Fush

Barra n chips, tartar sauce, something called seafood sauce (which I declined) and 7 UP.  A guilty treat.  Not every week.

It just gets worse and worse

First we had the suicidal strategy of politically assassinating the elected Prime Minister in the full view of television cameras, leaving his body to stalk the halls of Parliament like Banquo's ghost.  Then there's the retreat from key policy areas ... one described as "the great moral challenge of our time."  You simply walk away?  Then comes "real Julia".

Had no one ever heard of the smart arse observation that when you're a hole the first act in getting yourself out is to stop digging?  Obviously not.

So, on election night, when the scale of the defeat is becoming clear; the majority is gone; the first-preference votes are mounting up for the conservative grouping and you're fighting (poorly) for your political survival how could anyone think it's safe to step up to the microphone and on live television and say (as Julia Gillard said) ... “It now appears clear that Labor has won the two-party vote. That means the majority of Australians who voted yesterday prefer a Labor government. I think this is a critical fact to weigh in the coming days.”?

Isn't there a basic rule?  Don't pose a question unless you're certain of the answer.  Don't assert any "critical fact" unless you're surer than "it now appears ..."  Appearances can be deceptive Julia.  And what do you do or say now that your hostage to fortune comes back to haunt you?

From today's Australian ...

THE Coalition has now leapt forward in the two-party-preferred vote, taking over from Labor with a lead of 1531 votes on the Australian Electoral Commission’s latest count.

Behind in the seat count.  Behind in the first preference vote count.  And now (maybe) behind on the two-party preferred count.  Where do you go now ALP?

Nincompoops!
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Call That A Plan?

Nothing spares us -
not the fiction of contentment
in these 'middle' years (too near
the end we dare not call the winter
of our discontentment)
nor the lightly held delusion
there is time enough, still waiting
in the finite but unknowable
days, months, years, decades
ahead (we hope) the time beyond.
Beyond what, I wonder?
The silences speak volumes.
The absences become companionship,
familiar like old friends
who need not say one word
to make their meaning crystal clear.
This is the future, as foretold
by the Beatle who broke up the band
or, as Spock once said, it's life Jim 
but not as we know it.
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SCA Open Day

We spent a large chunk of our Saturday at the annual open day at Sydney College of the Arts.  Spike had roles to play ... guiding prospective students around the glass studio giving helpful talk, lamp working exhibition beneath Mark Eliot's animated film showing on a continuous loop, assisting a little in the hot shop.  I spent most of my time perched on the edge of the hot shop watching staff and students blow various pieces.  It's a fascinating process.  Each piece begins with a single lump of molten glass gathered from a pool in a furnace on a pole.  From that point onwards I am lost.  Usually working as the creative driver in a team of two the glass artist blows, turns, adds more glass, clips, pulls, spins and swings the molten material.  Somewhere between forty minutes and an hour and a half later the initial idea inside the artist's head appears in as near its final form as it will ever be.  No two pieces are the same.  The process has a hypnotic quality.  You wouldn't want to leave until you've satisfied yourself of how it all comes out.

The vegetarian lasagne for lunch left quite a lot to be desired.  Heat was one of them. 

Cecked out the ravens.  Still there.
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Val Vallis Poetry Award 2010

I didn't win.  I don't know who did but the announcement was made this evening at the opening of the Queensland Poetry Festival.  I wasn't invited to attend so I think we can assume that Penelope Awakes did not come first.

Keep writing Douglas; keep submitting.
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Like the hole in the ozone layer ...

But still the dominant feature of one's life!!  I can't transfer, can't drive, can't dress or undress.  Patience may be a virtue but I am over this, truly had enough of it and it's no consolation that this is the first such incident in 26 years of being in the 'chair.
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Nam Le: The Boat

I finished the prize-winning collection of short stories by Nam Le.  My jury is still out.  There's no doubting the technical skill of the writer.  So why do I feel a nagging doubt emotionally?  Have I written before that the collection brings to mind the quote I like of words by Charles Rennie McIntosh?  "There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist."

