I was going to write something about The Proposition, and I did. Except that sometimes even only one day after you see a film, it has already become past, unreachable, fragments. I remember the conversation we had after the movie more than the movie itself.

Instead, via Antipopper, I’m listening to Emma Reverter, Don De Lillo and Paul Auster reading aloud about the state, the state of emergency, in an event in New York a couple of days ago run by PEN International. Paul Auster relates how a French couple during WWII, discussing the possibility of their children being deported to Germany and how they might tattoo their names and addresses on their chests, so they could be found after the end of the war. De Lillo speaks of dreams and the way the state has an ability to act out its fantasies, its dreams, unlike most of us who dream of changing the unchangeable. These are patient, weighted, practiced voices, the voices of the Great Writers, in the heartland of the Civilised World, with civilised, polite applause recorded to accompany each speaker. There is not an audible sense of ‘emergency’. I guess the Moody story is entertaining, and it does sound like he was sneaking in a critique of Liberals — and Americans! — while simply appearing strange. But my favourite is Heidi Julavits reading a story from Donald Barthelme’s Amateurs, “Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby”:

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time because of the way he had been behaving, and now he had gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far — he did not deny that he had gone too far — did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something that everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging.

The next item of business was the gibbet. None of us knew too much about gibbet design, but Tomas, who is an architect, said he’d look it up in old books and draw the plans. The important thing, as far as he recollected, was that the trap-door functioned properly. He said that just roughly, counting labour and materials, it shouldn’t run us much over four hundred dollars. Good God, Howard said. He said what was Tomas figuring on, rosewood? No, just a good grain of pine, Tomas said. Victor asked if unpainted pine wouldn’t look kind of raw, and Tomas said he thought it could be stained a dark walnut without too muich trouble. I said that although I thought the whole thing ought to be really well, and that I also thought four hundred dollars on top of the expense of the drinks, invitiations, musicians and everything was a bit steep, why didn’t we just use a tree, a nice-looking oak or something. I pointed out that it was going to be a June hanging, the trees were going to be in glorious leaf, and that not only would a tree add a kind of natural feeling, it was also strictly traditional, especially in the West. Then the question of the hangman came up. Paul said, do we really need a hangman? Because if we used a tree, the noose could be adjusted to the appropriate level and Colby could just jump off something, a chair, a stool or something….

It’s at this level, the level of detail, aesthetics, mechanics, the art of execution and the inevitable concern that something as serious as death might be made to look ‘tacky’, that patient voices excel at. And it’s at this patient, meditative pace that the emergency proceeds. Who cares if parliamentary debate on the new anti-terror laws lasts a week or a month; or if the government gagged 30 MP’s from ‘debating’ the industrial relations legislation last week to get it to the Senate? No matter how fast everything proceeds, there’s still a slowness to it, there’s still editorials, letters in the letters pages, Leunig cartoons, dissent dissent dissent, raised voices. And the emergency just grinds on. The irony of this stupid fucking world is that emergencies, real ones, don’t act like emergencies. They behave like snails.