT: The Epic Saga Continues
Speaking of my weird af novels, I’m still serialising my shortlisted screwball epic (it’s long) A HORSE HELD AT GUNPOINT here every Friday, to an audience of two I think.
It’s a fun time! I’ve made it easy to catch up by linking past chapters in the most recent post. Again, sorry for not uploading this Friday, I’m literally trying to finish a new manuscript that’s due this Friday and my hyperfocus makes it hard for me to remember to eat, let alone post on le sub.
YEAHS & NAHS…
ft. Will Cox, Nika Mo, Harry Cunningham, and posting hog!
Before we dive into this weeks YEAHS & NAHS, here’s a guide for new subscribers/readers as to how they (currently) work:
Nah, Yeah = stuff I like 👍 and reckon you’ll like 👍
Yeah, Nah = stuff I don’t like 👎 that sucks big time 👎
I think that’s straight forward enough? At least by my standards.
Paying Drongoloids ONLY beyond this point, sorry to my fellow bludgers (I would never pay to subscribe to anything but White Dwarf [this is a joke, I bought myself a subscription to Sight & Sound as a treat this Christmas, been loving it]).
At least that’s usually the go! But this week I’m showcasing some local talent I’d like some more eyes on. So this week’s YEAHS, at least, are free. Hopefully this gives you free-tierios a taste for YEAHS & NAHS, and encourages you to sign up for more.
As I said above, the best way to support YNR/me is to chuck us $5 a month. I want to make YNR a full time gig. I know that’s delusional but I’m a pretty delusional sorta fella.
You’re gonna wanna smash subscribe anyway: this weeks NAHS, I’m posting hog!
Thanks, I love you. Now here’s ya YEAHS & NAHS…
NAH, YEAH…
Will Cox’s HYACINTH glows like your nan’s CRTV on a cold winter night
As mainstream OzLit continues to calcify in its death spiral plummet into unsalvageable mediocrity, what should be it’s leading voices, having grown tired of waiting for the industry’s fart powered tram to arrive at the station, have seized the means of production and set about self-publishing what is easily some of (most of) the best work in Australian fiction (and beyond) right now.
You can say this trend really kicked into overdrive after the success of Michael Winkler’s king-hit hit, Grimmish — a book I could wax lyrical about until I black out and conk my head on my side table. There’s no real starting point to this trend, but two+ decades of artistic, economic, and moral cowardice from the mid-wit gatekeepers who run OzLit’s shopfront has spurred on an exciting DIY movement I pray more people begin paying attention to. (please read Nicholas John Turner’s absolutely sublime Let the Boys Play, which I’ll write about at length sometime in the future.)
One of these authors is Will Cox, whose Hyacinth arrived on the scene in 2023 like a wreath of kettle bells hurled through a window at a local council meeting.
Hyacinth is a protracted riff on 90s British sitcom, Keeping Up Appearances — a show that I, a lonely only child surrounded by geriatrics who was permitted way too much TV time, used to watch obsessively. This was mainly because the show’s ‘protagonist,’ the faux-posho Mrs Bucket (‘Bouquet’), reminded me so much of my truly insane Nanna (RIP, you old bat!), to the point where she (God bless her mental heart) truly thought it was a personal attack (tbf she thought everything was a personal attack).
Cox works in a playfulness of form and content that has essentially been outlawed in mainstream Australian fiction. It’s a daring, dreamy, dangly, ultimately delirious trip through domestic and cultural entrapment, that gives the effect of channel flipping in a cheap motel late at night, only to find the same show on every station.
My only gripe with Hyacinth is that it should be getting 10x more praise, prizes, and profit than it has been. That’s not to say it hasn’t received plenty of those things, but. Cox, like Winkler and Turner, has proven that alt-lit can be a successful investment for those who dare to get weird and free thesmelves from the shackles of OzLit’s baked-in temerity.
Like Grimmish, I could talk about Hyacinth until I’m ushered out of the room by men with butterfly nets. It’s a little beacon of hope — a sly manifesto — in a bookscape that is otherwise as boring as it is baron. It’s worth setting up the VCR for.
Geddonit by clicking the cover below:
Harry Cunningham snaps world’s longest city
Perth photographer Harry Cunningham recently exhibited photos from his series THE WORLD’S LONGEST CITY (2024) at the recently wrapped Perth Design Week, and the work is haunting, to say the least.
These photos trace out Perth’s impossible suburban sprawl. Having been obsessed with documenting it myself (if in different mediums) for over a decade now, Cunningham’s work felt like a grim peek into an Aldi Mirror of Galadriel, only this potential nightmare future has already come to pass.
Perth is the world’s ‘longest’ city. Our hollow-earth McMansion riddled ultra-outer suburban company town’s (it’s all The Boom, baby) now out strip-mall the spread of megalopolises like L.A and Tokyo. It’s as bleak as it is bonkers, trust me, my job is 90% driving dude’s with head injuries through peak hour traffic, that’s somehow occurring at 12.13pm.
Cunningham confronts this barren middle-class fever dream in a way only a kid who has lived through the slow drip surrealism of The Boom could. There’s a book out now, and a documentary dropping soon. Give it a gander.
Nika Mo’s alt-folk balladry’s got me hopeful for the return of the songwriter
One of Perth’s musical wunderkinds, Nika Mo (who moonlights in so many projects [peep Great Statue], including Boorloo’s Best Band, Didion’s Bible) has just put out new music via an EP called ‘Panicle.’
Nika Mo, aka Annika Moses, makes music that gets me reflecting on certain trickles and eddies in my life that I may or may not regret succumbing to. It is immediate, raw, and intricate in a way that similar music rarely aspires to be, in Australia at least (and Perth especially).
Nika Mo at Fremantle Town Hall, part of Audible Edge Fest a week back…
I always say my main problem with the Perth music scene is that it produces a lot of S-tier musicians, next to none of whom are good songwriters. That, and you can tell no one reads. But Annika’s work, like Didion’s, is cuts my kvetching off at the knees. It’s exceptionally exploratory, a rare thing in a scene that leans so hard on its insularity.
15 years ago, she would have been made a mega star in a matter of weeks. Now, it is hard for artists (no matter how adored and/or brilliant) to breach Perth’s tyranny of distance (see: Harry’s stuff above). But this is someone worth paying attention to, and I hope to take a deeper dive here or elsewhere sometime soon. Until then, geddonit!
…YEAH, NAH
Freebie drongoloids, NAHs are for paying YNR weebs only — and this week? I’m posting hog…
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