Too many of the stories are devoid of an emotional core.  They feel (to me) like expertly crafted writer's workshop projects; hollow, technical examinations of prose style using ideas generated (borrowed from) some other, more authentic source.  So, Cartagena  takes its inspiration from the movie City of God and it just never feels like the voice of a young, Colombian gang member (but it is well written).  Meeting Elise (the weakest story in the collection) feels like a second tier Mirimax movie from the 1990s; one that never lived up to its Oscar-material aspirations.  You can see the joins in Hiroshima: the flash of the camera then the flash of the bomb.  Tehran Calling simply disintegrates in the final two pages and I'm not really sure that I buy the idea of the American woman visiting her former best friend but it is an ambitious attempt to occupy an entirely other persona.  Halflead Bay works well, although its premise is slight.  But perhaps, like Raymond Carver's stories, it's the ordinariness of a tale occupied by almost real people that gives the story legs.

The opening piece, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is described as "magnificent" on The Boat web site.  Sorry, it's not.  I need to get over my instinctual reaction against metafiction because I was deeply suspicious of the story the first time I read it.  Save me (I thought) from a writer's workshop project about a writer's workshop participant struggling to find authenticity in his writing whilst working out his relationship with his father and to his past.  But if you can get beyond those limitations (which are real barriers, suppressing more interesting and potentially engaging writing on similar themes) the story bears a second reading.  Beyond the metafiction there is an authentic voice, I think.

The final story, The Boat, works best for me.  The fate of the boy is discernible from the outset but that's not a problem.  There is an emotional risk at the centre of the story for its characters.  It's the way we're taken to the heart of that risk, see it exposed and witness the truth of its consequences that makes such an impression.  It seems to me that there's no flashy posing in this story.  It is what it is, told expertly and with an internal consistency and force that far outstrips the other stories.

I may be too harsh with these criticisms.  For any writer's first collection of published short stories The Boat is an impressive, highly readable group.  It augers well for the future.  If this is what Nam Le can give us first time out, we can look forward (I hope) to some remarkable work in the future when he's acquired the confidence to abandon the showy front and simply tell us authentic tales of his own imagining.
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Sappho

I listened to an enjoyable, illuminating episode of the BBC Radio 4 series Great Lives.  The subject was Sappho.  The host (the rather arch Matthew Pariss) and a couple of wholly enthusiastic, delightful guests filled half an hour of talk with their exuberance and joy for the real woman, real poet.  It's infectious.  Here's the first poem from the broadcast, Fragment 31.  It's brilliant.

He seems to me the peer of gods, that man
who sits and faces you,
close by you hearing
your sweet voice speaking,

and your sexy laugh, which just this moment makes
the heart quake in my breast: for every time
I briefly glance towards you, then I lose
all power of further speech.

My tongue is smashed; at once a film of fire
runs underneath my skin; no image shapes
before my eyes;
my ears are whining like a whirling top;

cold sweat pours down me, and in every part
shuddering grips me;
I am paler than summer grass,
and seem to myself to need little to make me die.

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Work

So work returns to fill a day.  I hope I managed to do something purposeful.  I finished re-drafting our submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into "disability care and support".  It's a decent piece of writing.  Later in the day Amelia and I attended a consultation meeting on disability services on Level 41 of Governor Macquarie Tower.  We made a sensible, perhaps even perceptive contribution to which many others referred subsequently.  It's my day job.  I earned my wages today.  I usually do but I'd rather do something else.

As H would tell me ... ditch the ego and write.  Wise woman.



(Persephone supervising Sisyphus pushing his rock in the Underworld. Side A of an Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 530 BC. From Vulci.)

Swift's Gulliver

I've finished re-reading Book 4 of Gulliver's Travels.  It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.  Gulliver's misanthropy and misogyny become more virulent as the work progresses.  The self-loathing seems to me to cross a line to occupy a view of humanity I'd simply rather not engage with because its psychotic.  Swift, in making his satirical point about the limits of reason and rational discourse, leaves no room for the fragility of our contradictory existence.  We're human.  We try, we try to make the best of life that we can and we succeed or fail to varying degrees.  We are not Houyhnhnms nor would we care to be.  Nor are we Yahoos, the unambiguously racist 18th Century representation of African people.  They weren't and we aren't beasts.  I'm glad that I'm finished with it (which is not exactly erudite literary criticism).

Turning the idea of democracy into a charade

It has been depressing to watch the ALP commit political suicide. What brilliant mind conceived of the strategy that you could politically assassinate your leader then ask the voters to place their trust in you 8 weeks later? The word used in Edinburgh for such people is NUMPTIES! Tony Abbott for God's sake.

