the home page of david prater

Ian McEwan, Atonement Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty Seventh City Todd Swift, Monsieur Pigeon's Best Machine Ku Sang, Eternity Today Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives Simon Armitage, Kid Clive Hamilton & Richard Denniss, Affluenza Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place In the Sun: A Modern History Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have      considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf Ha Jin, War Trash Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy Dai Griffiths, OK Computer J. Niimi, Murmur Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity Yang Gui-Ja, Contradictions Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities William Faulkner, The Wild Palms Shin Kyong-Nim, Farmers' Dance Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism Tony Tanner, Thomas Pynchon Walden Bello, Deglobalisation Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production Phillip K. Dick, The Man In the High Castle Jonathan Franzen, Strong Motion ...

you never did cross it but still it remains a pair of spectacles submerged in the river on one side lies the pleasure district: neon and ribbons, arc-welded limbs the scintillation distractors on the other: some home or one light that was gutted then torn down extinguished by passionate hopes between them, one heartless bridge a fiction beneath expatriate memories the mind`s dim canals ... of course being fake you`ll make a wide circuit round it beating drums to scare mild geese before dawn can catch its breath but grim hesitation tracks you down makes your heart skip beats tripping over cracks in streets sorrows like snow on an iron horse.

cold sweats in an immigration queue i`ve everything & nothing to declare hand trembles as it pushes a passport over the ledge into the hand of fate a process designed to inspire nervous twitches/ recognisable warning signs asked for evidence of forward journey (as if mere mortality were not enough then subjected to a crotch pat-down luggage rearrangements & repackings an apology & our tidy duet with zips questions as to future itineraries - drinking habits employment situation sniffing at feet & padded jackets ... is this why they call it "customs"? shoes removed & arms outstretched ... some meditative pose while minions search your person for spirit-ghosts a hushed quiet hanging over us all passing through a cold unassuming concourse (all memory of your past life erased every cavity aches for fresh air (or death/ this country whose culture you hope you`ll never have to fully understand let alone experience ... the attendant smiles as if we`re frien...

ian fleming eat your heart out a beetle hits the lane running then bursts into the blue road all its legs up atomic powered sound a whee! about to explode three hours flat busan fukuoka along this navigator`s spine - past those sea anemone islands ploughing up the roadstead like nobody`s dymanic business multi- currency bi-lingual & all edges not a plume in sight (even the sun sets in a corner & behaves tvs propagate morgenland`s top news story: tsunami anniversary or hwang`s stupidity (all our shrapnel deposited inside that terminal hours ago between an epoch of regret at leaving this electrifying nation in which i no longer live (slowly melting away ... concrete rivers carry flows of nature`s snowy tears.

Okay, so I've already posted this on the PC Bangs blog but once is never enough. I'm very excited to say that there's an article in today's issue of English language newspaper The Korea Times that profiles my PC Bangs project here in Seoul. You can read the article online here . Big thanks to journalist (and artist) Bridget O'Brien, who definitely has a love of poetry (boy, is that a nice change!) and to photographer Kim Hyun-tae who managed to make me look cool in the pic (above). So strange to be in the newspaper - it's my first feature profile ever! Zippedy doo dah!

loading sheherezade into a humvee for her next press briefing bricks & shattered glass at her feet we stop off at the px for space food sticks this has been going on now for more than a thousand days all the quaint denials deferrals & cryptic demands wrapped up in one tress of her hair in this green zone we talk of many things without rush or interruption after all we've got a millennium to sort through our stories & alibis we were never here (special forces it's all too plausible (elections we've made a difference (coalition we'll see it through (presidents sheherezade slowly washes her face knowing that this morning may be her last chance to pre-empt their empty statements & gravity bombs the tigris & the euphrates confer with her thumbnail dipped in tar & now it's time for dates & blogs & book deals hey woody harrelson! one thousand and one nights away a ghost sleeps in fallujah where another tale is being spun fro...

go on uh huh hit delete nah nah go on do it hit the button waha hit delete hit delete make like babyshambles pete hit yer headz then be dead hit delete forever pete make believe uh huh uh huh go on & do it delete forevers & still be clever as pete deletes his band & his mates his arms & go go pete girl get deleted oho pete & i were gunna get deleted forever! gunna die forever well maybe pete uh huh delete i dont really wanna know (uh huh oases of rehab shimmer in the mists o albion pete yeah what delete ah what a waster pete go on hit it delete forever pete why not who cares uh huh can we just have a g pete before you delete a beat or bleat about forever pete aha hit it pete! drive blind & then repeat pete crossfade the snowz pete delete forever make it hit pete hit it pete forever delete

Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! He's just a wee one he's not a biggy! He's not a tree no he's just a twiggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! Don't ever start on those evil ciggies! Eat too much you'll turn into a piggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! You'll be a truck driver in your riggy! In the Lord of the Rings you'd be Viggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! He's not bald he doesn't need a wiggy! Yes he's just a superstar called Ziggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! He's just a wee one, he's not a biggy! He's not a tree no he's just a twiggy! Oooooooooooooooooooooooo Ziggy Ziggy! Zigmund aka Ziggy aka Zigster Robert O'Shea, one year old December 3 2005!

I have a couple of poems coming out this week. One's in the understated and unpretentious Tasmanian literary bi-annual Famous Reporter , and it's entitled "There's A Wild Jack Russell In the Moon". I'm really happy that this poem has found a home (and in case you haven't noticed by now, I am obsessed with the moon, birds, planes, spaceships and little dogs). You can view details of the issue's contents (plus some of the poems) here . The other is a poem called "City Slacker" that will appear in the (Australian) summer issue of Overland . I'm over the moon (ha) about this one - I've been trying to get a poem in Overland for years, and they set a pretty high standard, I think. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Overland is one of the few Australian cultural and literary journals worth reading (oh no, I can feel another testimonial coming on). You can view details of the contents of the issue here . But I'll have to wait u...

This morning I was walking down to Jongno-gil in downtown Seoul to buy a ham, cheese and egg toasted sandwich thinking "Gees, it's cold!" when all of a sudden, it started to snow! Well, it was more like miniature specks of ice but how fitting, on the first day of winter, for the rain to turn to ice! Although it only lasted about ten minutes I wanted to go and visit the old man with white hair in the grocery store (who has been telling me every night this week - "Tonight, snow!") and give him a big hug. I then got a text message from a friend who was at that moment (I think) on a train heading to Seoul and she said: "It's snowing!" Yippee! I haven't really done the whole snow thing in Oz, apart from one trip to Mt Buller, a family holiday to Talbingo and Thredbo and a hazily-recalled winter in the NSW town of Orange (I was four, and almost completely deaf - I think this has affected my memory somewhat). Today, as the little balls of ice ski...