Lexicon Harlot

Wherein I turn out to be a terrible ingrate traveller

2011-05-16T03:10:00.004+10:00

Oh blog, I've missed you. I've been in fearsome book-writing mode for months; fearsome, because I had plans to have finished a whole draft of a whole book, this book, by now. Of course, it turns out I have more to do. Lots more to do. Every day, new little mushrooms of you-still-have-this-to-do sprout out of yesterday's smooth soil. There are - a fact that shoots a hard sliver of ice through my veins - whole chapters still to write. I am going to bed most nights and wrestling myself to sleep amidst the tangles of what I haven't done. By day, it's a pleasure. I'm loving pottering through my stuff and sticking it together, realising the joys of the contradictions, moving away from the generalisations I'd been planning to draw.

I'm in Canadia this week, at a pretty darn thrilling conference, if you're thrilled by what I'm thrilled by. The papers have been a mix of right-up-my-alley and centred on eighteenth-century German natural philosophers I haven't read. Who knew north America had so many Schelling experts on its books? Schelling and I have studiously avoided each other for 32 years. Apparently this has to change. You think you're all safely on top of a history of ideas, and it turns out you forgot the protagonist. Gah.

Though I'm surrounded by clever interesting people, and green sprouting Canadiack spring, squirrels of many stripes, woodchucks and swans and frogs and swollen rivers, and though I've only been away a week, and though I am a grown-up independent person with an internet connection who's traveled before and for longer, I've been finding myself pining for home. I had an unexpected moment of joy at the Australian accent of the international reverse charges telephone operator, and felt my heart snap when I heard Beatrice Cat meow somewhere on the other side of my phone call.

Am missing her and Harriet extremely. I can be in touch with my humans, know that they're well, know that they know that I'm well, know that they know that I know that they know that I'm well, but I wasn't able to explain to Harriet and Beatrice I'd only be gone two weeks. Maybe they're not worried about me (I hope so), but I can imagine them trying to work it all out, trying to decide how many days they give it before they figure I'm not coming back. It'll be glorious to see them again. I expect they'll ignore me furiously for a day or two. Can't wait.

And at the same time, I'm plotting my return voyage to Vancouver, which is trees as thick as houses and jagged mountains and laburnum and raspberries growing like weeds. I like me a good mountain range.

Edvard Munch tribute tomato

2011-03-31T18:42:00.002+11:00

Fig. 1. Collaboration between Tomato Plant and Unknown Grub. The Scream. 2011.

Various, with snail erotica

2011-03-30T20:20:00.005+11:00

I've just whipped up (and et) this spankingly wholesome quinoa rogan josh curry thing, and am glowing mystically with the goodness (blah) of quinoa sourced from the snow-spangled mountains of Bolivia, plump Black Russian tomatoes plucked from One of My Very Own Plants, and silverbeet snipped fresh from our front garden silverbeet plantation all of forty minutes ago. Also with the goodness of half a caterpillar, whose demise I attribute to my cavalier approach to silverbeet washing. And there we have the end of Vegan March.

One of the consequences of husbanding my own personal incipient vegetable forest is that I have become less and less kind-hearted towards snails. Snails are lovely people: romantic, resistant to patriarchal gender constructs, skilled in the consumption of bills left in slightly damp letterboxes. I have long recognised their virtues. And yet, as hordes of snails have chomped their way through my beans-cosmos-honesty-rocket-silverbeet-etc, romanced each other willy-nilly on beds of lucerne mulch, and spawned an irresponsibly large progeny,

Snails romancing each other willy-nilly on a bed of lucerne mulch.

I have lost all compunction about displacing them onto the oval, and indeed, in my less empathic moments, have actually administered a swift and firm mollusc-murdering stomp. It occurs to me that if I, who am philosophically committed to the principle that humans are - but should not be - self-serving psychopathic chauvinists in their relations with other animal species, can flounce about the garden spiflicating wholly innocent gastropods, then it's entirely likely that the Bolivian quinoa farmer would do likewise, only more so. Am not actually sure whether there are snails in the Andes, or whether they'd go for quinoa, but you understand my point: no agriculturalist whose livelihood is at stake is going to exercise herself too much about the rights of snails. Or about the rights of rabbits, starlings, mice or kangaroos. And probably not very much about the myriad animal species that are displaced by monoculture cropping, and displaced and displaced until there is no place for them. Which is say, just because I'm veganising, doesn't mean that the production of my food doesn't require the suffering of animals. It's just that, instead of eating them, I'm competing with them.

Having once again depressingly aborted my quest to exempt myself from the exploiter class, I will add, in defence of herbivorism, that pastoralists are just as unkind to animals that compete for their flock's food supply AND of course send almost every member of their flock to the slaughterhouse. (Even commercial freerange egg-laying chooks are packed off to the chicken stock factory at the age of eighteen months or so, because it ain't worth spending money on chicken feed for a lady who lays less.)

Okay. I really have to go now. Am starting to think embittered thoughts about injustice to chickens, when all I wanted to do was report on the presence of half a caterpillar in my curry.

Pleasing anagram

2011-03-29T20:01:00.001+11:00

Ocean
Canoe.

Stylish blogger wotsit

2011-03-10T17:16:00.003+11:00

The very kind Elephant's Child has conferred upon me a Stylish Blogger Award. She doesn't say why, but I think we all know that it's because of my inimitable dress sense. Or possibly my über hipsterish habit of checking out what's going down in ye Oxforde Englisshe Dictionarie.

So, what is going down in ye Oxforde Englisshe Dictionarie? This: the number-one entry for style offers it as a synonym for "stylus", viz., v. pointy writing instrument, useful for the engraving of wax tablets. The style/stylus is used as a "weapon of offence, for stabbing, etc", and figuratively, "as a symbol for literary composition". I conclude from all this that Stylish Blogger Awards are to be dispensed to persons whose writing utensils are mighty mighty.

These Stylish Blogger Awards aren't just all beer and no skittles (where "beer" denotes "fun" and "skittles" denotes "responsibility"). No. Being a Stylish Blogger is like being Miss Universe. You thought an occasional appearance in sequins would suffice, but in fact you have sole custodianship of the cosmos, which means that the people of Venezuela will hold you personally to account if a meteorite interferes with their Foxtel. That is to say, I have some tasks with which I am tasked.

Task One: Make a post linking back to the person who gave you the award.

Done. Ha. Easy.

Task Two: Share seven random things about yourself.

Righto. Bearing in mind that it is impossible for the seven things about myself that come to mind in the next five minutes to be random, here goes.

1. I have a bit of a thing for looking at pictures of turquoise sofas on the internet.

2. I recently saw the person who had been profiled in our local paper as the winner of the shire sustainability award loading her vegetables into plastic bags. I had snooty thoughts (despite the strong probability that she planned to use those plastic bags as nappies for orphaned koalas).

3. When I saw that the Wikipedia entry for Delphinium explained the word's derivation under the heading "Entomology", I immediately enlisted as a Wikipedia editor, and, with intense smugness, corrected "Entomology" to "Etymology".

4. I haven't eaten any animal products all year, and I haven't eaten any animals since December 1993, but (or perhaps therefore) sometimes when I'm digging I look lasciviously at the fat white curl grubs.

5. But what I actually do with them, and the snails, is put them in a bucket and take them on a holiday to the middle of the public oval. Sorry, public oval.

6. I've been on four televised game shows: Sale of the New Century (2000), Wheel of Fortune (2004), Temptation (2007), and Letters and Numbers (2010). The best prize I've won was a telescope, but the 50-inch telly of doom that I sold on ebay was pretty good too.

7. When I was about seven, I hatched a plan to have a hundred children, name them all after flowers, and spend my afternoons making industrial quantities of toffee apples. Fortunately, no part of this plan seems likely to come to pass, though some of the flower names were pretty special. Ranunculus Harlot has a certain je ne sais quoi.

Task Three: Award 15 recently discovered bloggers with this award.

Recently schmecently. Some of the stylishest bloggers I know are:

Livebird: for excellent ruminations on stick insects, all-round goodness, and for posting me sweetpea and cos lettuce seeds. (Oh - forgot to mention that I am open to bribes regarding this extremely remunerative award.)

Twisty Faster: has been educating my socks off for years now. Changed my life and all.

KateO: I'm totally into her lunchbox. She takes good photos. And is wry.

The Alone with Cats Blogger: I would send her money if it made her write more. And I had spare money.

Lucy Tartan: see above.

Pavlov's Cat: super-thinky. V. inspiring.

Dale Slamma: if I needed advice about haircuts, or being fey and whimsical yet intelligent and well-acquainted with the place I put my feet, I would dial 0409 DALE SLAMMA.

Ampersand Duck: ridiculously lovely person; makes things.

Mitzi G. Burger: punstrelsy.

Progressive Dinner Partiers: have tomatoes, will party.

Sterne: has a majillion gabillion different on-again, off-again blogs and such, all grand.

Ann O'Dyne: for blog citizenship and wisdom.

Copperwitch: somewhere between the Swarovski and volcanoes.

Voracious Ex-Vegan: with thanks for the provocaterie.

TimT: international award-winning pantoum-writer, with lovely beard, baking skillz, unstaunchable generosity, and vast repertoire of home-made jokes. (Disclosure clause: is sleeping with judge.)

Task Four: notify award recipients.

Argh. Too hard. Dear recipients, if you're reading this, you have been notified. Otherwise, thank youse all for being grouse.

It is a waste of time, and therefore immoral, to make the bed

2011-03-03T17:57:00.000+11:00

This announcement has been authorised by Harriet and Beatrice Harlot.

Plots

2011-03-01T09:43:00.002+11:00

Vegetable patch of oppression. Spiky white border tiles are relics of previous owners' bathroom renovation. Seedlings disarrayed by cat who mistook freshly turned earth for nice loamy loo.

Peggy Orenstein's essay, "The Femivore's Dilemma", has been unnerving me for almost a year now, and I am going to tell you why. If you don't want to know why, but you 'd like to see further illustrations of the bathroom tiles we here at Lalor have used as garden bed edging, skip ahead and leave a penny in the honesty box at the back gate.

Right. So. Reasons for my unnerving. Firstly, there were the visions of indecisive cannibals suggested by that title. Femivore's Dilemma: "Shall I have the char-grilled lady, or – perhaps just a salad?" ("Femivore", let's clarify this from the get-go, is a lousy neologism. It's supposed to denote something to do with feminist eating practices, rather than, as its cognate terms, "omnivore", "carnivore", "herbivore", suggest, the eating of feminists. I'm being curmudeonly here, but that's because I'm all for curmudgeonliness in these matters, taking my lead from finickety fin-de-siècle sexologist, Havelock Ellis, who objected to the word "homosexual" on the grounds that it conjoined words of Greek and Latin origin.)

While the visions of cannibals have faded, "The Femivore's Dilemma" has kept on troubling me, on account of its actual (gosh) content. Orenstein's thesis, for those of you who can't come at reading the whole article, is this: the discourse of radicalism that has attached to concepts like "eating local", "growing your own", "dishing up homespun spelt spaghetti with a side serve of freshly fermented tempeh from your own cellar", has permitted women who seek to identify as progressive to forsake paid employment in exchange for unpaid weeding, hoeing, zucchini-tending, and the recycling of baby poo, all without compromising their progressive credentials. I.e., there is a new (old) form of domestic labour, and those who practise it can see themselves as revolutionaries, rather than dish-washers to the patriarchy, because not only are they washing dishes, but they are Saving the Planet, which activity is endorsed by the Kyoto Protocol and Al Gore. Or in Orenstein's own words: "these gals — these chicks with chicks — are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: the omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper."

Omnivores requesting free-range dilemma with raspberry coulis

The "chicks with chicks" line might suggest to you (as it does to me) a certain lack of sympathy for this alleged movement of chicken-nurturing American PhD-Program-alumnae-cum-homemakers. Or, as it turns out, a gleeful (?certainly jauntily articulated) conviction that Women With Gardens are DOOMED. "[I]f a woman is not careful," runs the final sentence, "chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage." As in, you thought you would achieve apotheosis through bee-keeping, but in fact you're just lugging hives around on the back of a ute. Well, sure - but if that's what I want?

Enter Orenstein's disconcerting deployment of the "Women think they want X, but their preference for X has been engineered by the patriarchy/media/capitalist complex and is in fact against their truest interests" manoeuvre. It's a familiar line (B claims that she truly, freely, for her own sake, wants her forehead botoxed, but in fact she "wants" it because her society has created a whole buncha malevolent stories about what an acceptable body looks like, and she - probably rightly - believes that if she doesn't measure up then she has no status). It's a line that appeals immediately to someone like me who believes both that many (most? all?) of our desires are socially constructed and that there are at least some individuals who try to shape others' desires for their own ends. So, I'm all ready to accept that the desire to grow turnips in the backyard is socially constructed. I'm ready to accept that part of how it's constructed is through stories about the role of local turnip production in alleviating world hunger, and the notion that a person who participates in such a project believes she thereby gets to be identified as a provider, nurturer, food radical, eco-warrior, blah blah. Just as, you might say, B hopes to be ranked amongst women not-to-be-spurned when she has Botulinum toxin syringed into her face. But is an implicit parallel between the intelligent adult with alternatives who takes up backyard vegetable gardening and the person who forks out half her week's wage on wrinkle-be-gone warranted?

No. Growing zucchinis and receiving injections of neurotoxins are on whole different planets of fun, utility, and healthfulness, and as a person herself not averse to a home-grown zucchini, I am strongly irked by Orenstein's suggestion that I might be in the malign thrall of a patriarchal delusion. (Or rather, I readily admit that I'm in the malign thrall of several patriarchal delusions – perhaps more on this when I'm feeling brave enough – but none of them pertain to zucchinis.) I'm not in a position, nor do I want, to throw in the dayjob I'm lucky enough to love and take up full-time brassica husbandry, but if I were in such a position, and it was what I wanted, then the last thing I would need, amidst the hubbub of "Don't go out at night - you'll get yourself raped", and "Don't stay inside - that would be capitulating to the people who tell you not to walk alone at night", and "Pluck your oxters", and "But don't!", etc, etc, is the spectre of oppression by vegetable patch. Because while many (most? all?) of our desires are socially constructed, sometimes we can stand back and inspect them from every available angle, and see that they're not so bad.

Which brings me to this portrait of a tomato

– green at the tippy end of Summer (thanks a bunch, La Nina) –

and the excellent sunflowers that grew from seed in no time flat (no, really, thank you, La Nina)

and this mess of sage, roses, thyme and chives which has been flavouring my dinner for a couple of weeks now

and the rooftiles assisting with Project Lawn-No-More

and this young person who has discovered new pleasures in hiding behind dwarf beans.

That is all. I'm off to work on some proper dilemmas now.

Sitzfleisch

2011-02-28T17:14:00.003+11:00

The word for today is Sitzfleisch. If, like me, you immediately inferred from this word's German components - sitzen, to sit, and Fleisch, flesh - that it referred to the additional padding of the bottomular region arising from one's deskjob, you would be, like me, wrong. In fact it means something like "staying power". Sitzfleisch is the stuff that keeps you resolute in your chair when all others have run off into the gloaming to chase butterflies.

P.S., while considering synonyms for "bottomular region" (dismissing "derrière" - too frou-frou - and "sit-upon" - too Girl Guides-ish), I googled "the fundament", and happened upon this essential information: the ancient Athenian punishment for adultery was the insertion of a radish "up the fundament" (quoth my source), a sentence so regularly meted out that the verb for "I insert a radish up the fundament" was ραφανιδοω (rhapanidoô), from the Greek for radish, ραφανος (rhaphanos). People pay big money for that kind of treatment these days. And radishes aren't cheap since the floods either.

So there you go. Lexicon Harlot, Demonstrating that You Can Chase Butterflies without Leaving Your Deskchair since 2006.

P.P.S., I just realised that I have made light of state-mandated sexual assault. If you are reading this and you are a legislator, please be advised that the radish manoeuvre described above constitutes a violation of a person's human rights according to international law, and furthermore that radishes are only nutritionally valuable if taken orally and consensually.

Live (prerecorded) Harlot! Uses actual syllables!

2011-02-24T20:47:00.002+11:00

Nothing could induce me to misuse my employers' webcam facilities except the direst necessity. Recording this, for example.

Which I had to do because there are people, actual people, who want to know how I pronounce things. As in, words. And syllables. In fact, Kate O, who is one of the best internetians everrrrr, went so far as to write, "It would please me to NO END if you and [some other person – doesn't matter who] made an accent video!!" Two exclamation marks. That's her way of saying that if I don't expose y'all (her locution) to my pronunciation of the word "pecan" she will probably die of phonological curiosity. And I couldn't have that on my conscience.

So, here's the deal. People in on this global Anglophone accent game are required to:

1. disclose their regional identity (like, I live in la la Lalor, but I used to live in Preston, but my cats come from Coburg, and that's probably influenced my accent in certain indefinite ways);

2. record their pronunciation of Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater (that's "theatre" to you, Mr U.S. Originated Word List), Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught;

3. attempt answers to these
• What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house? (Your honour! Leading question, your honour! Falsely incriminates the defendant!)
• What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?
• What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
• What do you call gym shoes?
• What do you say to address a group of people?
• What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
• What do you call your grandparents?
• What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
• What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
• What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

I don't know about my accent, but my oral sentence structure is one of the seven wonders of the post-Apocalypse. (Also, I think I look rather world-weary and ho-hum-isn't-this-nerdy, in my own surpassingly nerdy sort of way, whereas I'm not weary of the world (I love you, world) and I was delighted to be doing this, so I can only attribute any arch eyebrow raises and fatigued vocal intonations to the fact that it was Something Late O'Clock in the House of my Employers.)