Clash Of The Titans

Despite the title and the tag line ... Titans WILL Clash ... there are no Titans in the movie.  Searching for a way to fill a slightly disgruntled Friday night I downloaded COTT from i.Tunes (my first foray into the Apple i.store).  It's definitely not as naff as the reviews suggested.  You know, it is what it is.  The plot is silly.  You wonder why Hades whispers quite as much as he does.  But it's surprisingly engaging and filled the evening well enough.

Toy Story 3

Flawless.  Enchanting.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I finished The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler today.  It's a good read, very well written.  I've not read much crime fiction, even less of the 1930's pulp fiction variety that Chandler transcends.  It's pretty clear though that there is before Raymond Chandler / Dashiell Hammett and after.  There is Philip Marlow and there is Sam Spade, archetypes of the hard-boiled, street-wise private investigator. 

I suppose Humphrey Bogart's movies, playing both characters, seared the genre in our minds.  They're how most of us know the world of seedy Los Angeles with its gamblers, racketeers, pimps and pornographers.  I was struck by the presence of rain in The Big Sleep (a trope used throughout Bladerunner, which is like a Marlowe story set one hundred years after the character first trod the streets).  And you wonder how anyone survived a drive in Marlowe's LA; everyone seems to be having a couple of stiff drinks before, during or just after jumping in to a car.

The writing has its problems, of course.  There are too many implausible coincidences and / or near misses.  Marlowe seems always to arrive somewhere just in time to see some plot moving arrival, departure or witnessing of death (Harry and the cyanide laced Scotch is the most unlikely of Marlowe's fortuitous arrivals).  Women are less than roundly drawn characters, used mainly (at least in this novel) as devices to mobilise or explain male action.  Homosexuality comes off rather badly too.

But it is well written.  Philip Marlowe is real, three-dimensional and has depth.  And Chandler certainly could turn a phrase:

• "The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings."
• "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it." 
• "His thick gray eyebrows had that indefinably sporty look."
• "Tall, aren't you?" she said.
  "I didn't mean to be."
  Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
• "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts "

Definitely worth reading.
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A second list ...

... on which one is not.  (I know how he feels ... Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake) The Blake Poetry Prize, presented by the NSW Writers' Centre and the Blake Society with the support of Leichhardt Council, is a $5,000 prize for a new poem or poems that best explore the religious or spiritual. The Prize is non-sectarian and encourages poets to engage in the dialogue btween religion, spirituality and poetry. The Blake Poetry Prize is named for visionary artist and poet William Blake.   Judges: Anna Kerdijk Nicholson  Ron Pretty Les Wicks

2010 Blake Poetry Prize Shortlist

"Perfume" by Margaret Collett

"Quince" by Peter Comino

"All Our Pretty Ones" by B.R. Dionysius

"From 'Still Lifes'" by Dan Disney

"Adrift" by Brook Emery

"Encounter in Manhattan" by Stephen Leeder

"Above, Below" by Earl Livings

"Marian Vespers" by Homer Reith

"Rahula" by Tasha Sudan

"Song of (someone like) myself" by Mark Tredinnick

The winner and highly commended poets will be announced at the 59th Blake Prize Exhibition Opening.  Opened by David Malouf.   Thursday 2 September, 6-8pm, National Art School Gallery, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst.

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Underworld 3

Silly, silly, silly but the kind of video to eat your leftover curry to on a Sunday evening after a day in bed thanks to the abscess (which is improving ... slowly).

There is a world beyond the door

First time out of the flat since Monday.  We took a trip (as in Spike pushed me) to the doctor's surgery at Summer Hill to pick up a prescription because I still need antibiotics.  We had brunch in the garden cafe then pushed back to Ashfield.  Ashleigh (who used to get me out of bed when I lived in the Italian Forum) was leafleting a pre-polling site (in the building where my 'misconduct' interview took place).  We chatted then I went in to vote, breaking the Labour habit of a life time.  They forfeited any claim they might have had when they usurped democracy two months ago.  They'll survive without me. 

We lost two hours in the shopping mall of all the world''s unlikely places.  We needed to pick up my drugs.  We didn't need the 3 DVD - Serpico (from my teenage years), Papillon and the preposterous Underworld 3.  I don't actually need the shoes but I'm a happy man; ridiculous but happy.

One could watch forever.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghh

A quadriplegic's paralysed bowel.  A partner's willingness to go above and beyond the call ...

I hate such moments. 

At least I more or less finished the office's submission to the Productivity Commission inquiry into "disability care and support".  Sixteen pages.  It'll do.
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Not on the list

Dear fellow poets, thank you all for entering the Whitmore Press Poetry Idol manuscript award.

