Adventures of a Bookonaut: Jennifer Mills

Showing posts with label Jennifer Mills. Show all posts

Feb 12, 2013

The Subjects–A reminder

Just a quick reminder to … erm remind you that a team of very dedicated creatives is undergoing a very wacky experiment in the name of science and entertainment.

The experiment proper has started and its interesting peering into the heads of Sean Williams and Jennifer Mills as they articulate feelings and relay observations of the effect of isolation and sleep deprivation.

Here’s a few choice snippets from Day 1:

I’m writing in my ‘free time’ between tests. These are checking my cognitive functions: response time, comprehension, and judgement. The tests are strange and very repetitive. There’s a device called a PVT which looks like it should be part of a 1980s robot. There’s a dinky little driving simulator (I crashed). Another test shows us the word Yellow coloured green, or the word Red coloured blue, and asks us to distinguish between the colour and the word. I already feel an estrangement between words and things. Partly in response to this, I have started to draw the objects in my room.
My ‘free time’ is neither, and soon interrupted for another test. Addition and subtraction. When my screen reads “2+2=” I think of Winston Smith, my imaginary companion in this dim cell. Should I put 5? Only the scientists have the answer.
Jennifer Mills

After our tour and intro, we settled in for a practice run. (Have I used “practice” right? This is something I always get wrong, and now I can’t check. Life without the web is going to be tough, particularly as the protocol kicks in and our brains melt into mud. As Jenn says, let’s have an embargo on typos, okay?) The tests are not especially riveting, but that’s not unexpected either. The first is a test of our response times (“PVT” it’s called, I found out later: Performance Vigilance Task). We hold a box and push a button when the screen lights up. A number tells us how fast we reacted. I already hate this test, because the box is heavy and it involves both my hands, and I have to sit grimly in place for ten minutes. It feels like an hour. At the end of the first run, my muscles were screaming. My results were slightly slower than average, but that could be because I was using my left hand. Or I was too distracted by the discomfort to pay attention properly. Or I’m just rotten at it.
Sean Williams

and from Day 2:

After an age, instructions come through the intercom on the wall above my bed: Keep your eyes open for thirty seconds (am I allowed to blink? I have to blink. I’m blinking. I’m not in trouble for blinking!); blink five times slowly (Ah, sweet blinking). Winston would remember this bit. At last, with much gratitude, the lights go down to “moonlight setting” and I sleep until Scientist Xuan wakes me. It’s long enough to dream a little. The only thing I remember about my dreams is that I played the role of babysitter. Waking, I feel more like the baby. Xuan tells me I will be put back to bed again after a short time. This means the electrodes stay in, and I rush to the bathroom to see what I look like. I look like this:
Jennifer Mills

The sound of air-conditioning could be fake. I deduced this while doing some stretches. The ever-present hissing sound is actually coming from what appears to be a speaker set into the ceiling, near the vent. My guess is they’re pumping in white or pink noise to cover up the sounds around us (the centre is on a very busy arterial road) and perhaps for some psychological benefit, too, as background noise helps the mind function under some circumstances. When I asked about, I got a weird reaction, like it was a big secret. Like I had opened the wrong door and seen THE ALIENS. I changed the subject immediately. Who wants to be put in the grinder for KNOWING TOO MUCH? (Alternatively, that “speaker” is an intake vent, which might explain why I can’t feel any air movement when I put my hand near it. That’s the sane explanation.)
Sean Williams

Please do go and read all the entries(start here). It’s interesting comparing the subjects observations which often parallel each other. And it’s amazing how quickly thoughts seem to edge slowly toward paranoia.

Note: “The Subjects” experiment is being run and the participants observations published by the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT). The material quoted here is published under a Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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Feb 5, 2013

The Subjects – an experimental and experiential project

I was made aware some time ago of a project to place some creative folk under duress, in this case sleep deprivation, and then see how that effected creative outcomes. That project is begins on the 9th of Feb.

The Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT), in partnership with Central Queensland University’s Appleton Institute, is running The Subjects.

The participants are

Artists Thom Buchanan
and Fee Plumley
Author Jennifer Mills
and New York Times best selling novelist Sean Williams

They will be spending a week in residency at CQU’s Sleep Research Centre. Their sleeping patterns will be disrupted and they will be under constant surveillance.

And considering we live in a Big Brother future (though not quite the same one Orwell was thinking of) we can peer into the experimented minds and interact with the test subjects.

You can read about the experiment here

You can view the bios of the test subjects here

You can ask them questions here

I plan to follow this next week. I know two of the participants and know they are excited by the prospect of participation. Good luck folks

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Oct 13, 2012

Book Review–The Rest is Weight by Jennifer Mills

The Rest is Weight is a short story collection by award winning, poet and novelist, Jennifer Mills.

I first came across Mill’s work at a reading in Alice Springs. Mills had just launched The Diamond Anchor and was the guest at a local poetry night. It was there that I picked up a copy of Treading Earth, a chap book of her poetry. This book contains one of my favourite poems to date, Mowing.