And here's my question for you, gentle reader, on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means "Can't I just go to bed already?" and 10 means "Hot Dawg! Yes! My word!", how much do you think I sound like a person raised in Sydley and migrated to the 'Bourne? And what do you call gym shoes?

Dad

2011-02-14T21:10:00.003+11:00

Our Dad died on the 14th February last year. The last few weeks have been shadowed, day by day by day, by what they were a year ago. Today was the day when, and yesterday was the day when, and that was the day he mistook the whistle of his oxygen mask for Lutheran choristers. Aching and blessed days.

Here is some of who I miss:

1. crinkly grizzly bear eyes,
2. the bald expanse from his ear to his other ear, which he referred to as his "wide part",
3. and when he saw another bald man, he would say "There's a man who goes to my barber",
4. and when he saw an unambiguously pregnant person, would say, "I know her little secret" (which was funny, even if it doesn't sound it right here)
5. and when he saw a grown man of impressive girth (which he was, mostly, himself), would say, "He'll be a big chap when he grows up",
6. and when he saw a terrier or a poodle the size of his shoe, would say, "That's a ferocious looking beastie",
7. and on long drives he'd sing the 23rd Psalm to the tune of "Advance Australia Fair"
8. and "A poor bird, take thy flight, far above the so-o-rrows of this sad night", jauntily,
9. and he used to refer to the "Te Deum" as the "Tedium"
10. and he seemed to become increasingly involved in our birthday presents as he got older
11. and took us as often as he could to the sea, crammed his shirt pocket with the flotsam I found on the beach, let the week leach out of him in the salt warm surf, bought irresponsible quantities of ice-cream for his children,
12. and watched consecutive news broadcasts on three different television channels
13. and was weak in the presence of cream,
14. staaaaaaaaaaaarrrving beagles,
15. plant nurseries,
16. and gradually grew out of reading the real estate pages out loud over breakfast (phonetically, i.e., "three bdrm, two bthrm, one-eighty-thou ono")
17. and invented toast with vegemite and marmalade
18. and was enthusiastic, at various times, about such things as yurts, no-dig vegetable gardening, potato sexing, curry making, liquid manure in fibreglass vats, torulosa pine windbreaks, MG convertibles, pineapple plantations, refugee activism, mud bricks, punning,
19. and he gave me, he and Mum, this feeling of completely belonging,
20. even though I was their "little mistake afterthought".

Death can seem so blunt and stupid.

Knickers

2011-02-08T21:48:00.010+11:00

You'll never believe this, but I was a bit of a booky two-shoes at school. My worst ever mark was awarded in year 7, in a subject then referred to as "Craft", but which, I'm almost certain, was shortly thereafter rebadged as "Listening to Mrs Hanlon Tell You How Her Son Developed Pubic Pimples As A Result of Wearing Tight Lycra Underpants". I quite enjoyed "Craft": the lack of homework, the dermatological advice, the forty or so dress-making pins I collected from behind the sewing machines. If there'd been extra points for the thrifty acquisition of other peoples' poorly husbanded pins, "Craft" would never have become my own personal toothy bête noir of scholastic failure.

I didn't technically fail "Craft". I scored 55%, a pass, which enabled me to leave year 7 and permanently avoid any further insights from Mrs Hanlon upon synthetic fibres. It felt like a fail, though, dripping and oily with condemnation. Mrs H had noticed that I'd spent the entire term collecting pins and stitching a single pants pocket with such rigour that I'd virtually sewn it shut. I'd done nothing but sew that pocket - unpick it and sew it again, trim it with lace, embroider it with daisy stitch – because in week 3 I had lost all the other pieces of my shorts project. "Lost", I say, but when I think of my own depredations upon the pins, it seems more likely that they were stolen. For the brisk underground trade in unsewn pants pieces. Probably exchanged for cocaine or chocolate buttons or whatever it was my hardened criminal schoolmates were into back then.

So I get a bit of a "Ha! I've shown you, Mrs Hanlon!" moment every time I sew something and it turns out sort of okay. Which more and more of my sewing projects are required to do, because I recently pioneered Project Never Buy Clothing Again.

There is no proper rationale behind Project Never Buy Clothing Again. It's a bit to do with this situation:

Wardrobe of Doom

And a bit to do with underpaid garment workers, and a bit to do with saving money, but mostly it's about exorcising the demon called 55%. Get thee behind me, 55%.

On the weekend, in between not writing the conference paper I'm giving on Friday, and the book chapter that I scheduled for completion in January, I figured out how to make underpants.

My underpants!

And so now I present to you the Lexicon Harlot Quick & Easy Guide to Making Your Own Underpants at Home:

1. Cut out an underpantoid bit of fabric. Do not use lycra.

Click on image to enlarge (what fun!)

2. Hem the leg-holes, taking care to press the seams at every opportunity.

3. Sew up the side seams.

4. Make elastic casing.

5. Thread elastic through elastic casing.

6. Embroider with your initials, or "I heart Andrea Dworkin", or whatever.

7. And now, having girt your loins with this serviceable and comfy undergarment, write your conference paper. There is no no no no no excuse not to.

They don't do science like this anymore; or, Darwin keeps making me cry

2011-02-02T12:47:00.003+11:00

"The second case was that of a Hindustani man, who from illness and poverty was compelled to sell his favourite goat. After receiving the money, he repeatedly looked at the money in his hand and then at the goat, as if doubting whether he would not return it. He went to the goat, which was tied up ready to be led away, and the animal reared up and licked his hands. His eyes then wavered from side to side; his mouth was partially closed, with the corners very decidedly depressed. At last the poor man seemed to make up his mind that he must part with this goat, and then, as Mr Scott saw, the eyebrows became slightly oblique, with the characteristic puckering or swelling at the inner ends, but the wrinkles on the forehead were not present. The man stood thus for a minute, then heaving a deep sigh, burst into tears, raised up his two hands, blessed the goat, turned round, and without looking again, went away."

- Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals

About this weather

2011-01-31T20:05:00.004+11:00

They promised 40 degrees for yesterday, and it only reached 38, for which I was pathetically thankful. They promised 39 degrees for today, and it only reached 37 before plummeting rapidly to 27, and I was grateful again. Right now the sun is slipping behind the airconditioning unit on the roof of the house across the road and it is stiiilllllll 27 degrees but so humid I feel like I've just finished my shift in the dumpling kitchen, crossed the laneway to my nightjob in the Korean bathhouse, and been asked to steam some towels above a big steamy towel-steaming vat. No dumplings, though, and not many laneways or Korean bathhouses. The humidity was my point. It's the sort of weather about which I'll cheerfully whinge.

I've been buttonholing wedding guests everywhere I go this Summer and telling them how cool and glorious this water-water-everywhere Summer has been. The floods are awful (I've said), in the awesome way of nature going slam and killing people and ripping animals out of their paddocks and ruining crops and sinking houses and giving rise to locust plagues, but (let us speak not of these matters, or of what it means that the Pacific ocean is evaporating a thousand swimming pools a second, or of the cyclone bearing down on Queensland right now) the rain! the rain! Melbourne's reservoirs are now 53.9% full (pathetically grateful), and, here at the Lalorium, we have planted peaches and a nectarine, an apple, tomatoes, beans, corn, mint, oregano, lemon balm, lemon grass, a lemon tree, a lime, roses, and honesty, chives, nasturtiums, lamb's ear, rosemary, garlics, and echium, cat mint, harebells, cosmos, a persimmon, a wee little Adriatic white fig, daisies, English box, a buddleja, pinks, lychnis, statice, lavender, kangaroo paws, gaura, pineapple guavas, sunflowers, brachycome, a bilbergia, rhubarb, crepe myrtle, thyme, sea holly, Vietnamese mint, and cotinas, and everything has survived, on rain and the odd slosh of pre-loved bathwater. Even the stupid grass, which hasn't had the luxury of sloshes of pre-loved bathwater, is green and sproingy like the grasses of my childhood oop north. The only things that have died - an alpine daisy, a fifteen centimetre high giant feather grass and a $5 flea market rose of uncertain parentage - died of too much water and/or of being sat on by cats.

So, as I say, I'm whinging cheerfully, because everything's coming up dandelions (here), and this sudden onset of swimming-around-in-a-big-pond-of-warm-elderberry-soup is nothing to the hot-and-deathly of two years ago.

I've gone a little potty over being able to grow things. Saw a giant fat thistle on my walk to the shops the other week, and managed, with the assistance of ye google, to diagnose it as a cardoon. My resourceful mum pointed me to a two fat ladies' recipe for cardoons, and I promptly inveigled the sidekick to accompany me on a cardoon-pilfering expedition by dark of night. We severed a few roots trying to dig it up, and it's now hovering on the brink of existence, between two slowly decomposing piles of horse poo, which poo is further evidence of my garden pottiness. There's a personage 30km up the road giving out free faeces, see. She's struck up a monthly appointment with me and I'm now her official manure-remover. I look forward to many conversations like this one:

Fellow garden enthusiast: Duuuude. This is seriously good shit, dude.
Me: Totally, dude. Like, shit.

Which is to say, got any spare poo, or veggie seeds, or raspberry canes, I'm your man.

But what does a pig do with a warm shawl?

2011-01-31T16:36:00.004+11:00

"Kittens, puppies, young pigs and probably many other animals, alternately push their fore-feet against the mammary glands of their mothers, to excite a freer secretion of milk, or to make it flow. Now it is very common with young cats, and not at all rare with old cats of the common and Persian breeds (believed by some naturalists to be specifically distinct), when comfortably lying on a warm shawl or other soft substance, to pound it quietly and alternately with their fore-feet; their toes being spread out and claws slightly protruded, precisely as when sucking their mother. That it is the same movement is clearly shown by their often at the same time taking a bit of the shawl into their mouths and sucking it; generally closing their eyes and purring from delight."

- Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Sloth/human hybrid

2011-01-08T14:08:00.006+11:00

It's 2.10pm and I have just parted ways with my pyjamas, after a morning of eXtreme sloth, executed with military zeal from the middle of my bed. The sloth was in honour of last night's kitten vigil, as we waited for Harriet and Beatrice to come inside from their romp-athlon about town.

If H & B don't get a couple of hours of daily al fresco exercise, they spend the night bouncing on human pancreases and attacking human toes in the manner of hyperactive carnivorous lemurs. The trouble with their taking their constitutionals, however, is that Beatrice is a pinky, and though her preference is to lounge about in the sun in the manner of Brigitte Bardot, the result would be great hideous tragic skin cancers, possibly (google seems not be working, so I can't check) also in the manner of Brigitte Bardot's. To butter her in sun-screen would comprise a violation of civil liberties tantamount to bathing her, and so we wait til the sun is two-thirds dropped, make sure her bird-alarm-system is at full tintinnabulation, and tell her to go play in the shade. This she and Harriet have generally done, and with a few notable and anxiogenic exceptions, they've generally brought themselves back inside two or three hours later, romped out enough to make pleasant bedfellows.

But we're not in Kansas anymore. Here, up in not-Kansas, where there are exciting things like hedges!, unmown lawns (ours)!, ways of getting onto the shed roof!, Harriet and Beatrice have turned into feline delinquents, staying out til all hours and not even texting. In further evidence of their delinquency, when Harriet does come home, she is bearing an unripe apple from nextdoor's apple tree.

Harriet Cat's stolen apples

This is one hundred per cent true and not a lie. You can see them in the picture above. She brings them home and drops them next to the dining table. Also an apricot from next door's apricot tree, but as it was ripe on one side I ate half of it before I thought to take the photo. I'm not sure if the reason she's bringing home apples rather than mice or locusts or caterpillars is because she knows this is Vegan January, or because the apples are easier to catch. Either way, I'm impressed by her criminal audacity, and hoping that it continues when the apples get bigger and tastier.

What I'm also impressed by (this is how to contrive an elegant segue, kids), is the neighbours' commitment to food gardening. No. 10 has not only this cat-pleasing apple and fantastically fructiferous apricot, but also a lemon and a giant beautiful fig tree. No. 6 is all mulberries and stone fruit, with a neat line of shallots marching along in front of their zinnias. In the midst of this edible paradise, all that was growing in our brand new garden was a concrete gum tree stump and a vigorous colony of dandelions (no, I lie: also a golden diosma, an ornamental bookleaf conifer, and a variegated pittosporum), but we're gradually stirring up the clay and finding places for nectarines and peaches and feijoas and beans (and tomatoes, which are flowering but refusing to fruit - which is their choice of course, and I respect it) and a fancy little lemon tree my sister bequeathed us for Christmas. There will be produce, dognammit, and I will be documenting it with unseemly pride.

For now, though, Beatrice and Harriet are leading the way by sleeping their socks off, and I think getting dressed constitutes sufficient hard labour for today.

Another post

2011-01-06T20:05:00.010+11:00

This is the story of how I came to forsake the rosy loo and greeny walls of my once and former spinster pad for la-la-la-la-la Lalor!, Peoples' Republic Thereof, and one of the finest (you know) three-bedroom 1968 brick venereals in town. Now, well may you ask why me and mah posse couldn't find something more interesting to do with our future earnings than pay il Banquo a squillion bajillion dollars in interest, why we couldn't have - I dunno - started up a commercial spanakopita kitchen, why the national obsession with indenturing oneself to Westpac needed us too. Yes, well may you ask.

There is an answer to your questions, and it is twofold.

Fold, the first: when I first moved into my spinster pad, high density housing suited me right down to my faux floorboards. Fifty square metres? Felt more like fifty acres. I could have installed a couple of ponies in the bathroom-cum-laundry. Nosebags in the wardrobe? No problem. But then, instead of ponies, these young people moved in:

They were happy living in the drawer for a while, but soon Harriet took possession of the one comfy chair.

And Beatrice was forced to establish herself in the bathtub.

And then I plighted my trough to this character

who immediately started making biscuits

and before we knew it we were having to stack excess biscuits in the bathtub-cum-storage-trough in the bathroom-cum-storage-space and Beatrice was forced to live behind the kettle. This was untenable.

Fold the second is this rather astonishing letter-box and newspaper receptacle log, made out of genuine concrete eucalyptus stump. I'd say it added a good $15000 to the purchase price of the Lalor quarter-acreage, and worth every penny.

Toodles, Two Thousand and Ten

2011-01-03T21:06:00.003+11:00

Happy new year, commarades. It took the onset of a whole nother decade to remind me that I have a blog, and then it took tonight's spanakopita de resistance to fill me with typistly zeal - but! - here I am, having thrown my own personal gauntlet at my own personal self, having brushed the withered internetian laurels (such as they were) from my posterior, and declaring before you all (Mum), that 2011 will be a year of less infrequent blogging, more frequent eating of spanakopita, and of adherence to a swag of lesser resolutions (i.e., write doggammed book,* grow feijoa hedge out front of new house,** buy no clothes all year, except possibly brassiere,*** and so forth).

January, meanwhile, is the month of being vegan, which brings me to the rather tasty subject of tonight's spanakopita. Or the less tasty subject of why January is the month of being vegan. This business with the dairy industry, the one where the calves get shunted off prematurely away from their mothers, the little bulls turned into mince meat, the cows kept in a state of prolonged aching lactation: it's not good, is it? And neither is the fate of your typical chook. I've been thinking these thoughts for almost two decades now, and making sporadic, invariably unsuccessful runs at not eating eggs and milk. Unsuccessful, sporadic, I suppose, because I don't figure my personal abstinence constitutes much of a chip off the great groaning megalith that is our day-to-day exploitation of animals. And because I don't feel as implicated in that exploitation when I'm eating the biscuit that's made from the butter that comes from the cow whose male calf was killed, as I do when my teeth tear at the calf himself. And because I know that even if I stop eating butter-eggs-dollops-of-marscapone myself, I'm still of the exploiter class. I pour the catfood (that euphemism) into the two white bowls. I take it for granted that any medicine, shampoo, dishwashing liquid I might use will be safe for me to use, or unsafe in known ways, because thoroughly tested - on whom, I prefer not to think. I read a poem that was first written down with a feather plucked from the rump of a live goose. I look at a photograph first printed with egg white. On my wall is a painting of a chemist's laboratory, painted with - a brush - made of? I admire human ingenuity without thinking too hard about humanity's ingenuity for cruelty.

January is the month of being vegan, not for the sake of the captive farm animal - because if it was for her sake, I'd do something bigger, something real, something that would really help her, like going to the butchers' shops tonight, right now, and plastering her picture on their windows. It's in hope of some kind of absolution, even as I know that I can't be absolved, because my not eating cheese doesn't change the fact that I'm of the master species, a thriving beneficiary of this culture built out of fine bone china and calfskin and catgut. But, but, but: it seems right, to try at least, to take that tiny chip from the monolith, or more right than not doing so. (You will see my ethical bankruptcy - or confusion, anyway - when you hear that at 11.50pm on New Year's Eve, I guzzled as much of the Christmas Lindt as I could, in anticipation of January, the month of being vegan. Or when you note that I am speaking of a month, rather than a lifetime - though that, I should say, is in the spirit of beginning with measurable distances, and to defuse the anxieties of a beloved who knows no higher compliment than "buttery", and cannot think of a mushroom without sauteing it in something from a cow's teat.)