The judges had a tough time trying to select from so many entries down to a shortlist of ten.

We thank you all for entering and if your name is not down below we,  the organisers can empathise with your dissapointment as we ourselves still get rejection for our work even though we have been published a lot in magazines and newspapers.

Unfortunately rejection is part of the writing process and the only words we can add as encouragement is to sincerely say, don't give up. We hope to continue this award next year and give you an opportunity to be published by the Whitmore Press in 2011.
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Some things are beyond parody

Julie Burchill has become a columnist with The Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom.  Once upon a time she was an in your face, iconoclastic, angry young thing of the punk era.  Maybe she was one of the proofs of its inauthentic rebellion and few people noticed how fake the period and its out-riders truly were.  These days (it seems to me) Julie Burchill has become a middle-aged, increasingly reactionary parody of her earlier ridiculous public persona.

Her column in today's Independent almost makes one's jaw drop.  She can't seriously believe such reactionary, racist drivel.  It must be an attempt at self-parody, surely?

No.  I don't believe so either.  Julie probably does subscribe to such bullshit.  And she probably does laugh all the way to the bank.  I wrote what follows in the comments section.  Other readers seem to agree but none of us should comment at all.  It will only encourage her to think we care.

Do we have to put up with Ms Burchell's mock-Little Englander phase for much longer? It's not only tedious and vacuous but intellectually bankrupt. One imagines that Pravda probably had a similar 'opinion' piece at about the corresponding point of the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan. She is entitled to her "armchair warrior" views, of course but doubting the validity or prospects of success of the current strategy in Afghanistan does not appeasement make.

I guess someone at The Independent has made some kind of bean-counting calculation to justify the cost / benefit of the newspaper acting as some kind of wicked stepmother's mirror for one of the nation's long lost enfants terrible. I'm one of the beans who reads her articles and increasingly wonders why I waste my time on this site if all it gives us is more 'Ms Angry' from once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away. 
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Inflamed, infected, in trouble

Bruce is back.  And I'm in bed again.
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Advance Australia Fair?

 Another of those slightly bizarre, quite surreal Citizenship ceremonies.  Spike submitted herself to the final part of the process in a beige / brown room on the upper floor (above the pokies) of 'Club Ashfield' (aka The Catholic Club).

There were rows of well-ordered seats for those taking the pledge (people swearing an oath at the front, those affirming at the back).  Guests like me sat at the side.  The official party - Mayor with chains of office that weighed him down, Mayor's wife, some Councillors, a parliamentary staffer (with regulation ALP-style suit) of the absent local MP (Virginia Judge), the uniformed co-ordinator of the local State Emergency Service, an Evangelical Christian Minister who got to speak about one's right as a free Australian citizen to encounter Jesus Christ, the RC local priest who spoke too but at least mentioned one's right to not believe as well as to believe whatever you want to - all sat facing the serried ranks of soon to be Australians.

People waited patently to be called, received their certificates, posed for photographs then selected a native plant from a group on a table near the door as they left.  It's an odd but necessary ritual.  For Spike, it's done.

Don't even ask who didn't quite take the photo.
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The Ravens made it

The second moulds and another week in the kiln worked.  After a day's cold-working Spike finished her birds just in time (second bird on the plinth with about half an hour to go before the show opened).

They're very good.

After the show we drove with Spike's parents to Surry Hills to help them celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary.  Spike calculated that's 13,140 days (not counting 36 leap year February 29ths).  Spike had given a short list of suggested restaurants from which they selected Billy Kwong on Bourke Street.  I was truly impressed by the food: exquisite prawn wonton, mouthwatering mushrooms and succulent Bass Groper as well as delicate jasmine tea plus poached pears to die for.  

I may have overdone sitting on my wheelchair cushion.  The abscess may bite back  Back home, in bed, I shivered like a man with hypothermia.  That's never a good sign.

Photo by Spike.
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Real Julia?

Michelle Grattan in The Sydney Morning Herald asks two questions, neither of them unreasonable, in a decent article in today's paper.

"The Prime Minister declares that she's unleashing "the real Julia" and taking "personal charge" of the campaign. Which raises the questions: "Who, precisely, have we been seeing? And who has been running the campaign up to now?"

You could not make-up this farce if you tried.  You really couldn't.  Toytown politics in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.

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And today's word is ...

... cramps.

We men  don't know how lucky we are.  We truly don't.

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