Melbourne Launches Our Book: Friday Sept 23

In four sleeps Melbourne will be launching our book. Yes, it is four months after the Sydney launch, and the book is already available in a variety of Melbourne bookstores but four months seems to be how long it takes for Launch Vibes to percolate down the coast and pool in a Launch Venue, or rather: a Spooky Abandoned School, or rather: the Schoolhouse Studios.

As it turns out, four months is also how long it takes for the How Fun Was the Sydney Book Launch stories to start boring the socks off flatmates/ lovers/ family members. And as Nick Sun warns us in “The End,” it is this kind of nostalgia that will bring this fucking country to its knees*. So then, what choice do we have but do the whole thing again, but in another city, so it’ll be like the First Time, every time, forever. Or at least until we run out of Australian cities. Or until pull our fingers out and make another book. Whichever comes first.

So: ding ding ding: ROUND TWO of the launch festivities is going to take place on a BASKETBALL COURT in a SCHOOL in ABBOTSFORD, MELBOURNE. Or, more specifically at 97 Nicholson St. There will be a band, which might sound like this, but which probably won’t be locked in until the last minute.

And now for the details which are locked in, and which we should have told you in the first paragraph of this post:

If y0u come to our launch at 8pm on Friday September 23 you will not only hear Luke Carman, Zoe Norton Lodge, Felicity Castagna, Sam Twyford-Moore, and Vanessa Berry read their stories from our book, but you will hear BRAND SPANKING NEW responses to those stories by Going Down Swinging’s Geoff Lemon, the Lifted Brow’s Ronnie Scott, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award winner Amy Espeseth, HEAT’s Fiona Wright, and Beat’s Amelia Schmidt.

There will be stupidly cheap beer generously provided by Grolsch.

There will be dancing.

There will be music.

But most importantly, it will give us something to talk about for another four months.

Oh, and it’s free.

* From “The End” by Nick Sun I mean Rick Doom:

Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any more different, famine struck. Not in the sense of an absence of food, but an absence of imagination. Humanity consumed more and created less, and, as a result of their under-developed creative lives, people developed a debilitating addiction to nostalgia and cliché. Everyone became mentally trapped in the romanticised past, whence they projected unrealistic visions of the future while decaying in the present.

“Remember that time when we were remembering that time?” was an oft-heard refrain. When the dying watched their lives flash before their eyes, all they’d see was themselves at various ages in various locations reminiscing about reminiscing about reminiscing about stuff that they’d once planned on having had happen to them.

This endless cycle of nostalgia increased in speed as nothing new was created and even more was over-recycled. Everyone’s temporal perception compressed and people began to over-emotionally reminisce about things that had just happened to them. “Remember breakfast three minutes ago? Such a wonderful bowl of porridge! Ah youth,” one five-year-old was heard to say, eyes wistfully wet with sentiment, wiping his rose-coloured glasses. What everyone didn’t know was that each time a nostalgic fantasy or cliché was repeated it gained momentum and its anti-anti-anti­matter mass increased. The tipping point was reached when The Karate Kid III was remade for the three-hundred-and-thirty-third time, this time with an aging Jessica Alba playing Mr Miyagi and the reanimated corpse of Heath Ledger, inexplicably in blackface (well, it was directed by the ghost of the ghost of the ghost of James Cameron), playing Ralph Macchio playing Genghis Khan playing Shirley Temple playing the Karate Kid. Upon its debut screening, a mesomorphic quantum squish hole was torn in the space-time warpflux capacitator and triple black anti-anti-anti matter spewed out of the cinema screen and invaded the world in the form of a vague existential malaise and constant dissatisfaction with everything in an environment of plenty.

People started to reminisce about things that were about to happen. It was more pattern recognition than psychic prophecy: the same things kept happening, so they weren’t difficult to predict. Temporal perspective broke down. No one could tell if they were living in the present, future or past, and time became one long, unbroken, disorienting moment that seemed to last forever but was over very quickly. And when it was over everyone would try and reminisce about it but the experience would be unsatisfying; similar to re-watching your favourite childhood movie as an adult and realising it was a tawdry, clichéd piece of shit.