So, to the far pleasanter matter of vegan spanakopita, brought to you by the eternal excellence of filo pastry, by the enormous bunch of silverbeet procured for $1 at the local vegetablarium, and by a viable substitute for ricotta (stay with me here) made out of mashed tofu, pepper, lemon juice, basil and nutmeg. Chuck ye this into yon oven, with liberal sloshes of olive oil, and serve with a brown lentil, thyme, tomato, basil, green bean, rocket, balsamissimo salad, and Bob thine uncle shall be. See how I deprive myself?

* subject of another post
** subject of another other post
*** subject of another other other post

Pseudo-French

2010-11-07T19:39:00.006+11:00

Here is an interesting fact: polyglot derives from the Greek words for many and tongue. Many-tongue. Ew. People use this word in polite company, on the train, in front of police officers and grannies. You might as well saunter up to Constable Widget and ask him whether his uvula’s still swollen. “How’s your uvula, Constable? Still murder on the labio-dentals? Oh, by the way, we’re having a polyglot night down at the Hellfire Club. You should swing by.”

As it happens, every polyglot I’ve ever met has been a charming person, but many of us lack the time, wit, educational opportunities, or lairy audacity necessary for committed polyglottism. In tourism-induced episodes of cross-cultural encounter, we confirmed one-tongues generally have to fall back on what linguists call a lexical “smattering” – of French, Spanish, Urdu – to which more advanced crypto-monoglots add the pertinent accent, which accent can be perfected by listening carefully to Peter Sellers on youtube. To give you some indication of what this sounds like in the field, here’s a pre-recording of a practised monoglot working her magic in a Parisian hair salon: “Bonjour, garçon. Ah would lahk un caffé avec soy milk and lots of – ‘ow you say? – chocolate sprinkles.” This is the same person in Frankfurt: “Vow! Vould you look at that amazink Dachshund! He hast schtollen the Bratwurst and he ist running away! Schnell, little Dachshund! Schnell!” And in Auckland: “Usn’t thet neat, broo? You cen guv fush to the pingwuns!” The friendly and undiscerning natives are down at the pub buying Bratwurst smoothies for these champion monoglots in no time flat. When this occurs, the wise one-tongue feigns a swollen uvula.

There’s no reason to be ashamed of good old-fashioned monoglottism, but now and again every Honest John wants to deceive his friends and co-workers regarding his core competencies, and for this purpose, we advise that he learn a couple of handy Anglicised foreign words (loanwords), and deploy them liberally, ideally while being as ridiculously pedantic about their pronunciation and grammatical insertion into the English sentence as he can.

Buttered snails are an infallible social lubricant, as we all know, so I suggest that Honest John begins with loanwords from French. French affords English a frisky little selection of bons mots, including lingerie, croissant, champagne, faux pas, abattoir, cinematheque, and cul-de-sac. These words should be used regularly. If you’re having trouble fitting them into the conversation, change the subject. Your co-workers will love it when you interrupt their discussion about the payroll dispute and propose a ménage à trois with rissoles and lorgnettes. “Why, John,” your managing director will pant, “you’re such a polyglot.” The trick, of course, is to completely, completely Frankify your pronunciation of these key terms. Do not pronounce “lingerie” lonjeray, the way lesser monoglots do. Remember that you are pretending to be able to speak the language that is traditionally spoken only through a mouthful of buttered-snail soufflé (true). That is to say: lan-zjherree.

Accomplished crypto-monoglots have a variety of additional strategies. Try pausing in the middle of your meeting, furrowing your brow and muttering, “How do they say this word in the English? Oh. Ah. Dear me. [Sotto voce] Merde! Errm. Oh, yes,” and here you must handle the familiar English term as if your mouth were a pair of barbeque tongs, “water jug. Would you be so kind as to pass the ‘water jug’, please.”

Of course, the risk with all this is that the secret workplace polyglot will uncloset herself there and then and ask you en Français whether you’d prefer the water jug or the bottle of sparkling dog’s urine she has in her briefcase. In this case, “Je ne croissant pas” may not be a suitable answer. Feign a swollen uvula.

My hair, powered by 100% Instant Cereal Beverage, Naturally Caffeine Free

2010-10-07T17:30:00.000+11:00

Nyah, nyah, Summer

2010-09-24T18:35:00.003+10:00

The Bureau of Meteorology (and what a fine bureau it is) predicted a sweltering top of 21ºC for Melburnium today. This 21º peak would have been the Bourne's first encounter since the 10th of May with the far side of 20º. I will confirm everything you ever thought about me (i.e., nerd! number obsessive! weather-zoid!) when I tell you that I have been keeping a hawkly climatographic eye on these statistics, and quietly rejoicing in Melbourne's 136 consecutive days of under-20º-ness. And I'll confirm it all over again by waxing ecstatical at today's triumph over the Bureau's haruspications, a triumph which tips 136 consecutive days below 20 to 137 days below 20. Nice work, Smelbourne.

NEWS FLASH! Two days later now and it's 20.2 degrees in the City of Melba! Winter is offishly over.

You can say that again

2010-09-01T17:08:00.000+10:00

There are two kinds of tautologies: rhetorical tautologies, which are tautologies in rhetoric, and logical tautologies, which are tautologies in logic.

Reasons why I love my job immoderately

2010-08-31T17:09:00.006+10:00

Things I have learnt or remembered today, in the honest plying of my trade:

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire. Ottery, I tell you. How he managed to spend the rest of his life in bouts of intermittent misery I can't begin to fathom.

2. Wikipedia (bless its vaguely disreputable but otherwise excellent socks) has a page on the etymology of countries' names, and it turns out that the Isle of Man* is named for Manannán mac Lir, the Brythonic and Gaelic equivalent to the god Poseidon. Way to intimidate the opposition in the America's Cup, no? Or the 100m fly at the Olympic Games?

3. English doesn't just have the word "zoomorphism" (ascription of animal characteristics to a non-animal); it's also got "theriomorphism", ascription of the characteristics of a wild beast to a non-wild-beast. I guess this is the difference between calling your colleague a pussy-cat and a tiger. Not that you should do either. There's no call for metaphor in the modern workplace.

* Isle of Man: (a) not actually a country, (b) birthplace of one of my numerous great grandparents, or something (I don't always pay attention), and (c) associated by reputation with those cats without the tails, who are no relation to my great grandparent, despite what you might infer from this Beatrice impostor.

Explanations

2010-08-13T18:30:00.002+10:00

I recently came into possession of Pauline Hanson's Untamed & Unashamed: The Autobiography.* Lest Hanson's subsequent flamenco routines on Dancing with the Stars and Who Wants to Migrate to the Motherland? have blurred your memory of what she was, in 1997, to an Australia that still talked about multiculturalism like it might be a bit of all right, allow me to quote from the preface she wrote (or "wrote") to her autobiography (or "autobiography") in August 2006:

Another reason why I wrote this book was the frustration of being castigated as a racist by the media and major political parties after my inaugural speech. Yet the very same policies I advocated back then are now almost populist policy, being advocated today by the federal government. For instance, proposing that immigrants should be able to speak and understand English before being allowed into Australia, taking action to stop the illegal refugee situation that was rife at my time in parliament, and a call for immigrants to be sent home if they will not live by our laws, is to name only a few of the beliefs that I made in my inaugural speech. Back then they were 'racist' statements; today the government is advocating the same.

- Pauline Hanson, Untamed & Unashamed: The Autobiography (Docklands, Vic: JoJo Publishing, 2007)

This is where I would have gone if, in some weird parallel universe, I had found myself in Mark Latham's position yesterday, asking Tony "Stop the Boats" Abbott what his role was in gaoling Pauline. I might have suggested that Abbott and the Liberal Party he rode in on wanted Hanson out of the way because they didn't want her attracting the Liberal Party's voters with the Liberal Party's Hansonian policies, that the Liberal Party of the past thirteen years had distinguished itself with its indistinguishability from far-right human-rights-denyin' idiocy. And so forth.

* It was the [ahem] lucky door prize at Poetic Justice on Tuesday night. Far be it from me to look a raffle horse in the mouth, but really. Pauline Hanson's autobiography? Fancy a gold-plated replica of Robert Menzies' toenail while you're at it? Actually, I could have chosen the money box instead. It was pink, cross between a small plastic lady and a skittle. Or Michael Phelps' biography, about Michael Phelps's life, swimming etc. I chose the Hanson. For the same reasons I would have reached for Mein Kampf, morbid curiosity and such.

Nerd alert

2010-08-13T14:23:00.002+10:00

There's a brand-spanking-new, baby-powder-blue edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, hitting the shelves (and the webs) by the end of this month. My inner citationologist is a-quiver from footnote to header. Word on the street is that the CMS is encrusted with jewels no less coruscating than this, for the quoters-of-blogs: "There is no need to add pseud. after an apparently fictitious name of a commenter; if known, the identity can be given in the text or in the citation (in square brackets)."

MLA and Harvard, eat my shorts.

Two Cauliflowers

2010-08-06T23:05:00.002+10:00

There are two types of cauliflower in Coles: organic cauliflowers, which come wrapped in plastic, and cauliflowers that do not come wrapped in plastic and are inorganic.

What would Jesus do?

The Stately Pleasure Dome that is my working life

2010-08-06T18:32:00.002+10:00

There's nothing like writing a lecture on English literature in the wake of the French Revolution to put a person in mind of:

a) literature in English in the wake of 9/11
b) croissants

Can't say I am extremely 'xpert in literature in English in the wake of 9/11 (though while we're here, Simon Armitage's poem, Out of the Blue, is one of those change-your-life sorts of poems, and Rufus Sewell used to be my boyfriend, so you should probably bunker down somewhere with a hanky and a cat and click on that link), though here's a theory, for which I'm not going to advance any evidence, because I am lazy and otherwise engaged and possibly because there isn't any. The theory is this: (1) the post 9/11 West (or if "West" is too homogenised for your tastes, the Axis of We're Not Evil Like Them) has perceived itself to be a sort of frontier, last bastion, yadda yadda, threatened by barbarians* from abroad who are disconcertingly indistinguishable from some of the West's home-grown citizenry; (2) the post 9/11 West, if it thinks about these things at all, thinks that perhaps it is in something like the position of the Ancien Régime just before, during, and after the 1789 foofaraw; (3) this has produced an inordinate interest in 1780s and 90s France and a sympathy for aristocratic layabouts; (4) and textual incarnations of the inordinate interest and sympathy, as in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette and Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, the latter springing to mind because I read it a month ago and it is still on my desk.

That was unconvincing, wasn't it? Let us discourse instead on the subject of croissants. In 1987, I was enlisted by my grade 3 teacher to join my colleagues, Jackie B and Katherine H, in preparing a class presentation on France. Other members of the class were likewise preparing presentations on Spain, Japan, Wales, etc. We were designated class time to repair in our small group of three and think up information about France (as far as I can recall, "research" for this project entailed pooling our collective 9-year-old foreign affairs knowledge). One day - how many days did we spend fecklessly discussing berets and the Eiffel Tower? - Jackie B brought in a croissant, with the intention of exhibiting it in our presentation. I ate it, naked and cold.

The croissant was naked and cold, that is, not me. I was wearing my school uniform. I am ashamed to confess that I have never been a very sophisticated croissantophile. Until about the age of 15 I preferred my croissants with tomato sauce. Indeed, I preferred most things with tomato sauce. One of the sad side effects of becoming a vegetarian at that age was being deprived of the approved opportunities for eating tomato sauce (i.e., with the hind quarters of cows). With tomato sauce, croissants are sweet, salty and tangy; without tomato sauce, you can't fail to notice that what you are eating is 97% butter.

A couple of months ago, my lady's companion and I went on a three-day, ninety-kilometre tromp from Wangaratta to Bright, mostly for the purpose of wearing tweed and carrying sticks and addressing impromptu doggerel to farm animals. The first leg of the third morning was from the pub, where we'd slept (when you're on a tromp, rather than a hike, you stay in pubs), to the bakery, where we had breakfast. My companion asked for a croissant, and then he asked for jam with his croissant, and then he asked for his croissant with jam to be toasted.

Which act of toasting caused the croissant to be shmooshed into a sandwich toaster, whence it emerged as a kind of pancake-oid agglomeration of butter, flour and jam. If the shmooshed croissant had been available to Europe's intelligentsia in the 1790s, I'm sure they could have spilt a lot less ink trying to represent the condition of France.

* N.B. Barbarianism is a projection from the mind of the person/society that feels itself beleaguered onto those whom it believes itself to be beleaguered by. Noone is actually a barbarian.

Wherein your author gets to the point

2010-08-05T18:56:00.003+10:00

I was seventeen when Kaz Cooke first told me that a breast could look like a ferret's nose and be nonetheless a perfectly sensible breast. Given that ferrets' noses are exactly what my breasts looked like - whiskers and everything - I figured at this point that Kaz Cooke was my own personal oracle. I read Real Gorgeous front to back, pausing only to plait my armpit hair, and when she scored her column in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald, I took to writing out her name with TimTam crumbs on our kitchen table.

But over time, as the pong of a person who refuses to use deodorant on the grounds that its aluminium content might cause Alzheimer's doth dissipate in a field of violets, so too did my devotion. Thing was, those columns in the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald weren't even dogs' breakfasts. Dogs' breakfasts, in my experience, consist of only one or two ingredients, or where there are several ingredients, they're reconstituted in roughly equisized and monochromatic pellets. Kaz's articles were more like my breakfasts - fifteen different constituents before you even boil the kettle. There she'd begin, with an amusing anecdote about abseiling in cheerleader gear, and before you knew it she'd be ending on a recipe for Baked Alaska. Or she'd kick off with something punchy about workplace harassment, then meander her way to the pressing matter of basset hound grooming. It was like being invited to the beach, only to find yourself eating dim sims in the bus shelter.

But that's life, really, isn't it? Your day doesn't tend to unfold according to neatly taxonomised thematic principles. You don't generally remember only things starting with the letter Q, and few of us arise from writing 800 words about the criminal justice system in Bolivia without having squandered a thought or two on the itchy spot just west of our left nostril. Well might you reply that the difference between what's going on in your mind as you're writing 800 words about the criminal justice system in Bolivia and what ends up on the page is a good solid edit, either of the as-you-go school or the retrospective, and to that I would say: yes. Indeed. Too right. Strewth. But I might also say, that just for a change, in the privacy of our own homes, maybe just on Sundays, a bit of an unstructured pootle down the avenues of thought can be a pleasantish thing. I said that my devotion to Kaz waned, but I didn't stop reading her column. She said funny things. In no apparent order, true, but still - funny, and sometimes wise.

Here is a picture of a spooky cactus:

Pawly

2010-07-31T15:52:00.005+10:00

Those of you who follow my cohabitator's blog will know that there's been some pretty lyrical regurgitation on the Harlot Heights feline front. The great cat spew of 2010 seems to have done its worst, thank Dog. The pertinent household appurtenances have been soaked almost to the point of disintegration in Napisan, and Harriet and Beatrice are now so frisky that if it weren't for the garbage bin full of vomit-sodden rags I'd be wondering if I dreamed poor Harriet's nine up-chucks in six hours or Beatrice's spectacular stomach-to-modem bile jettison.

Now that we're over the worst, and lest we give the impression that the cats are nothing but trouble, fur-balls, and pre-masticated kibble, I want to state in public the immense contribution Harriet and Beatrice make to the common weal.

For instance, you're trying to write an essay on Mr Darwin's Beagle diary?

Beatrice has got it covered.

You're trying to sew a shirt?

Harriet's right onto it.

You're trying to work out how to turn the rug that's drying on the clothes-horse because you had to wash it after Harriet vomited on it into a cat hammock?

Sorted.

My wonderful ma emailed my sisters and me today to point out that it'd only take three votes to bring wee Bea up to a grand total of TWO HUNDRED VOTES in the Who Wants to Be a Ten-Thousand-Dollar-aire? Whiskas catfood competition. Beatrice currently lags behind her chief competitor, Theodora, by 11312 votes, and the election ends tonight, but I have no doubt , no doubt what-so-ever, that with our electorial powers combined we can catapult Bea into first position. Metaphorically catapult her, that is, as opposed to the literal catapulting that's been going on in the catly oesophagus lately. No, actually, that was metaphorical catapulting too.

P.S. Speaking of elections: I hope the Geej gets herself elected, especially given the alternative, but it was pretty darn disappointing hearing her raise the ol "People Smugglers are Evil People" line on Sunday night. Surely she doesn't think so? Is it the helping to save persecuted people's lives that's supposed to be evil, or the being paid for it? So if - when - Gillard does win the election, my joy will not be unalloyed. It'll be so not unalloyed that I'm not even certain it'll be joy. If Beatrice, on the other hand, wins the election, my joy will be 100% pure joy containing nothing but joy. And disbelief. And thoughts of a new rug.