Mills displays a great talent for succinctly capturing; people, place and emotion. I had appreciated it in her poetry and in Gone. It was most evident to me, however in this collection.

The stories are diverse in tone, character and place. With any collection of short stories I often find reading them in one sitting quite difficult. You’d think it would be easier but I do often enjoy the feeling of being immersed in a novel and that doesn’t happen with short stories generally for obvious reasons. Not so with The Rest is Weight, I read it in 2 days, without interruption from other reading work. Mills continually captured my attention and compelled me to read.

This is an achievement because when I say the work is diverse I mean it. The first story Look Down with Me is a snapshot of Australia’s dark history of race relations and it pulls no punches. It would sit equally well in a horror anthology and has elements that I find amongst the best purveyors of the weird and dark in fantasy circles.

Indeed their are a number of pieces that play in that borderland between reality and fantasy, pieces that stop short of dipping into the fantastical but leave you second guessing yourself, like movement caught in peripheral vision. Reason and Demolition are two such examples. The former is about a ministerial assistant who sees things on the return from visiting an aboriginal community, the later about the possibility of a Fox Spirit living in an ancient townhouse marked for demolition by the Chinese Government.

Then there are pieces that are slices of Australian life, relationships brought to life. The Capital of Missing Persons, Hello Satan and The Opposite of Peace.

Mills facility for voicing the perspective of the untouchables of Australian society, the mentally ill, the homeless and the imprisoned is evident with The Shipping Views, Plain Indians and Crow Season.

I don’t generally read Australian literature, because none of it captures Australia for me. Not so with Mills, her Australia is my Australia - authentic and despite her being from the East Coast originally, I perceive a view from the centre looking out.

There’s something for every reader in this book, Mills holds the diverse content together with refined prose and precise, evocative imagery.

This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012. Please check out this page for more great writing from Australian women.

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Jan 14, 2012

Book Review–Gone by Jennifer Mills

A young man is released from a Sydney prison, his hands empty, his identity gone. He catches a southbound train out of town, then hitchhikes west. He hasn't been home for fifteen years.

I have been delighted by Mills writing since I bought a chap book of her poetry, Treading Earth. Large parts of Gone remind me very much the writing contained within that collection, particularly her observations of the minutiae of human interaction.

Another spill over from her poetry are the raw observations that are both economical and evocative.

Gone is both a road trip and a mystery. The road trip is an examination of an Australia that most readers, I would argue, are not used used to reading about.

The route is one generally only frequented by those that live in the major regional centres along the Stuart highway, the odd combi-van hiring tourist, selected grey nomads and truck drivers. It’s sparsely populated, vegetated and for the most part bone dry - the real Australia for a lot of people.
It’s refreshing then to have a narrative of Australia that isn’t “Kings in Grass Castles” or some faux bohemian, inner city “Secret Life of Us” story – important though each of these is.

Equally refreshing is the landscape and interactions viewed through the eyes Frank, a member of two underclasses; the ex-con and the sufferer of a mental illness.

Frank as an invisible and fragmented observer presents the reader with a largely non judgemental picture of the land and its people and allows Mills to present the route and the characters as free from judgement as possible (hers at least). The reader is left to make the judgement and come to their own conclusions.

Mills has written for left leaning publications like New Matilda before and there’s always a danger that when you have a character representative of a social underclass that some of those views might bleed through into the characters voice. Not so with Frank, his fractured psyche doesn’t really allow that sort of coherent thought to be put into his mouth, he’s got his hands full working out who he is and where he’s going. There’s mentions of topical issues, like mining, but these are in the form of dialogue spoken by those who give Frank a lift and they come across as honest and genuine.

Similar to the observations of landscape, the reconstruction of Frank’s past requires a fair bit of effort from the reader. Mills is deliberately ambiguous with his fragmented remembering's, which works well with the presentation of Frank as someone who is suffering a severe mental illness. The reader is drawn in to trying to figure out what Frank’s done or is doing. It’s hard to like him in that sense, I never really felt totally at peace with him, could never entirely trust the character. I have sympathy up to a point but that sympathy is tempered by an uneasiness as to what Frank might be capable of or have done.

Gone is not a book that I think you can fall in love with nor a book that you can sit down and enjoy as a light piece of reading. It requires some effort and careful reading (some of it between the lines) particularly when it comes to piecing Frank’s life together. I enjoyed the observations of and interactions with, the people who Frank comes into contact with on “The Track”.

Some may be unsatisfied with the ambiguity surrounding Frank’s life but I think it’s the only honest way to portray the character. There were some humorous instances and there were some eerily suspenseful and gut wrenching revelations.

I can heartily recommend it for tight and evocative prose, for an honest representation of an ex-con and someone suffering a severe mental illness.

If you are looking for a unique Australian narrative Gone is it.

Disclaimer: The book was provided by the author at no cost