Vowel-free five-letter-word appears in dictionary, delights scrabble players

2010-07-20T20:06:00.004+10:00

I got the new Macquarie Dictionary yesterday. Fifth edition and all. It turns out that "grrl" is now an Official Word. Also "grrrl". I got rhythm! I got syzygy! I got my grrrl, who could ask for anything more!

Milk Poem, the sensible

2010-07-20T16:00:00.001+10:00

Finding God in coffee cups
brewed by stovetop percolator
so that the burnt coffee edges of God fill the house
and if one were pregnant, one would heave at the stench, I see:

that God leaves a brown ring at the base of the mug,
the stained china, bone china,
the molten ash of the bones of the ox
or where oxen are short, the bones of brown cow Bess.
We pour Bess's milk into Bess's old bones,
and bugger her baby, pardon my French.

Bone china and jelly and marshmallows the pink of cherry blossom,
all these are brewed from the bones of cows.

Reading the tea leaves, when they're not made of tea,
but dried-out beans from the dark-roast jar,
and their smutch on the mug is a fine dark line,
I study the Lord and wonder when.

Milk Poem, the silly

2010-07-20T15:56:00.001+10:00

The milk of human kindness
Comes in many different forms:
like not teasing colour blindness
with strange chromatic storms,
or playing on your bagpipes
outside the boarders' dorms,
or other such impertinences -
for which, refer to common senses.
The milk of human kindness,
Like other dairy things,
Comes curdled, cooled, homogenised,
Whipped and drizzled on fruit pies.
The wise will know the wheys and whys
The lactic roundabouts and swings.
The milk of human kindness
Is the very sort of treat
To please the sort of person
Who likes a kindly teat,
The very sort of person
Who digs the sweetest dugs,
Prefers a nipply sympathy
To flowers, words or hugs.

iI

2010-07-18T17:00:00.003+10:00

Wunna my all-time fave internetians (mine, and anyone's who digs Texan tacophile on-line feminism) has been embarking on a one-brain-campaign to illustrate the rhetorical limitations of the first person singular nominative pronoun, which pronoun is the great columnar phallogothingy, I. Around this phallogothingy, on this blog, have clustered divers and interesting claims. Such as:

1. that "I" is redundant, that putting an idea (e.g., X) under a name on a blog proclaims X to be the belief and the opinion and yea, the very synapse-spawn of the writer, regardless of whether or not the writer prefaces her claim, "X", with, "I asseverate that...". Also sprach mine high school English teacher, steering his feckless charges into the faux-objectivist rhetorical quagmires of agentless passive verbs, polysyllabic Greco-Latinate nouns, and nary a first - or second - person pronoun across the entire barren tundra of our Thomas Hardy essays. From this quagmire the emergence of the trusty Alexis is yet to transpire (to give you a fairly representative, if horrific, example of the sort of construction my high school English teacher encouraged);

2. that an "I think etc" disarms the idea, implies a subjective claim, when the author actually means an objective one: and therefore either weakens the claim or - and this is what makes "I think" rhetorical genius, imho - disables objections. Whereas you might be the world's most cogent authority on why X is untrue, there's no arguing with the claim I think X;

3. that personal narrative enjoys a long and illustrious history alongside such feminist activities as outing the oppressor and asking one's Sister to pass the muffins. This is whether the oppressor is one's boss, close relation, next-door neighbour, bus-driver, or local aluminium-based vaginal deodorant merchant. And also regardless of the moral status of the muffins.

Anyway, someone should tell all this to Apple. iMac was one thing; iBook, on the other hand (no, the same hand), was another. iPod sounded so cute - in a cetacean, beany sort of way - that I was beyond protest; iPad, meanwhile, so gloriously naive to the suggestion of menstrual equipage I almost want to buy a gross of them. But come the day that Apple manufactures its first wireless hominid central nervous system, it's going down in a welter of controversy. iI? I mean, really.

Vote 1 Beatrice

2010-05-28T19:08:00.006+10:00

So, word on the cat front: Harriet has embarked on an exciting career as an experimental physicist (take one glass of water, observe, enact deliberate sideways swipe of paw, measure resultant hydrocity, remain scientifically skeptical of so-called law of gravity and repeat experiment when opportunity presents). Beatrice, meanwhile, has been non-consensually entered into a Perhaps - Certainly from the Tuna's Point of View - Pretty Darn Sinister Cat Food Sponsored beauty contest. For which beauty contest, N.B., victory is assured, especially if this blog's intrepid band of readers - yes, all four of you - contribute your electoral goodwill. That's right, all Bea needs to win $10,000 and her rightful place on the marketing material for Whiskas' Oh So Gelatinous! is the help of four ordinary, decent voters, four voters prepared to cast a hundred votes from a hundred IP addresses every day for ten consecutive days. If that sounds like your cup of lactose-reduced, go hence. One of the world's two loveliest kittens thanks you, or would, had she actually agreed to the latest installment in my regime of catsploitation.

In other catly news, Ben Pobjie - of the soon-to-be tragically moldering New Matilda - penned the following pome in exchange for fifty (50) dollars ($), that is, AU$50, a mere half of a hundred dollars, which actually pretty negligible sum (buys a lot of lentils, sure, but not many movie tickets), is going towards his campaign to get himself a berth at the 2011 Melbourne Comedy Festival, which I understand takes a great many lentils indeed. Here is his poem. I'm not sure about the closing couplet (Bea & Harry are both committed egalitarians), but I think the bit about the korma rivals P. B. Shelley at his least vegetarian.

Take it away, Pobjie:

Two sisters
Both alike in dignity
Except for one, who is small and weedy
But the big one is definitely alike in dignity
If you get my drift

Two sisters
Both alike in fur
Fur of different colours, but similar consistency
Like a plate of butter chicken, sitting next to a plate of goat korma
Different to look at, but similar to rub on your face
Also different to taste

Two sisters
Different to taste
Do not try to eat them
You will
Regret it
They will scratch your throat out

They have done it before
One time Harriet was at the vet
And the vet performed certain actions
And lo, it was proved, the truth of that ancient aphorism writ large on the papyrus of history:
One man’s routine medical procedure is another man’s unprovoked sexual battery
Especially, as Diogenes said, if one man is a female cat
Which was probably more common in ancient Greece than it is now
And so Harriet took back the night

Because cats are all about rebellion
It was cats who built civilisation
When in Egypt of old they raised the pyramids and manipulated the pharaohs
When monuments and ornaments were built for their glory
And they basked every day in fish and milk
When even the very reeds of the Nile trembled at their approach
And did their bidding
Not that having reeds do your bidding is of that much use
Reeds have poor musculature
And no limbs
So the range of tasks they are suited for is minimal

But other did their bidding also
The cats were rulers
And still they rule

Two sisters
Ruling
Harriet, bestriding the world like titans of old, facing dogs, rats, and hoses alike
With calm equanimity
And regal grace
Beatrice, tiptoeing modestly through the corridors of life, self-effacing
And yet proud as legend’s faerie queens
Even when biting your arm

Two sisters
They flatter us with their existence
And they bless us with their favour
Which is to be found in the litter tray

Thank you, Sisters
We, your slaves, await your order.

Fungi and friends

2010-05-16T14:30:00.005+10:00

There's a yeast-based beverage for anyone who can tell me what this fungus is called. Its proper mycological name, that is, though I could probably see my way to a beer for anyone who tells me it's Queen Ann's Bloomers and perfect in your risotto al funghi deluxe.

The Preston Heights ménage (two humans, two cats) visited Chateau de Mum (two humans, one dog, three chooks) last week, and rather than taking responsibility for the inter-species consequences (chooks-dog-cats, like rock-paper-scissors, except that cats seem to beat everyone else, especially if everyone else is the world's most chivalrous beagle and a trio of sensible bantams), I trotted off to take photos of fungi and other mycobiontical delights. Mum lives in front of a pine plantation, which means there are enough fly agarics to build an entire fairy Manhattan

Also this ramalina farinacea, the beardy lichen:

and this parmotrema something-or-other, which I wish I could grow across the walls of my living room. The trees look liver-spotted (who came up with that word, liver-spot? to say nothing of senile wart?). There's something about lichen that suggests the sturdy and eternal, even if itself it grows and spores and dies and grows. And p.s., for all you, who, like me, are enthralled by and grossly underinformed about matters micro/biological, lichens come about through symbiotic relations between fungi and algae or similar bacteria. How cool is that? THIS cool.

Tellies

2010-05-07T17:44:00.009+10:00

Now this, ladeez and gennilmen, is what I call a Home Theatre System.

I use it to watch The Big Bang Theory and The Mentalist on Monday night, Monday night being telly night. I watch The Mentalist even though The Mentalist's plot goes like this: camera pans across decolletage of conventionally gorgeous young woman found mangled in clearly felonious circumstances; camera cuts to decolletage of conventionally-gorgeous-young-woman of a crime scene investigator who advances a theory as to nature and perpetrator of felony; Patrick Jane, aka the Mentalist, a sort of blond Byron-on-a-stick waltzes in and advances alternative theory; alternative theory proves to be correct. This, you would think, is hardly edifying fodder for a Baron about Town such as myself. Indeed, I would say in reply, but where were you when I needed three litres of intravenous chocolate after my four consecutive hours of Monday afternoon teaching?

It has come to my attention that my home theatre system may shortly cease to work on accounta not having an enigmatic piece of hardware known as a Set Top Box. I'm guessing that if I had the inclination I could procure myself a Set Top Box, but I'm not convinced it would go with my decor. I.e., do set top boxes come in spraypaint gold? If not, shame on them.

Recent sightings of other people's home theatre systems in various stages of al fresco decay (scroll down...)

Home Theatre Systems in various stages of al fresco decay, photographed on my route to work

lead me to believe that the horrors of set top box purchase and possibly the sexual politics of channel 9 programming have caused the entire Australian population to chuck their tellies out onto the nature strip and take up more wholesome Monday night pursuits, like intravenous chocolate.

Here is my question to you, gentle reader, if you still exist: what do you do plan to do on Monday nights after your Home Theatre System ceases to function? And can I come too?

The whiskeriest loser

2010-04-15T08:24:00.004+10:00

You subscribe to your vet clinic's monthly newsletter, and whaddayaget?

From the veterinarians who brought you "Buy one neutering, get one free", comes the "PetFit weight loss program". I mean, omidog, Slimmer of the Year? Anxiousness, much? I've never been prouder of Harriet for biting Dr Rob's hand.

Derangement

2010-04-14T12:24:00.003+10:00

My first year classes are finding their way this week into Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. It's a dankly Gothic – and of course – this is Margaret Atwood – a ravishing, unsettling tease of a novel. Its Grace might have murdered her master and his housekeeper in cold blood, whatever cold blood is, but she might have been an amnesiac, might have been under the thrall of a psychotic alter ego, might have been the scared-witless witness to a murder, and after five hundred pages or so we still don't know. Which is maddening, and pleasing too.

Yesterday afternoon, we stumbled across the place where Grace learns that her master has made his housekeeper, Nancy, pregnant. Grace remembers instantly her best friend, who bled to death beside her after an abortion. She thinks about Nancy who stands a chance of survival, who might marry the master, and she thinks about her friend Mary who bled, and she feels a righteous rage. Of course, it's a perverse kind of justice, where if one person is wronged, it seems right that other, similar, people, should be wronged too. But it occurred to me that trauma, or – let's not use that word, because people use it for what happens when you spill your carrot soup – the sorts of emotional experience that discomfort your intuitions about how the world should be, tend to de-stabilise your sense of justice too. One of your reference points is moved, and your whole network of beliefs shifts three degrees north-east.

The week that Dad died, I didn't have to look for snakes as I waded through the grass along Darebin Creek. I didn't have to check for the cars that surge round the corner just near my house. I waited for my green man, and I walked. I made a point of not checking for those stray cars. It seemed impossible to me, unjust and therefore impossible, that my mother might lose a child and her husband in the same week.

I found myself yesterday afternoon saying this to my students. "I remember the week when my father died," I began, pretending that what I was remembering wasn't eight weeks ago, but safe and far away. There was a sort of hush that fell on the room. I hadn't expected empathy – I hadn't expected anything, I guess, since talking about Dad certainly wasn't part of my lesson plan – but it felt like the class could see through "I remember the week" and "Here I am telling you an anecdote to illustrate how sadness can derange our sense of justice" to "I am sad".

The first year course is meant to be a welcome-to-literary-studies-and-its-key-concepts thing. We felt that the best way to introduce literary studies and some of its key concepts would be through overtly intertextual pairs - Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Sylvia Plath's Ariel and Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, and Alias Grace, which is itself an assemblage of different texts. It's not a particularly original organising principle, but it does the trick. Rolling out the course for the first time last year, I realised that the secret thematic link between the texts was the mentally ill woman: Ophelia in Hamlet and R&G, Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Grace in Alias Grace, Sylvia Plath. Which was good. My inner 70s feminist has a lot to say about mental illness and women. But we started the course again this year with Hamlet, and I realised for the first time that he has lost his father. And Jane Eyre is an orphan. And Antoinette/Bertha Mason loses her father, her mother, her step-father. And Grace's mother drowns at sea. And Sylvia Plath rages for and against her dead Daddy. The secret thematic link is the death of a parent.

I could tell them this, to illustrate how the reader's lived experience interferes with her reading, but I have such mixed feelings about the pedagogical value of the teacher's, i.e., my autobiographical detours. I had a favourite English teacher at school, and our ears would prick up like dogs' whenever he pulled a story out of his own annals. He'd grown up with a white family in Kenya, been there during the violence of decolonisation, gone to a boarding school in England where he slept in Thackeray's old bed. It helped us pay attention to the other stuff, not that the other stuff (Under Milkwood, John Keats, Margaret Atwood again, with The Handmaid's Tale) wasn't interesting enough. But when it's my life and times: it's not that I'm short on stories, but I know that there's something self-serving about my telling, to this captive audience, who have to laugh on cue, or look engaged, lest I gnash my terrible course coordinator's teeth, or set them three thousand pages of Freud on the joke for homework. I'm worried, I suppose, about turning into the David Brent of the classroom.

So I said that thing about the week that Dad died. It was just an anecdote - three sentences - to help explain a point about trauma and magical thinking - but they looked at me, and I don't think I mistook the compassion in their faces. I can be steely and resolute, until someone offers sympathy, and then I collapse into myself, or into them, into their sympathy. Here it was my class, of mostly eighteen-year-olds, and I had to turn to the whiteboard and collect myself.

Pasta la vista, baby.

2010-03-24T16:42:00.003+11:00

Just sent off a 17 page study leave application and now need to fall into a giant bowl of spaghetti or I will DIE of malnutrition (17 page study leave application, you understand, doing some serious sapping of the energies).

P.S. if my application is not successful, I will consider quitting my job and taking up as a professional spaghetti taster. You read it here first, comrades.

P.P.S. Dear Job, if you're reading this - not really. I'd never leave you. Even for spaghetti.

With cat-like tread

2010-03-20T14:53:00.004+11:00

It's been Official Week of the Manky-Brained Harlot round here. The Sidekick and I left the bathroom window open on Sunday night, to facilitate the immildewification of said bathroom, and thereby instead facilitated the escapades of Intrepid Harriet. Out the bathroom window she slunk, down the neighbour's prickly conifer she clomb, into the neighbour's enclosed backyard she plunked, round the neighbour's chicken coop she sniffed, whereupon she realised she was verily stuck. Actually, that's my reconstruction. This is how it really went: at 10.30 we closed the bathroom window which had been opened for the immildewification of said bathroom and retired to the recumbent reading room safe in the knowledge that Harriet and Beatrice were hiding under their hard furnishings of preference; by 11.00, Beatrice was pillowing her head on my ankle, but Harriet hadn't emerged from under her hard furnishing; I searched the baronial premises; no Harriet. We remembered the bathroom window. We shuffled outside in slippers and jammies. "Oh, Harriet!" I stage-whispered into the night, so as not to antagonise the neighbours. "Why, Harriet!" Still no Harriet. And then I saw Leonard, perched atop Apartment 7's recycling bin and staring hard over next door's fence. I listened. Tinkle-jing. Harriet's collar. Sidekick, who's got the advantage of an extra 8 inches, looked over the fence, where sat Harriet, staring up at him, relief in her eyes.

"Oh, Harriet," said Sidekick. "It's you! Good girl! Thank God!" (We were worried, see, 'cause it's a rough neighbourhood, what with four lanes of traffic just around the corner, to say nothing of the menaces of Fat Cat, who lives a couple of houses down the street, and is all "I wuv you, I wuv you so much, I wuuuuuuuvvvvvvvv you, purr, purr", until he sees Hazza or Bea, whereupon he lets out a godawful air-raid-siren of a meow and squares himself up like a Staffordshire Terrier whose bone you've just admired.)

Anyway: "Meow!" said Harriet (truly - that's exactly what she said - two syllables and everything).

"Jump up here," said Sidekick.

"My good man, if you think I can jump 1.85 metres straight into the air without serious inducement - and might I here suggest Tasmanian smoked salmon with King Island clotted cream and organic caper berries - you are sorely deluded," replied Harriet.

"I see," said Sidekick. "Well, perhaps you could follow me along the obverse of this fence and I will lead you to the neighbour's padlocked gate, under which you should be able to squeeze yourself, whereupon I will scoop you up and escort you personally back into your nice warm home."

"That's all very well," said Harriet. "But I cannot understand a word you are saying, and I wish you'd come up with a plan to get me out of this garden rather than blathering on."

And so Sidekick and I told Harriet she was a fine, fine cat, and suggested she try climbing back up the tree that leads to our bathroom window, which we promised her we would keep open, and then went back to the recumbent reading facility, where we lay awake for the next hour and a half, hoping, hoping, hoping that Harriet wasn't being molested by Fat Cat. Actually, we knew she wasn't, because she had set herself up in the corner of nextdoor's garden closest to the edge of our apartment block and was gazing longingly up at our window. Beatrice, meanwhile, lay on the window sill, gazing longingly down at Harriet.

At 2.30, we heard a scrabble and a thump. It was Harriet, figuring out how to climb back up the conifer. We cracked open the Iams cat biscuits, threw a bit of a party, and then went back to bed.

That, I submit, is the main cause of my manky-brainedness for the rest of the week. I managed to lose my phone recharger, forget - in the middle of a lecture - the name of the bloke who wrote Rousseau's autobiography, and leave my wallet and keys on my office desk on Wednesday evening, so that when halfway through my walk home I found myself with a pile of olives, peas, bread and toilet paper at the Coles checkout, it turned out that I was completely without funds. I spent the next hour and a half ambling through my neighbouring suburbs, plucking the ripe figs that dangled over people's fences. I was still home half an hour before anyone who could let me inside, so I checked the letterbox, and by the light of the silvery halogen streetlamp, read Medecins sans Frontiers' letter about tuberculosis so many times I was ready to give them my entire life-savings immediately - only my credit card was sitting in my wallet locked inside my office four kilometres away.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why a more sensible me would have invested in a fly-screen for her bathroom window three months ago, but all's well that ends well, blah blah.

Wherein I wish Gerard Henderson would go away

2010-03-17T12:39:00.003+11:00

I've always understood a "think tank" as something similar to a "fish tank" - with Gerard Henderson paddling about, losing his memory every thirty seconds - but it's just occurred to me that the "tank" bit might be as in "armoured combat vehicle blindly trundling across the tundra".

Dad

2010-03-11T18:30:00.004+11:00

Silence always means something, and round here it's meant that a week after I got myself officially with sidekick, my beautiful, boisterous, noisy, joyful father, one of my very best friends in the world, was diagnosed with mesothelioma. For two weeks after the diagnostic surgery, Dad was desperate to go home, longing for more time, exhausted by hospital and being prodded awake and reminded to breathe properly and catheters and thrush and nothing to eat but ice-cream and diabetic jelly and milk. He was saying every day how much he loved each of his kids, loved Mum, loved Mum more than anything, but after two weeks of that he stopped breathing.

We don't have proper rituals of mourning, not ones that I know of, so I've been bumbling around, giving lectures, keeping my office door closed, eating the sidekick's biscuits, crying every day for the last five weeks – mostly when someone asks me how I am, or I re-read Hamlet, or try to phone my oh-so-splendid mother and be brave for her. Brave for her. God knows, I knew it would be sad when it happened – but even when he had cancer ten years ago, and we joked about the stories we'd tell at his funeral – it never seemed possible that someone so stouthearted and loud and solid could die. My Dad, who spent the last sixty-five years of his life making up for WWII cream rationing, who in 2003 walked up to a riot squad cop outside Philip Ruddock's house and demanded, demanded in the name of Australia (go, Dad!), that the cop stop pulling a protester by her hair, who divided his toast equally with the dog. He said he and Mum had four children before they worked out what was causing us. He would cry in ghostly tones from the far end of the house, "Coffee for your poor father". He pronounced vegetables with four syllables for fun. He'd get cranky with the tv when ever anyone said "vunrable" instead of "vulnerable". He quoted bits of poems at apparently irrelevant moments – "Butting down the channel in the mad, March days", "Young Lochinvar has come out of the West", "Margaret, are you grieving?", "But if we fail, we fail", "Water, water everywhere", "Under the spreading chestnut tree". He only ever wore grey socks, except when he had on his fawn shorts and then he'd wear fawn socks, and as long as I can remember, he's worn white underpants and a white singlet. He'd eat pizza with abandon, saying, "Have you ever seen a dead Italian?" Sometimes he'd eat Chinese take-away with abandon, saying, "Have you ever seen a dead Chinaman?" He'd encourage me to take a piece of beef, saying, "The cow's completely vegetarian." Or "This is the poor man's lettuce." He called the radio the wireless, and spoke lovingly of crystal sets, and relief maps. He planted trees. He sexed potatoes. For about two years, he worked his way through each of the recipes in the Charmaine Solomon curry cookbook.

When I was a kid, I spent most Saturday afternoons at the beach with my father. There was always an ice-cream ("If your mother asks, you must tell her the truth, but no need to say anything about ice-cream if she doesn't"), and usually a trip to the nursery, and a great sprawling chat in the 45 minute drive home from the sea. When I was fourteen, writing a short story about apocalypse-by-laser-gun, Dad drove me to the Sydney University physics library so I could read up on electromagnetic radiation (I spent six hours working out the cataloguing system). He'd always offer to test me before Latin exams. "Hic haec hoc," he'd say, infuriatingly. "What does that mean?" He'd similarly test my sisters, who could do dizzying things with maths: "What are five sevens? Two plus two?" He'd drive me to music rehearsals, sit outside for two hours, drive me home again, and the talks we had were glorious: God, communism, eating animals. I didn't ever ask him if the lifts were a trouble, I don't think; it was understood that he'd enjoy ferrying me around.

I'm writing this because my mother told me last weekend that she wanted me to keep putting stuff here, but before I can put stuff here, darling Mum, I have to say something about the hole in our world. You know how much Dad loved you, and I hope with all my heart that he is somewhere now, surrounded by Devonshire teas and scruffy stout dogs, loving you still.

Wherein I announce my sidekick

2010-01-15T17:41:00.003+11:00

I'm not good with disclosing myself. It's not that I won't tell you all about my intestinal parasites, the oscillations of my uterus, and the three day beetroot diet of '99 (good times), it's just that when it comes to Matters of the Heart I am discretion with a capital D, discretion in the Masonic vault guarded by three-headed sabre-toothed Swiss bankers sense of discretion. I am a veritable clam. I am an encrypted stone buried three kilometres beneath Mt Kilimanjaro in a lead-lined sea-chest. That's right, I am the opening chapter of a Dan Brown novel.

All that's by way of not getting to the point, which point is that I am now exhuming my inner life to announce that through processes mysterious and wonderful, I have contracted an alliance with the dearest boy in the world (I refer to critically-acclaimed globally-renowned internetian of letters, TimT), and we are, as I speak, in the process of merging our empires. Or not quite as I speak, because he is presently at work, and I am about to go out for dumplings with friends, but nowish. I.e., I have been living amongst his books (6000 or so) but not his bookshelves; his soap is now here, but not his shower recess, etc. Life is messy and kind of glorious, a bit like my hair, which I trimmed last week in an ill-conceived attempt to look like a rambutan, and despite which this extraordinary person still seems to love me. Sigh.

Awright, I won't go on. You can safely infer about 70,000% more happiness than the above paragraph indicates.

Put this in your pipe and produce an exothermic chemical reaction with it.

2010-01-11T15:01:00.004+11:00

"I may here speak of some attempts by myself, made hitherto in too desultory a way, to obtain materials for a 'Beauty-Map' of the British Isles. Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, 'good, medium, bad,' I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross With a long leg. I use its upper end for 'good,' the cross-arm for 'medium,' the lower end for 'bad.' The prick-holes keep distinct, and are easily read off at leisure. The object, place, and date are written On the paper. I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. Of course this was a purely individual estimate, but it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population. I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest."

- Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, 1908.

Ah, Francis, Francis, Francis. And there was I thinking that you eugenicists were just nice chaps who'd fallen in with the wrong crowd. I've got a whole quiverful of envenomed projectiles aimed in the general direction of this paragraph, but let's leave the one labeled "Prick-Holes - Freudian Much?" and instead fire off "There Is No Such Thing As Attractiveness".

Where to begin? Well, firstly, there is no such thing as a beautiful thing. But what about alps?, you might well interject. And indeed, when I behold an alp, my heart pronks, my knees tremble within my veganware Lederhosen, and I yearn to gambol with the goatlings between the jagged death-dealing outcrops of granite as I clutch at my heaving bosom on account of the high altitude pulmonary edema. But alp worship - I have it on good authority - is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before circa 1750, put an alp before your average Jo and she'd aim her pricker at the "repellent" end of the page. "Alps?" she'd burl, in her exaggerated Wessex yokel accent. "How you going to grow a nice cabbage on an alp, eh? Answer me that." Which is to say, one man's fish is another man's poisson. Notions of what's beautiful, like notions of what's good to eat (tomatoes, fungus, dogs), what sounds nice (Chinese opera, heavy metal, nightingales), and how best to cut a length of demin (poo-catcher, high-waisted, flares) owe - as the entire world knows, or, erm, "knows" - quite a bit to culture.

This much has been orthodoxy for the last half a century. Beauty is not truth; it's just truthy. And as my year 8 personal development instructress observed, "While the current fashion, ladies, might be for bosoms that look like badgers' snouts, only a hundred years ago it was all in the bustle. So don't you worry if it's your behind that looks like a badger's snout. Posterior whiskers will be on the What's Hot list before you can say 'Claudia Schiffer in a boiler suit'."

So it's wrong to say that luxuriantly dimpled thighs are beautiful. What you should say, if you must, is "I have a penchant for luxuriantly dimpled thighs". But there's something about the word "attractive" that makes that nuance nigh on grammatically impossible. Even if you try to install yourself - the observer with the penchant - as an agent in the operations of attractiveness, i.e., I am attracted, the real agent emerges in the by his moustaches, or by her badgers' snouts, or by the way her boiler suit glimmers in the moonlight. The observer is absolved of his (her) response. Q.* is attractive; Q. attracts; of course I am attracted by Q.. Of course. How could I not be? And so whatever actions my attractedness manifests in, they aren't my responsibility, because I was attracted by Q.

And here I conclude, by saying this: Francis, old pal, "purely individual estimate", my Aberdeenian granny.

* Like you wouldn't believe.

Flattery schmattery

2009-12-28T16:19:00.001+11:00

"You have lots of nice soft moles, Lexi."

- niece, aged 3.

What I am about to type will disgust you

2009-12-23T15:37:00.004+11:00

So if you don't want to be disgusted, admire these wholesome family portraits and then flee from this site, preferably sprinkling yourself with holy water and applying one of those plague doctor masks with the giant crows' beaks as you go.

But first, pre-disgustment wholesome family portraits:

Wholesome Beatrice, getting down low with the Dustmaster 2000.

Wholesome Harriet of the unsmutched belly.

Now, vamoose, especially if you (a) work with me, (b) are likely to see me in the next week, or (c) are in the habit of excommunicating people on grounds of poor - nay, criminally negligent - hygiene. If, on the other hand, you want to wallow in fresh depths of disgustation, then huddle round and make sure you've got your bleach handy, because [da da da dum] I have worms. Thread worms. In my digestive tract. And it's a good thing, too, because if I didn't have worms - according to last night's google research - I'd have haemorrhoids, and apparently the only thing you can do for haemorrhoids is shove anaesthetic cream up your bottom, give up sitting, and betake yourself to the barber surgeon for a quick haemorrhoidectomy. All you need to dispose of worms, on the other hand, is a single dose of over-the-counter vermicide and then a brisk incineration of your house to get rid of the eggs.

I only realised that I have worms this morning, and I have since showered three times, invested in a six-pack of the aforementioned over-the-counter vermicidal tablets, a new nailbrush, and a bottle of strawberry flavoured Belgian beer (for inner cleansing, etc). I have also undergone six psychosomatic parasitosis-induced hysterical episodes, for which the beer would be useful, but I'm keen to keep my wits about me. Last night, as I lay in bed failing to get to sleep because my fundament was itching and I was pondering the fate of my benighted nethers, my mind turned - as minds do in these circumstances - to the public history of my bottom. I had a sudden terrible vision of the time my mother waited for the entire family - sisters, brother, sisters' boyfriends - to gather round before attacking the splinter that had lodged in my left buttock no-thanks-to-the-cats-tongue-wooden-floorboards-at-ballet-class. And another sudden terrible vision of the time I came home from a birthday party with a yellow paper dog mask, took off my party dress and sandals and socks and underpants, found my yellow - that is to say, horseradish, that is to say, supposedly dog-coloured - skivvy, donned it and the mask and beetled off down the street on all four feet with my naked bottom wagging. Neither of these terrible visions was as terrible as the terrible vision my mind was concocting of the gloved doctor preparing herself for my haemorrhoidectomy, and so I was glad when I woke up this morning and realised with dawning clarity that I have worms.

What troubles me, of course, besides the fact that there are small creatures roosting in my hindquarters, is that there is something seriously wrong with my hygiene routine. I mean, I wash my hands after going to the loo, with soap!, and I don't make a habit of sniffing other folks' bums or handling raw sewerage, but in the last year I've had my first wart, two cats' worth of ringworm, and now this. Noone has ever, ever, ever told me that they have worms. Ever. So I have no way of judging what a reasonable rate of infestation might be, but this - this doesn't seem reasonable.

The unverbable gerundive

2009-12-22T13:20:00.003+11:00

Which smartysocks decided that "unrelenting" gets to be a word but "unrelent" doesn't, eh? She's messed up my scrabble game, whoever she is.

I think I'm in love

2009-12-10T19:11:00.002+11:00

Just received some spam from one "Romeo Hankel".

This also is cool

2009-12-09T20:27:00.003+11:00

If you're, say, a misguided eighteenth-century natural philosopher dude, and you believe that within each sperm is a perfectly formed miniature man, then that perfectly formed mini-man must himself have little miniature sperm, inside which sperm are even teenier perfectly formed little men, in whose insy-winsy sperm are even smidgier men, in whose itty-bitty sperm are weeny-meany little squidgy perfectly formed men, replete with minimissimus sperm, containing very small humans indeed, and - so - forth.

You'd get to thinking you were quite important.

Viva ovoviviparous sharks!

2009-12-09T17:45:00.010+11:00

Harlot folklore has it that it was good old me who suggested we call Aristotle Aristotle. I was five at the time, and he was a wriggly round puppy with a leg at each corner. In my memory, I spent days lobbying for Daisy. Someone had told me that chihuahua puppies were small enough to snuggle inside matchboxes, and I was wishing my socks off that at the last minute the beagle elect would be replaced by a chihuahua.

The beagle won, thank Dog, and Aristotle trumped Daisy. I don't remember giving up on Daisy, but the collective account is emphatic. I chose Aristotle. I do remember, afterwards, being inordinately proud of having fished out such an illustrious name for the wonderdog.

Until I realised what a total doofus Aristotle's namesake was. Exempli gratia:

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

That's just charming, that is. Much worse than his theory that babies happen when an Athenian plants his homunculus in the nearest vessel's menstrual blood.

But this is kinda cool. In De generatione animalium, Aristotle classifies animals into five groups: mammals; ovoviviparous sharks; birds and reptiles; fish, cephalopods, and crustaceans; and insects. And might I just add how impressed I am by those sharks, who keep their eggs in their bodies until they're ready to hatch. Way to avoid the omelet factor.

The Ambassador for Preston, reporting for duty

2009-12-08T21:38:00.009+11:00

Last you heard from your feckless narrator, she was inspecting formaldehyded fœtuses east of Weimar. You could be forgiven - considering the silence round these parts - for assuming that she had since perished from a surfeit of sauerkraut and extrawurst, but in fact I've been moseying my way back to the internet, via a series of airports, northern hemispeherean cities, an overdue essay, and the two weeks' effluvium that spewed from my pigeonhole at Good Old Work.

Speaking of northern hemispeherean cities, my sister & co. took me on a speed tour of Tokyo, the main effect of which tour (besides how hugely nice it was to see my sister & co.) was to make me ashamed of Australian dunnies. Seriously, Japan's got it all over Australia in the plumbing department.

Above, for instance, is a Japanese toilet console, which plays prerecorded gurgling noises, sprays your nethers with gently warmed toilet nectars, and adjusts seat temperature to taste. Where I come from, you're lucky if you have a hole in the ground and a sheet of newsprint. What, a hole? When I were a lad, had t'defecate into thin air, I did.

Speaking of such savoury matters, here is a giant Japanese poo:

Or possibly a sweet potato. I couldn't tell, but sister & co. were pretty certain it's a giant poo.

And what would be the point of all this attention to gross domestic product, were there not also things to eat?

Delicacies, like SPAM, with sticky rice and seaweed.

Or manic blue-eyed self-saucing hotdawgs.

Or this actually quite potable green-tea-ccino.

As my father's fond of saying whenever the opportunity arises, "I see travel's broadened you."

Fill in the blanks

2009-11-24T03:59:00.005+11:00

There once was a ... hippopotamus
Who ... ... ... ... ... on top of us.
... ... ... ... ...
... ... ... ... ...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... [rhymes with potamus].

P.S. the Jermin for hippo is Flußpferd. Learnt that today while looking at a hippo's skull. Unsmiley face.

Three Disturbing Things

2009-11-24T03:16:00.003+11:00

1. There were six pickled fœtuses at the Phyletisches Museum today. Human fœtuses: one aborted at four weeks, one at eight weeks, one at twelve weeks, one at sixteen weeks, one at twenty-four weeks, one at thirty-three weeks. Some of them were curled against a preserved slice of uterus, cut away so that you could see the tiny limbs tucked into the tiny body. They're suspended in formaldehyde, and arranged so that you imagine it's the same fœtus aging. I found myself talking to the biggest ones, as if they were babies, and alive, and needed comforting. Whose were those uteruses?

2. In the same room, there is a chart – a recent chart, inspired by the Out-of-Africa hypothesis – that illustrates the degree of relationship and distance between the human races. Races, so called. There's no human race that can't be undone with a single act of sexual reproduction. Not that you'd think so, to look at this chart.

3. One of the stranger papers at the conference last week was titled "What Women Want - Men Want Something Different". I'm of the "one is not born a woman" school, so I'm unreceptive from the get-go to evolutionary accounts of why "women" and "men" behave the way they supposedly behave. Even if I weren't, though, even if I thought I was nothing but my biology, and that my biology was something static and predetermined and identical with that of 51.2% of my species, this paper would have gotten my goat, by her beard. It went like this: women want men who will enable their babies to prosper, high status men with lots of money; men want women who are healthy and fertile, and monogamous, so that they can be sure that they're investing their paternal energy into their own offspring; there is no upper limit on women's desire for their mate's status and wealth; and so men are driven to relentless capitalism; cue – smoke-stacks, landfill, disposable ermine earmuffs; conclusion – the environmental apocalypse has been caused by women's desire.

And from the blog with its finger on the pulse of the arterial system of the body of today ...

2009-11-24T02:53:00.003+11:00

A Düsseldorfian antiques dealer has located Adolf Hitler's Mercedes. Chancellor Merkel attributes her staying power to peppermint tea. McDonalds in Germany is going to re-colour its logo green, to show its respect for the environment.

Well may you snort (I do), but these are all facts. I heard them over breakfast in the Hotel Thüringer Hof, and as everyone knows, in cheeso veritas.

Eating Noodles in the Former Soviet Bloc

2009-11-23T03:25:00.017+11:00

Very early on Wednesday morning, I landed in Munich. My coccyx was numb. Barely had the blood oozed back into my nethers than I was flying to Hannover, en route (i) noting that Munich's nuclear reactor resembles Springfield's, (ii) successfully negotiating, in German, the flight attendant's enquiry as to my tea/coffee preferences, and (iii) receiving a free newspaper, Bild, from Lufthansa, whereon were published Hot! Previously unseen! Photos! of Jackie Onassis! Nude! Thus initiated in the ways of the northern hemisphere, I caught the intercity speedzug to Göttingen, where I parked myself for four days.

You want to know how I survived? Ritter Sport chocolate is how I survived. As the advertisements will tell you (and who am I to disagree?), "Quadratisch, practisch, gut." Also, Ritter Sport chocolate comes with a variety of nuts.

So, here is Göttingen.

If you're keen on eighteenth-century observatories, canals, bakeries, statues of early Enlightenment scientists, or dauntingly multilingual German people, Göttingen is the town for you. It's also excellent if you like bicycles. There are many bicycles.

Here is a small selection of the bicycles to be seen cavorting outside Göttingen railway station.

And what was a nice chap like me doing in a place like that, you ask. Well, as it happens, I was getting all conferential on my ass. Best darn conference I've ever been to, in fact. On Mr Charles Darwin, M.A., and what the peops down in the humanities are doing with him. I could, of course, tell you more about that, but instead I will talk about cheese.

On account of how Germania seems to be the most carnivorous country in the world

Exhibit A: Extrawurst sausage shop sign, proves that Germany is the most carnivorous country in the world

and the breakfast buffet is a sea of fleisch, in which are scattered islands of cheese, and the conference lunch is trays and trays of breadrolls slathered with dead pig, dead cow, dead chook, dead salmon, plus one tray of breadrolls slathered with dead cheese, und so weiter, I have eaten So Much Cheese, I am now SICK of cheese. I've had predictable ethical reservations about cheese for a while now, but as of the sixth consecutive cheese-based meal in a row (with cheese), I have aesthetic reservations to boot. To stinky old comes-from-an-udder boot. (N.B. these reservations do not apply to haloumi.)

Which brings me to today's lunch, Nüdeln mit Gemüse. Today I forsook Göttingen for a joint called Jena, which joint, unlike Göttingen, sits in the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik. You can tell that you're entering the former DDR, because, whereas two minutes ago, your train was easing its way through little dorfs with higgedly-piggedly wattle-and-daub houses - I'd call them Tudor, only it's the wrong country - now there are quadratisch, practisch, multi-storeyed grey erections squatting in geometric clusters. They're the same regulation apartment blocks you used to see in documentaries about Chernobyl or Ceauşescu. I'm more of a higgedly-piggedly oak-beamed ramshackle-o-phile, myself, but there's something sort of sublime about these apartment blocks. They subordinate the individual to the hive. You can feel your sense of self dissolving before something bigger, something unflinching in the face of individual difference or preference.

Here in this joint called Jena is another joint called Wok-Gourmet. Both those words sound pretty appealing to an overcheesed cheesephobe such as myself. Woks and I have enjoyed a long and rich relationship. Even typing this, I recall with affection the tofu green curry of May 2004.

Jena.

Turns out there are only two vegetarian things in Jena Wok-Gourmet. The Coca-Cola and the Nüdeln mit Gemüse. Everything else looks like chicken schnitzel fried in a wok. The Gemüse, for those of you as interested in my lunch as I, turn out to be a handful of bean sprouts and some julienned carrot. Not exactly tofu green curry, but 100% cheese-free.

So what's a chap like me doing in a place like Jena? I'm here for Ernst Haeckel, evolutionary theorist, eugenicist, scientific fraud, and erstwhile Jenanite. Jena is Haeckel city. Someone at some stage has loved Ernst Haeckel so much they've named a street after him.

It's called Ernst Haeckel Straße.

And a place. There is also a place named after him. Ernst Haeckel Place.

And behind the sign pointing to Ernst Haeckel Platz there is an apartment block festooned with gen-u-ine pre-Soviet caryatids.

A gen-u-ine pre-Soviet caryatid.

Jena is home to Ernst Haeckel's former house, known today as Ernst Haeckel Haus, but in his day as the Villa Medusa. It's also home to Ernst Haeckel's phyletic museum, an institution he founded as propaganda for his theory (that ontogeny, the development of the embryo from fertilisation to maturity, recapitulates phylogeny, the evolution of the species). A huge ceramic oak is built into the museum's façade. This oak is Haeckel's tree of life, a sturdy symmetrical thing with humans at its apex. Darwin's tree of life is more like a tangle of seaweed. Humans are no more at its apex than ants.

I hadn't thought about this until today, but to have streets & stuff named after him, Haeckel must have been canonised by the DDR. There's a chocolate frog on the table for the first person to explain how this eugenicist (a member of Germany's - the world's - first Society for Race Hygiene), committed to biological hierarchy, gets himself turned into a socialist hero.

Meanwhile, back in Preston, Comrad Timsky is valiantly bestowing pats and Iams Kitten Growth Formula on Harriet and Beatrice. Thank you, Comrade Timsky. You're the bestest best besty ever.

Who wants a chocolate frog?

2009-11-13T18:00:00.010+11:00

You can have one if you tell me (truthily) what proper certified biologists do when they want to talk about the plural of "genus". It's "generes" in Latin. I thought that sounded a bit fancy for your garden variety sentence, so I tried typing "genuses", but Mr Microsoft Autopedant told me I was a pustulent hillock upon the dorsal skin of good usage.

Here, by the way, is the context: "Darwin’s sketches of the branching relations between [plural of genus], species, and varieties are, as he knows, foundational to his articulation of how biological difference comes to be in all its plenitude."

N.B. chocolate frog may turn out to be a metaphor for extreme kudos.

N.B.B. Apologies for "comes to be in all its plenitude". Euphony schmeuphony.

UPDATE: I am a Latin fraud. It's actually "genera", not "generes". Good night, then.

UPDATE THE SECOND: Am, like, totally embarrassed by this post, but I'm leaving it up to dispel myths of my omniscience. Ahem.

Lobal warming

2009-11-09T21:57:00.001+11:00

This really isn't acceptable. 10pm. 30ºC. Early November. Grumph.

The imminent travels of Lexicon H.

2009-10-30T16:07:00.002+11:00

I'm off to Germy-land in exactly eighteen sleeps, and in between marking essays, and brewing my conference paper, and deciding what colour to do my powerpoint slides in (Lady of Shallot green and Robert Browning beige or Stick With What You Know black and Keep Sticking With What You Know white?), and keeping an anxious eye on the town well, and losing sleep – several sleeps – over people I enormously respect who think that comparing the way we treat non-human animals with humans' experiences of racism trivialises humans' experience of racism (which it certainly does, if you are of the opinion that the fact the world is knee-deep in barn-raised chicken carcasses is absolutely inconsequential, or even just not very consequential, or indeed requiring anything less than urgent revolution) – and in between not blogging, I have been brushing up on my Tscherman.

I've been doing this with the aid of two texts: (1) The Penguin Book of German Verse, and (2) Ecce Homo: Wie man wird, was man ist, the autobiographthingy of Friedrich Nietzsche. And so now, in addition to the useful phrases I learnt in highschool, viz., "Wo ist die Jugendherberge?" (Where is the youth hostel?), "Entschuldigung, haben Sie drei Wellensittiche?" (Excuse me, do you have three budgerigars?) and "Ich möchte die Schokoladenkuchen - jetzt!" (All purpose phrase), I can now say, in the words of August Stramm, "Die Steine feinden/Fenster grinst Verrat" (The stones are hostile/window grins treachery), and, after Rilke, "Feigenbaum, seit wie lange schon ists mir bedeutend,/wie du die Blüte beinah ganz überschlägst" (Fig-tree, for a long time I have found meaning in the way you overleap the stage of blossom). This will be mighty handy if I find myself detained by customs: "My good man, my name is Lexicon Harlot. For a long time I have found meaning in the way you overleap the time of blossom. I have three budgerigars. Do you have three budgerigars?"

But why am I telling you all this? Warum? Warum? Because Ecce Homo is - surprisingly - hilarious. Or - the popular theory - the work of a nutter on the verge of deliquescing irretrievably into public lunacy. But I prefer to think of it as hilarious, and I cite in defence of my amusement the following chapter titles: "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", and "Why I Write Such Good Books". Take that, autobiographthingies the world over. They don't call him a genius just because his moustaches look like a couple of oversized mice protruding from from his nostrils.

F. Nietzsche with Moustaches, portrait pilfered from here.

And that's the end of my story. If you have any good German words to share (bearing in mind that I already know Regenschirm, Dudelsack, and Schildkröte), let me know.

And now on account of how I ain't been bloggin' nothin'

2009-10-20T15:42:00.002+11:00

Why write when you can quote?

"I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."
- Mark Twain

Xtreme Weather Blogging

2009-10-06T18:48:00.007+11:00

From the blog that brought you such seismogeometeorosensations as Hey, was that an earthquake? and Hot diggety dang that was another earthquake comes Hail in Preston, the acclaimed miniseries starring all new hot talent, including

the carpark, next door's backyard, and the fence that kept them apart

the apartment stairway that wouldn't say die (unless you forgot to wear your extra-traction boots, but then it tended to say die as in "Die!", not die as in "Oh noes, I die!")

the corrugated iron roof with the heart of asbestos

and of course, Harriet and Beatrice, who, despite their keen interest in freaks of precipitation, elected to spend the entire hailstorm pluckily guarding the underside of the armchair

Restores my faltering faith in the Bureau of Meteorology, this does. The BoM predicted a hail storm for today, and lo, there was a hailstorm, which makes a pleasing change from the arrant untruths it has been issuing for the past week. Arrant untruths, I tell you.

Well would you look at that? If it isn't the old internet requiring my urgent perusal

2009-10-02T10:01:00.001+10:00

“Usually writers will do anything to avoid writing. For instance, the previous sentence was written at one o’clock this afternoon. It is now a quarter to four. I have spent the past two hours and forty-five minutes sorting my neckties by width, looking up the word paisley in three dictionaries, attempting to find the town of that name on The New York Times Atlas of the World map of Scotland, sorting my reference books by width, trying to get the bookcase to stop wobbling by stuffing a matchbook cover under its corner, dialing the telephone number on the matchbook cover to see if I should take computer courses at night, looking at the computer ads in the newspaper and deciding to buy a computer because writing seems to be so difficult on my old Remington, reading an interesting article on sorghum farming in Uruguay that was in the newspaper next to the computer ads, cutting that and other interesting articles out of the newspaper, sorting – by width – all the interesting articles I’ve cut out of the newspapers recently, fastening them neatly together with paper clips and making a very attractive paper-clip necklace and bracelet set, which I will present to my girlfriend as soon as she comes home from the three-hour low-impact aerobic workout that I made her go to so I could have some time alone to write.”

– P. J. O’Rourke, “Book Tour”, Smart magazine, 1989.

Glut thy sorrow

2009-09-25T16:06:00.001+10:00

What's the first book to make you cry?

Wherein I have my computer STOLEN and replenished tenfold and still I can't bring myself to unadulterated gratitude*

2009-09-24T21:36:00.007+10:00

The other day I perpetrated the employment sector equivalent of "I'm not a racist; my garbageman's an Esquimaux, and my, he does a marvellous job, the pet".

"So I was at this poetry slam last night," I'm telling my sisters. "And there's this fantastic woman up on the stage. Big hair, black cape, and she's going at her poem like she's a steam train. And her partner's there in the audience, and in the break her partner turns to me and asks me if he knows me from work. And - get this! - it turns out he's one of the I.T. people. One of the I.T. people - at a poetry slam - which just goes to show that computer people are people too."

My sisters can program Excel and they'll translate any integer you name into binary code quicker than you can say "this sentence constitutes an ontological challenge to the logonormativity of the academy", so they weren't very impressed by my limping belatedly into the fair pastures of I.T. person tolerance. But to them - and to all you other I.T. person tolerators out there - I say this: my prejudices were not entirely without foundation.

This morning I burst into my office, zinging with superluminary insights gleaned over the course of my six minute tram trip. I'm all ready to boot up my trusty old mac and enunciate the Solution to Literature. Only where is my trusty old mac, I ask? My desk is a barren plain, punctuated only by the drifts of dust and sandwich crumbs that waft around the perimeter of the five thousand unmarked essays I meant to savage and return to their authors a week ago. The trusty old mac is nowhere to be seen, and I start recalling all the flights of oratory and administrivia I committed to yon trusty old mac without bothering to Back Them Up. In perfervid panic, I stagger up the corridor to ask my admin comrade if she knows where the trusty old mac is. This is the first she's heard of its abduction, but she rings the I.T. people (rather than the police, which shows somewhat more presence of mind than I myself have mustered), and after several denials (which turn out to be the I.T. person's notion of humour) it transpires that they have my trusty old mac. Yes, they are two flights of stairs away, waiting to transfer the contents of trusty old mac onto obscenely fancy new mac, with 24-inch LED cinema display, camera, and vending machine. Did it occur to Mr I.T. person that he should inform me I would arrive at work today and find myself stripped of mine puter? Why no, quoth Mr I.T. person to my admin comrade. No.

So this is farewell to the mac of yore, why, hello sailor to the mac of non-yore, and a warning to the young: keep your valuables superglued to your desk. Those I.T. people are no respectors of personal property.*

* even though it's not technically my computer (cough).

Would you give a job to this woman?

2009-09-20T08:14:00.002+10:00

There's an inmate at the Preston Cemetery named Imperatrice. Now there's a suitable revenge on your demanding foetus. Beats Regina or Queanie hands down.

Imperatrice usurps my previous favourite tombstone eponym, Susannah Womble, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Wet nose and velveteen ears

2009-09-19T09:08:00.002+10:00

We used to lure Aristotle outside with a biscuit shaped like a small brown bone. We'd break it in half (two half biscuits are better than one biscuit), and toss the first half out into the courtyard. Aristotle would lunge after it, and then we'd throw out the second half, so that mid-lunge, he'd lurch off after that and leave old firsty lying on the ground. This was good in a way, because it made the biscuit last longer, but then, making food last was never one of Aristotle's great aims. Eating the compost was one of his great aims. Breaking into my sister's bedroom so he could snaffle the abandoned school apples from her bag was one of his great aims. Figuring out how to open the fridge, sneaking carrots from the vegetable box, licking someone's plate while they weren't watching: all these were Aristotle's principal concerns. If Aristotle had paid more attention in geometry, and consequently realised that the quickest way to unite half a biscuit with his gastric system was to keep on lunging after the first half and only then to head off after the second, that's exactly what he would have done.

Aristotle was my brother. He died in my first year at uni and I remember walking through the quad after Greek with my face scrunched up and my eyes all salty. A woman with grey hair stopped and asked me if I was all right dear, and I told her my brother had died. Which was sort of misleading, but more the truth. I think my other brother, the human one, would agree.

He taught me most - or lots - of what I know. I was going to write here about how I lurch from book to book the way Aristotle lurched from one half of the biscuit to the other (I have about seven different books on the go at the moment). But there were more important lessons. Don't drop your steamed silver beet under the table and expect someone else to clean it up for you. If you discover that the creature you've been tracking for the past half hour turns out to be an echidna, give up and go home. Don't chase kangaroos unless you have warmed up your crucient ligament first. It's entirely possible to eat half a queen-sized chocolate mudcake and for noone else to notice for a good four hours. Love thine everyone, indiscriminately, with a slight preference for thy mother.

With this ringworm I thee wed

2009-09-14T22:10:00.003+10:00

Far be it from me to ponder the impossible cuteness of Beatrice and Harriet when I could be dissecting the usurpation of organised religion by psychotherapy, complaining about the season finale of The Farmer Wants a Wife (to say nothing of the semi-finale, the demi-semi finale, the hemi-demi-semi finale, and all the lesser episodes that preceded the protracted denouement of this brave tribute to the embattled white Australian heterosexual), and/or marking the seventy-thousand-and-three essays that repose before me – but right now, where Beatrice and Harriet are at, is, in fact, Newsville Central.* Not because they have perfected the transverse slumber manoeuvre (difficulty level: 7.5).

Nor because Beatrice has been apprentriced to the Ladderers Guild.

Nor because it is only a matter of time before I wake up choked to death.

No. Harriet and Beatrice trump all else in newsworthiness because after three months of quarantine, daily butterings with SolveEasy Tinea and close encounters with the fungicide of doom, they are almost ringworm free! And when that happy day arrives, we'll be posting out the invitations to their Cat Mitzvah.

* This is, in fact, a proper sentence.

09:09:09 09/09/09

2009-09-09T09:09:00.000+10:00

Doo bee doo bee doo bee doo bee dooooooo.

Broccoli, potato and almond soup au vin with a touch of blender

2009-09-03T18:39:00.002+10:00

Take potato, broccoli, vegetable stock, and almonds. Cook. Add a touch of blender. Voila! (Vin in separate glass.)

The lexicographer's lexicographer

2009-09-03T18:22:00.002+10:00

I'm taking my ease with Dr Johnson's dictionary, which contains such useful lexemes as (and here I'm showing my considerable maturity):

To BEPI'SS, v.a. [from piss.] To wet with urine.

Introducing Schmarvard Harlot, my as yet unconceived progeny

2009-09-02T10:35:00.002+10:00

Sigh. I am a blogger in name alone. If you've stopped by here lately, you will have heard nothing but the squeak-squeak of tumble weeds scratching their bellies on the rough bare blogular earth as they tumbled on down to the next port of all-out vacuity. And here's the bad news: it's not going to change any time soon. I am up to mine oxters in projects of a putting-the-wordsies-together nature, plus I am surrounded by so many A-grade industrial-strength procrastinatogens, that blogstering-as-recreation pales distinctly.

But here's a plan: I'm thinking of having a son. I want to call him Schmarvard. Schmarvard Harlot. If you can see any flaws in this scheme, point them out quickly.

Thrift and gluttony win the day

2009-08-22T15:14:00.002+10:00

You know what I think? Swine flu, schmine flu. Earlier this week I invited forty-two students with varying but undocumented levels of personal hygiene to sniff a small container of dark chocolate, and a small container of coffee, and a small container of vegemite, another holding a spoonful of cumin, and another with the last drops of the Pert 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner I brought with me from Sydney in February 2007. Sniffing the containers was meant to get the class thinking about the relationship between bodies and subjectivity (this is what they're teaching the kids these days? aren't logarithms good enough anymore?), but what was exercising me as the containers hovered beneath each scholarly nose was whether a sensible person of average to slightly above average risk-aversion would consume tea, coffee, cumin, shampoo, vegemite, and, in particular, chocolate, after it had enjoyed such proximate relations to so many respiring young nostrils.

Who could tell, but in the interests of science, I decided to eat the chocolate. If I made it to the end of the week, I would know: there is no swine flu epidemic. Either that, or I am a person of superb robustity, and/or my experimental method needs some tweaking. But ruling out these last two possibilities, I am delighted to report that there is indeed no swine flu epidemic. Whether or not there has always been no swine flu epidemic I am not qualified to say. Having said that, many people are not qualified to say things, and yet say them nonetheless, and so I recommend the abolition of the states, a compulsory history-of-science subject for all science students, free public transport for all, showers only every second day, pepper instead of salt, community compost bins on every street corner, dogs in hospitals, and more novel reading. Also, something to do with swine flu. Can't remember what.

Mixed metaphor of the week

2009-08-18T17:46:00.003+10:00

"As the Australian economy begins to recover, now is the time to nip a potential housing bubble in the bud", now with tip-top advice on why you should sell your house immediately and move in with a posse of bubble-blowing horticulturalists.

There's not mushroom left*

2009-08-16T16:56:00.002+10:00

I was stocking up on chocolate-coated goji berries at the supermarketarium this afternoon, when mine fungophile eye fell upon a box of button mushrooms. Four kilos of button mushrooms. For $11. Though personally I'm all for the re- or ongoing- or heretofore-unknown- socialisation of the banks, and the telephones, and the schools, and the medicines, and the scientific researches, and the forests, and the rivers, and the law-making, and the universities, and the redistributions of the wealths, I am descended from a long line of practising capitalists, so I know a good deal when I see one. My forebears didn't trade in mushrooms, specifically, but what holds good for the exchange of air valve patents and dry cleaning services applies also to boxes of fungus.

Trouble was, four kilos of mushrooms exceed even my fine figger of a belly, especially when I am also beholden to a packet of chocolate-coated goji berries. I was humming and hawing in the vegetable aisle, mentally distributing a lifetime's supply of 'shrooms into pots of mushroom soup, basins of mushroom tart, bowls of fricaseed mushroom lightly drizzled with mushroom and served with a sizeable pile of mushrooms. I was wondering whether Beatrice and Harriet could be induced to eat mushroom, about the palatibility of frozen Tofu avec Mushroom Stroganoff, and whether the gal next door would respond favourably to an offering of mushrooms sporting cocktail umbrellas - when, suddenly!, the lass beside me in the veg aisle asked if I'd like to go halfsies on a box.

"Good Dog!" I said. "You're brilliant! Where did you come up with an idea like that?" Whereupon it occurred to me that this is what I should have been doing for years. How have I reached the advanced age of ---, I asked myself, without joining a mushroom procuration co-operative?

So that's my plan. Agaricus bisporus for all, not just the rich.

* Caveat plagiaratoris: my sister's pardner, Cecil, intones "there's not mushroom left" every time we're within four kilometres of a fungus. Bless him.

Tripe and Slime

2009-08-13T11:17:00.002+10:00

Sometimes I remember Paul Keating fondly.

Why boxes shouldn't trust cats

2009-08-12T08:38:00.004+10:00

I was born into an illustrious family, and am a direct descendant of such noble boxes as the Great Zigguratical Box of Ur, the world's first cabaret dancing box, La Boxy de Voom-Voom, and the Snuff Box Stolen By the Bloke Who Got Done In By the Constabulary for Stealing It. Although my own aspirations were humble, I was ready to acquit my boxly duty with dignity and continence.

So naturally, I expected that once the $30 r.r.p. radiant heater had been eased out of my innards, I'd be stuffed with old newspapers and borne gratefully out to the recycling bin. No one mentioned the feline teeth of doom.

Or the feline acts of sequestration and pouncing.

Or the feline sitting inside one for the easier dismantling of one's person.

Or the feline nibbling of the corners.

Or that within five days one would have ceased to be a box at all.

04:05:06, 07/08/09

2009-08-07T16:05:00.000+10:00

I am your loving nerd.

Oh, Darwin

2009-08-02T18:59:00.001+10:00

"From the facts alluded to in the first chapter, I think there can be little doubt that use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them; and that such modifications are inherited. Under free nature, we can have no standard of comparison, by which to judge of the effects of long-continued use or disuse, for we know not the parent-forms; but many animals have structures which can be explained by the effects of disuse. … I believe that the wingless condition of several birds, which now inhabit or have lately inhabited several oceanic islands, tenanted by no beast of prey, has been caused by disuse."
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)

How I amuse myself on the weekends

2009-07-31T17:18:00.002+10:00

Whenever anyone appends "ass" to an adjective (e.g., "She's a real short-ass", or "You're totally bad-ass"), I mentally translate "ass" into "bottom" (e.g., "You're totally bad-bottom").

The intranet is having kittens

2009-07-28T19:39:00.002+10:00

The rhetoric of the grumble gets far too much space on these here intertubes - yea, it is the bread and butter, the tofu and potatoes, the long johns and the flannel spencer of your amateur internetian. There's a reason for this. Waxing vitriolic is far more fun than waxing your legs. Clinical research demonstrates that grumbling releases endorphins, which taste like chocolate. And so loathe as I am to pollute the shades of Pemberley with symptoms of my displeasure, for the good of my health, here goeth ...

1. The silly old vet - let's call him the Archfiend – forgot to unpick one of Harriet's stitches last night. And this, after she'd suffered proximity to Maltese terrier puppies, the clammy thermometer-wielding hands of the Archfiend, and being gassed for the preservation of his, the Archfiend's, dermal integrity. She clambered onto my lap this evening, and snip-snip said my nail scissors, ping-ping said the forgotten stitch, and "Good grief, I should have done all of your stitches myself and saved you the unutterable horror of going to the vet I'm so sorry you poor gel", said I.

2. They just don't make felafel rolls down here like they do oop north. Where I come from, a felafel roll is hommus and tabouli and onion and chilli sauce and felafels wrapped in flat bread and toasted. Where I come from, a felafel roll makes you want to buy a carpet and wear a fez and summon up whichever other Orientalist cliches swim your way, to yodel in Yiddish from the Golan Heights, to sail to Byzantium, to farm chickpeas, to bathe in tahini and rosewater. Down in the 'Bourne they appear not to have heard of the unleavened loaf, and the felafel roll is less roll than festival of yeast, soft fluffy mounds of bread, tiny felafels embedded in doughy embonpoint. Melbourne and Sydney may only be 800 kilometres apart, but they are separated by a great culinary gulf. Melburnian felafel roll? Schmelafel roll. If I were the litigious type, I'd souvlaki.

3. The special-intranet-thingo at my place of employ has chosen first week of semester to go splendidly bung. Poor students (can't access their readings for next week), poor me (pleading with tech support persons, apologising to students), poor tech support persons (sending out emails telling me that my problem has been resolved, i.e., they have identified a systemic problem, it is not just my problem, and they are working ten thousand hours in a row to try to fix it).

Have failed to find suitable helmet on ebay

2009-07-26T20:22:00.002+10:00

Disaster!

2009-07-16T18:46:00.001+10:00

My heater's gone bung. If I don't do something fast, Harriet and Beatrice will move next door.

This spay tonight

2009-07-11T17:31:00.005+10:00

Beatrice and Harriet and I have spent today at home, recovering from yesterday's non-consensual ovarohysterectomies and trying not to gnaw on our stitches. Harriet was so non-consenting, by the way, she bit my hand, drew blood, and then sank four envenomed fangs into the vet's hand. The vet shoved her back into her box and told me that I had a naughty cat who would get her sedative later in another form (ominous) and I should show it who's boss because if it were a German Shepherd then I'd be in real trouble. (Too right. And if she were a sabre-toothed diprotodon ...) I should practice disciplining Harriet, apparently, by devising and enforcing rules (like "No scratching the furniture", which sounds completely fascist to me; what is furniture for if not scratching?). I sympathise with the vet's aversion to having his hand bitten (gosh, I do), but I was secretly cheering Harriet on. If someone tried poking a cold thermometer up my bottom without asking, I'd like to think that I'd draw blood too. And as Harriet is a civil and delightful person at all other times, I say "naughty" my aunt's bottom.

For those of you who've been wondering why the world's overrun with delinquent children, the answer's clear: it's femo-anarchist parenting and a permissive approach to sofas.

Today was meant to be quiet day - a day of heaters, laps, computers, and not chewing on our stitches - but instead there's been a deluge of tele-interuptions. They go something like this:

Poor telemarketing blighter: "Good afternoon, Mrs Harlot. I'm ringing from Blah-Blah Sunshine Blah Corporation to tell you that you have been specially selected for seven nights holiday at any major Australian city for only blah blah hundred dollars blah."

Me: "Thanks, I'm not interested."

Poor telemarketing blighter: "You do not like to take holiday?"

Me: "No, thanks. Bye."

Poor telemarketing blighter [indignant, incredulous]: "May I please ask why you are not interested in taking holiday?"

Me: "No."

Or

Poor teleresearching blighter: "Good afternoon my name is Blah and I'm ringing from blah blah Scientific blah Research blah to ask you some questions about hair-thinning and balding do you or does anyone in your household experience hair-thinning or balding."

Me: "No."

Poor teleresearching blighter: "Are any of your friends or family members experiencing hair-thinning or balding."

Me [overcompensating for the fact that I'm about to not mention the majority of my close male relatives]: "Well, I'm quite young, and most of my friends are quite young, so we're all too young to be experiencing hair-thinning or balding, so no, none of my friends are experiencing hair-thinning or balding. Byeeeeeee."

Poor teleresearching blighter: "Could I please speak to your mother or father?"

Me: "Byeeeeeeeee."

Or

Blighter: "Good evening ma'am, and how are you this evening?"

Me: "Very well, thank you. How are you?"

Blighter: "I'm wonderful. Thank you for your concern. I'm ringing about the Motorola blah blah from Optus blah with free blah. It's an excellent deal."

Me: "Thank you, but I'm not interested."

Blighter [shocked]: "Don't you use a mobile phone?"

Me: "Have a lovely evening."

I wish I could pull off my father's trick, which - regardless of the day or time - consists in muttering, in wounded, righteous tones, "Making telephone calls on the Sabbath! Not in my day. On the Sabbath. Well, I, never."

Seeking...

2009-07-09T12:15:00.002+10:00

... clichéd dubiously-appetising pre-fab microwave meal. E.g., shrink-wrapped chicken Kiev and rice. Free packet of frozen baby carrots for the best suggestion.

Painted ladies

2009-07-07T21:20:00.000+10:00

For about a year I've been conscientiously ignoring the raw timber window frames I had installed - about a year ago. I've been trying not to think about their gradual disintegration, the westerly sunshine, the westerly frosts, the westerly winds bearing the westerly rains, or the fact that I installed them to replace window frames so rotten they'd sprouted fungus. My timber window frames stand six metres above the ground in their stockinged feet, and as I lead a ladder-free existence, I knew that the only way I could do the right thing by 'em was to recruit the services of a professional painter with a ladder. Thus the year long delay. Professional painters with ladders do not grow on trees.

Happening upon a painting consortium run by teh ladeez last month, I figured that this was the painting consortium for me. Their "98.5% testosterone free" slogan sounded a bit second-wavey for my tastes, but as I discussed self-priming acrylics with a deep-voiced lass called Jay on the telephone, I decided that maybe they weren't as biologically determinist as all that.

Jay turned up this morning at 7.15am and it was clear that on all salient criteria, Jay was not a lass. I have nothing against gentleman tradespersons - indeed, a wiser person than myself would befriend as many as possible - but Jay's undoubted mandom kinda undermined my attempts at affirmatively-actionizing the world of outdoor painting.

As it happens, Jay did a super job, and as he was leaving, his eye fell upon the half a page it had taken me six hours to write. We discussed what kind of work it is I do, and the fact that I'm from Sydvillea, and then Jay apologised for the Bourne. It used to be beautiful, he said, and safe, but that was before all these multinationals came. They’re the ones causing all the trouble. The Indians have been fighting the Mormons for thousands of years, and then they bring their fights over here. He doesn’t mind the ones that work hard, but these ones who come over and think they can just be like anybody else, they've really stuffed things up for Melbourne.

These remarks caused some consternation in feline quarters.

Beatrice closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts. "It's wrong for the Indians to fight the Mormons," she said. "They should just learn to get along. But don't you see, Jay? You are succumbing to the same impulses as those Indian-hating Mormons. You are making generalisations about the moral status of an entire people, and your empirical claims are slightly dubious."

Harriet was a tight knot of disapproval. "Jay," she said. "Jay, you should try to cultivate empathy. Race is discursively constructed, and if you reframe your discursive practices, your analysis of modern-day Melbourne will be quite different. Take it from me, Jay. Beatrice and I are living proof of these principles."

What I Did Last Summer

2009-07-06T19:29:00.003+10:00

You might have noticed a certain silence around these parts, a silence punctuated only by my deep disgust at certain northern hemispehereans who think that 32 degrees on the ol' Celsiometer deserves a spot on the front page of the national newspapers. (As some wise philosopher has opined, this is perhaps no more disgustworthy than the channel 7 weatherboy who puts on a ski-suit and tells us to dust down the snowplough and affix the medicinal liquors to the necks of the St Bernards for an overnight low of 11 degrees. To such opinations, I say, "Pass me my vegan eggnog, Smithers," and, "They just don't make St Bernards the way they used to".)

So what have I been doing with myself?, well may you ask. Firstly, I went to this ripper of a symposium where people talked about mimetic representations of the temporal affect of memory (Bart: Is that a real thing? Lisa: Yes.), and ate muffins. And this person was there, and this person, and this person, and amazingly, despite the presence of some of my all-time antipodean academic superheroes, I managed not to gush. And then I marked a buncha essays that reached up to my armpit. And while I was doing that I read Annabel Crabb's Quarterly Essay on Malcolm Turnbull, and consequently was glistening with freshly applied Turnbulliana just in time for his recent acts of political autocannibalism. Meanwhile my Pa had that hip replacement surgery, which went swimmingly, as far as the hip was concerned, but plunged his kidneys and his heart into conniptions of such conniptedness that he is still in hospital eating jelly almost two weeks later. This was pretty scary for a day or seven, particularly as these parental brushes with mortality remind a person that her parents rate extremely highly on the most beloved people in the universe scale. Then there was this three-day quasi-compulsory-but-actually-not workshop on How To Be A Better Lecturer. The answer - you never would have guessed this - is to think about how students learn best. Personally, I've always thought that shifting into a Cornish pirate voice every seven minutes should suffice. Dad, at this point, is still alive and bantering at full pelt with anyone who's up to it. I pick up the essay I haven't touched since February, the one that's due at the end of the month, on cyborgs and slavery, and start googling "automaton"+"spartacus", which turns out to be a disappointingly fruitless research tactic. It rains a bit; Melbourne's water storage is up to 26.3% of capacity. I see Disgrace, which thank-heavens uses John Malkovich rather than Ralph Fiennes as David Lurie, but nearly vomit when a chuckle runs through the audience as Lurie's putting the moves on Melanie. (The capacity to elicit that chuckle - the "this is a romantic comedy, isn't it? and that reluctant girl will actually fall for him?" chuckle - was one of the best things about this film, which of course is not a romantic comedy, but grim and harrowing, as the chucklers must have found out to their horror.) And here I am, disgorged by the past fortnight, with a Beatrice on my lap and a Harriet near my feet, and great pools of unplumbed internet for me to continue to ignore as I get on with this next bit, of life.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha. Ugh.

2009-07-01T21:45:00.001+10:00

"Britain declares heatwave as temperatures soar towards 32ºC"

Oh, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You do make me larf.

Celebrating my inordinate belief in the power of the fact

2009-06-25T16:08:00.002+10:00

Captain Robert Hunt was the fourth commandant of the convict settlement of Norfolk Island between November 1828 and February 1829. That's not very long.

On spending the weekend in parentville

2009-06-21T10:20:00.003+10:00

They have some amazing widgets, my parents, like the widget that enables their computer to photograph a surly beagle untimely plucked from 'neath his quilt.

It's 10.30. It's a Sunday morning. The valley is a low sea of fog and the hills have their heads in the clouds and everything outside is drippy and wet, and it's the shortest day of the year, and the black cockatoos are screeching like mad spirits, and why would any self-respecting dog be out of bed? I blame myself and my parents' amazing widgets.

My Aged Pa - he of death-defying quadruple-bypass fame - is having a state-of-the-art all-synthetic hip joint installed on Wednesday. It's been on my list of ambitions for a while now, setting up a seniors' nightclub called Hip Joint (this is after I move to Tasmania and change my name to Charlotte), but now that the Aged P. is staring down the prospect of six months swiveling around on crutches, hip replacements aren't looking quite so festive.

Because I was examining a wee thesis yesterday, the Aged P. and I got to discussing the thesis he submitted in 1970 on economic determinants of urban form. I've stolidly resisted reading it for thirty years, but I started on it yesterday evening, and it's excellent, with lines like "the hinterland of today's cities is the whole world".

The immiseration of the rentenproletariat will hasten the revolution

2009-06-15T18:54:00.005+10:00

There are two things you should know about me:

1. I have no intention of altering my domestic arrangements in the foreseeable future.
2. I have been perusing the real estate pages over dinner.

Please don't press me for explanations. It's a disgusting habit and I'm thoroughly ashamed of it. It's only a matter of time before I'm checking the uranium prices first thing after breakfast, jabbing off messages to my broker, and saying savage things to the cats when my derivatives go toxic. (I don't do that, rest assured - it's still the garden variety vice of real estate voyeurism for me.)

So my secret's out: I have been perusing the real estate pages over dinner, and lo!, I see that the erstwhile Hôtel Harlot is once more on the rental market - for $230 a week. Those of you who inhabit the cockroachial climes of inner Sydney will of course scoff at my $230 a week. It's barely more than the price of a crushed berry frappe overlooking the jelly blubbers of East Circular Quay. But $230 is some 43.75% more than the $160 per week that I paid for Hôtel Harlot when I first moved Melbournewards 28 months ago. By my calculations (bear in mind that I single-handedly solved Fermat's last theorem before you try to challenge me on this), that's an inflation rate of over 19% per annum.

We can partly attribute this to the fact that folks have only very recently realised that Thornbury is an infallible source of wholemeal spelt pasta. But it's more than that: the world is not a whole 43.75% more aware of the charms of wholemeal spelt pasta. In fact, wholemeal spelt pasta is not particularly charming. You can gussy it up with lots of garlic and olives and jolly sprigs of parsley, but it remains, regardless, righteous, wholesome and cardboardy. My alternative explanation for the 43.75% rent increase is this (bear in mind that I wrote Das Kapital AND The Wealth of Nations before you challenge me here): the filthy capitalist landlord class is putting one over the rentenproletariat. Given the parlous economic times in which we live, and the very amenable interest rates the filthy capitalist landlord class currently enjoys (not me, I signed up for a mortgage at the preposterous fixed rate of 8.75% p.a. [for five years (yes, I know)]), I have to say that the filthy capitalist landlord class is not very nice. Unless it uses its vast obscene wealth to set up shelters for penurious spelt addicts.

Hello blog

2009-06-13T10:53:00.002+10:00

Just dropping by from Planet Essay-marking to inform you that I seem to have inadvertantly converted three hundred and twenty-one students to Team Harold Bloom. Who woulda thunk that the youtubification of America's canoniser-in-chief would have the good scholars of tomorrer decrying the political correctitude that has robbed them, robbed them, of the opportunity to read Shakespeare? Nobody reads Shakespeare anymore, it turns out, because the canon-busting femmo-Marxo-anarcho-aesthetic-relativists put all the Riverside editions in a big pile labeled School of Resentment, tossed in a match, and proceeded to toast their organic tofu on little sticks.

Relativism

2009-06-03T17:19:00.003+10:00

A very big eggplant or a very small fifty cent piece? The epistemic conundra of modern life, courtesy of the Psarakos Veg Emporium.

N.B. My sister took this photo, but it was my local eggplant market.

Architects have all the best words

2009-06-02T17:07:00.002+10:00

Wainscot, flange, lintel, cornice, cantilever, weephole, balustrade, sill ... oh my ... quoins.

Amazing rolly rolls and a boxy box.

2009-06-01T21:55:00.010+10:00

Leonard was waiting for me this evening at the letterbox. She kept her feet tucked under her middle, and stretched her neck out towards me. "Do something about that itch there below my chin, would you?" she said. "A little to the left. Lower. Lower. No, higher. Purr."

As I had so satisfactorily attended to her chin, Leonard escorted me up the stairs to the lobby door, where I was to perform my useful door-opening function. But just as we reached that Fatal Portal, she remembered. My cats. I'm the one who imported the cats into her spare apartment. Those small ones, with the whiskers. Me. Them.

Leonard looked me in the eyes and hissed like hot iron. Then she scarpered back down the stairs with her hackles on.

While she has elected to spend the first night of Winter outside (outside, Leonard, where there are more cats than your wildest nightmares could possibly concoct, all roaring their terrible meows and lashing their terrible fluffy tails, and this when you could be lounging around my place contracting ringworm and snaffling stray Iams Kitten Growth Formula pellets), back in front of the heater, Harriet and Beatrice are in ecstasies of cardboard, many thanks to their inaugural correspondant, Genevieve the Tucker, who sent not only the superior toilet rolls which you see below

but also this multifunction cardboard box,

excellent for the sitting in, the chewing of, and the enabling of

acts of synchronised felinicity calculated to temporarily distract a human from the violations of corporeal sovereignty entailed in the application of fungicidal ointment to a person's ears.

The beasts of Harlot Heights say Thank you, Genevieve. You're tops.

Der Ringworm des Nibelungen

2009-05-31T17:12:00.000+10:00

I took Harriet and Beatrice to the vet on Friday night, and she confirmed what my fine eye for a fungal infection had suspected: the ringworm, they haz it. Actually, I prefer to think of it less as ringworm, and more as Athlete's Foot of the ear. I am up to my armpits in antifungalistics, very keen to smash this protozoa in its infancy and not to have to feed the wee beasts the terrible fungicide tablets of doom and liver-destruction.

Top ten impediments to my protozoa-smashing:

1. That Beatrice passionately longs to lick the poisonous ointment off Harriet's ear.

2. That Harriet very reasonably responds to the smearing of poisonous ointment onto her chin by raking her toenails through whatever flesh is nearest (i.e., mine).

3. My aversion to bleach. My floorboard sealant's aversion to bleach. My respiratory tract's aversion to bleach.

4. The size of my borrowed cauldron vis a vis the size of the soft furnishings I need to boil.

5. Paucity of sunny drying spaces for the soft furnishings I have attempted to boil in the too-small borrowed cauldron.

6. That the novelty of combating Athlete's Foot of the ear wears off after about two hours.

7. Delusions of parasitosis, mine.

8. A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, first 147 pages thereof. More fun.

9. Theological angst. Cf. William Blake's "The Tyger", only substitute "Ryngworm" for "Tyger". See especially the line, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?", where "thee" = "Ryngworm". I had similar difficulties back in my flea hostessing days, and overcame the apparent problem of evil by recognising the sheer majestic beauty of the flea and its various contributions to the ecosystem.

10. Spores.

On the plus side, Harlot Heights is only 50 square metres when it sticks its tummy out. Fortunately I don't have the misfortune of living in a beautiful four bedroom Victorian weatherboard in Northcote with pressed metal ceilings and antique fireplaces and cedar fittings. Phew.

Dry-as-dust ivory-towerite comments on raunchophile film review

2009-05-30T07:59:00.004+10:00

Steve Jacobs is making a film based on J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. A risky business, where the ironic gap between the book's narrator and author is so carefully concealed. How do you do that kind of irony in film? I'm looking forward to finding out, or being gleefully disappointed that one of the best elements of the novel hasn't survived adaptation. Meanwhile, yes, yes, yes, I understand that a film borrowing a name and some plot points from a novel can't be expected to reproduce in facsimile the original text, and a good thing, and blah and so on, yes, I understand that, but still, Disgrace says some important things in a complicated way, and it'll be a shame and not very surprising if the film ends up saying the opposite of those important things for sheer want of subtlety.

What's twitching my digits right now is this, from Brian McFarlane's review of Disgrace and Philip-Roth-spawn Elegy (which I have seen, and which is a very good film if you don't mind having to participate in its lascivious appraisal of Penelope Cruz's legs and its apparently unironic [?] theme song, "When you make love to a woman you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life," which is the kind of sentiment that makes me want to sign up for a life stint in the local nunnery) – and now returning to my sentence – I am perflexed by this, from Brian McFarlane's review: "An ageing academic myself, I must say in passing how gratifying it is to see these raunchy protagonists as distinct from the dry-as-dust, ivory-tower image more often associated with the profession."

What? What, what, what, what, what? It's gratifying to see oneself represented by David Lurie – despite whose self-justifying narration seems to me to rape his student, Melanie – or David Kepesh, who by his own admission uses women's bodies, his students' bodies, as receptacles for his vengeance? And there's something pleasing, and "raunchy" (good lord!), and pleasingly, raunchily subversive about depicting academics as sexual predators? I've had a few too many friends propositioned by their course coordinators or dumped, après shenanigans, by their supervisors, and seen too many of the consequences, to feel gratified by the Lurie/Kepesh depictions.

Oh, girls just want to have fungi

2009-05-27T22:22:00.003+10:00

No thyme to blog because of mad panicked dash towards essay-writing finish-line, except to say:

1. I read today that in the late nineteenth century, a majority of surveyed folks reported dreaming in colour. In the mid-twentieth century, a majority reported dreaming in black-and-white. I happen to think this is a very impressive statistic.

2. I think Harriet and Beatrice might have ringworm. Excellent. Also, whenever anyone says the words "headlice" or "fleas" or, you know, "fungal infection savaging its way across your kittens' ears", I get incredibly itchy. All over.

Feel free to decline my invitation to afternoon tea. I'll understand.

Birrrrrdy

2009-05-22T16:34:00.004+10:00

It is a little known fact that today I turn fifty-six, if you round my age up to the nearest fifty-six. Certainly I am nearer to fifty-six than zero, which is not something I could have truthfully claimed four years ago. Just goes to show, if you keep working hard enough at something, you'll get there eventually.

I have been celebrating my birthday by Working At Home, which is still working, even if I do most of it in bed and pyjamas. Before lunch, for instance, I wrote a paragraph towards the 7000 word essay that is due on the 30th May. It's a very exciting essay (oh yes), about the rhetorical exchanges between Decadent poets and late nineteenth-century psych-iatrists/ologists in codifying those conditions now known as synaesthesia, and I wrote the conference paper version of it in January. Now I have to turn it into something that will withstand the buffets and blows of peer scrutiny, with no prospect of distracting said peers from my logical slipshoddery by the usual (my charmingly Australian accent, the light winkling off my spectacles, the blob of dried hummus on my lapel). So back to my day: I wrote this paragraph before lunch, and after lunch I deleted most of it, and then I decided to let the essay moulder at the back of my cranium for another day while I addressed the pressing matter of Monday morning's three hour seminar on Janet Frame. The thing is, and I know I'll sound like Geeky McGeek in saying this, but I can't imagine a nicer way to spend a birthday. Especially if you throw in a couple of cats spilling off my lap, and some interesting things from my sisters in the letterbox, and the knowledge that tomorrow morning the Beagle Express is going to be hurtling down the Hume Highway bearing Wilbur and my parents, who have kindly scheduled a date with a suitcase repairperson so as to excuse the seven hours of driving that will enable them to have a birthday dinner with me.

So what have I learned in my fifty-six years? This: that American exchange students often have names like Brandi and Hunt; that you should always carry a safety pin; that however you cook it, tempeh tastes like it has been prised from the forest floor with a sharp gumboot; that "facetious" contains every vowel in alphabetical order, as does "facetiously".

Because I don't want the ad for Dr Circumcision to remain at the top of my bloglet

2009-05-18T20:33:00.002+10:00

Would Madam care for some chalk and cheese? Chef uses Gruyere, with lightly crumbled limestone. Highly recommended, but a slightly dusty aftertaste, so I suggest a good red. Trotsky, perhaps.

Buy one, get one free

2009-05-13T18:48:00.002+10:00

It's hard to say what's best about this. The quotation marks around "all ages, all reasons"? That it appeared in my letterbox with a take-away pizza menu? That Dr Mohammed Jabbar has proudly made circumcision his life's work?

Home maintenance for the domestic short-haired feline

2009-05-13T08:48:00.008+10:00

Everybody knows that cats are remarkably clean animals. It's a knowledge, in my case, gleaned through empirical observation of mesdames Harriet and Beatrice, who make a habit of licking each others' anuses with their antiseptic tongues and burying their poos with such sanitary rigour, such hygienic applications of the poo-burying muscles, that fæcal matter and clumps of kitty litter can be found in every corner of my bathroom - if indeed the first person possessive pronoun pertains in the case of a bathroom overrun by kitten excrement.

So here Harriet and Beatrice (last seen up on the kitchen bench eating the sourdough I left out for my lunch) share with you some of their thoughts about domestic hygiene.

"Clean the sink so it don't stink". Thus runs the old housewifely adage, and sepia-toned Beatrice contemplates a bathroom sink well licked. Note especially her careful removal of the plastic drain pipe cover, which was restored to its rightful place on my pillow.

"Who doth not prance upon the clothes airing rack catcheth no invisible moths" (Mrs. Beeton). What is a clean shirt without a smudgy paw print, I ask you?

"The price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance." As Harriet reminds us here, the fact that you are licking your sister's forehead is no excuse for not keeping an ear out for the neighbour's chickens. Amateur forehead-lickers, take note.

Also remember that the toilet isn't just for sitting on, it's for falling into. If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

No boxed gifts please

2009-05-07T08:08:00.004+10:00

I've received some pretty fancy wedding invitations in my time, but yesterday's wedding invitation takes the three-tiered cake. First there's the silver envelope, addressed to Ms Harlot. Inside is a silver gauze bag tied with silver silk ribbon. Inside is a map, a reply paid envelope containing a pre-printed RSVP card, and a plastic pocket, wrapped in another silver ribbon on which are printed the names of the happy prenuptial couple. Inside the plastic pocket are twelve jigsaw pieces, on each one of which is a dissevered portion of the happy prenuptial couple's faces and glimpses of what looks like normal wedding-invitationese. I assemble the jigsaw, and find in the bottom right hand corner the exhortation: "No boxed gifts please".

Someone is going to have to remove the toothpaste stain from my party dress.