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Thursday, January 28, 2010

Enrolled

I enrolled as an undergraduate, part-time student with the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University today.  In my first semester I'll study ENGL1002 Narratives of Romance and Adventure and ENGL1007 Australian Texts.  After enrolling I wandered through the campus; visited the library, the Students Union, even signed my first petition (organised by Trots!!!!).  I felt like a student today.  It also felt as if something important for me had started.  We'll see.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Australia Day

So ... bizarrely ... one reads I Am Legend from cover to cover.  The novel has a far superior, much more literate ending than the Will Smith movie with its Christ-like sacrifice.  (It's not a bad movie but sticking with the original storyline would have made it better I think).

In the evening we attended the State reception.  There were fireworks.  I wore the rented kilt (McIntosh).  Spike wore a frock and necklace, both of which Spike made.

I punctured my rear wheel tyre ... on an Australia Day pin that some other guest must have dropped in my path.  That'll teach me to imagine one matters.








Monday, January 25, 2010

More than one black dog


We drove to Wattamolla beach in the Royal National Park on a lazy, hot day.  Ants feasted on us as we tried our best to enjoy our cheese and tomato sanwiches, fruit and Green & Black's organic chocalate.  Spike had a swim in the lagoon.  She described the water as cool.  That may have been a euphemism for "Jeezus, it's cold!".
 
I read all afternoon, finishing Black Dogs by Ian McEwan.  Now there is a disappointing novel.  I had hoped for more.  The praise for the book printed on its cover is hyperbolic.  That seems like a polite way of saying what I mean.   

It’s a slim volume, which is not necessarily a bad thing but there isn’t much you’d want to hang on to from its 200 or so pages.  The principal characters – Bernard and is it June – were (to my sensibility at least) two-dimensional, cardboard cut-out figures.  The passionate intensity upon which their relationship was supposed to be based was not at all apparent from the text so I wasn’t entirely sure why I was reading a tale about how June had felt terrorised by two dogs (which may ort may not have trained by Nazis to rape prisoners) to such a degree that she converted to God from Communism during the one brief (I’ve no doubt scary) encounter in France.  That lead to them altering their route on the next country walk.  They bumped into a shepherd who took them to an empty house which June decided they must buy and there she spent most of her life estranged from her husband who ended up as a Labour MP.  I understand that the viscous, black hunting dogs roaming free across a newly pacified post-world-war France may have had a symbolic, even allegorical and / or prophetic significance but Christ it’s a tedious read about not very pleasant but not entirely unpleasant people to whom nothing very dramatic happens.  Sorry Ian.
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Sunday, January 24, 2010

After the Prime Minister's reception


Will you hurry up and TAKE THE PHOTO!!!!!

(frock by Spike.  foto by Mr Wobbly)

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Hot


I cannot recall the last time I actively welcomed air-conditiong enough to make a visit to Ashfield Mall just about the only thing in life I cared to do.  Today though was hot, uncomfortably hot for a paralysed man like me.  Thank God for K-Mart.  That's all I can say (which is tragic, when you think of it).

Friday, January 22, 2010

Rupert Bunny



Excellent show at the Art Gallery of NSW.  I hadn't realised how gifted an artist he was.  Seeing so many works in the same space made me look again, more closely.  It's impossibe not to be impressed.  He's not just some post Pre-Raphaelite (if that makes sense).  There was more to his work than that. 

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Long day


Busy day at work.  Late night shopping to pick up Spike's specs and spend a five-year old voucher at Borders.  Time for bed.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

To Kill a Mockingbird


I finished Harper Lee's novel this evening.  It's an excellent read.  Nothing reached the heights of the first three pages.  I think they are so very well crafted it would be impossible to sustain that level for the next 284.  But it's a marvellously well-written novel.  Scout is an authentic, wholly unique, entirely believable voice.  Atticus Finch seemed real; not perfect but real.  It's fascinating to play with the fact that Dill grew up to be Truman Capote (astonishing that the real life Scout and Dill would write three key books of 20th Century American Literature).  The cast of secondary characters had a vibrancy and authenticity which drew me in to their world - so long ago, so far away it seems from my childhood.  The black characters were less vividly drawn but one can't really fault the memory of a ten year old girl.  It was her recollections upon which Harper Lee drew and TKAMB is a novel about white America not black.  It's for others to tell that side of the story (and plenty have).


If I have a serious negative criticism it is with the melodramatic denouement.  It worked, I suppose, although it's rather too neat and tidy; bringing the threads together in a neat little bow of moral virtue and just desserts for the bad guy.  But I'm being churlish.  It's a marvellous book.


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Last chance?


I received a text message at 9:15 p.m. to tell me that I've been offered an undergraduate place to study for a BA at the University of Sydney.  I better accept.  And I better be serious about my degree aspirations this time.  I've lost count of the Higher Education establishments and courses I've enrolled in and not completed.  Stirling twice.  The Open University twice.  There was a Polytechnic in East London (I can't even remember its name)  Now Sydney.  Get with the programme Douglas.

It's an odd thought that all over NSW this evening there must be thousands of young people - eighteen and ninetween year olds mostly - leaping with joy, running to tell the good news to their parents, texting friends to say I got in or where are you going, posting excited messages on Facebook, MySpace and the rest.  Tens of thousands of enthusiastic students on the threshold of transformation bursting with excitement, faking indifference, burning with ambition, making plans.  There will be lots of dissapointed or (at best) sanguine others who haven't received an offer via UAC on this big night for the application system; who didn't secure their first choice, maybe not their second or third either so they're weighing up whether or not they really are prepared to relocate to some regional town with a second-tier university to study a subject to which their not entirely committed. 

I've no idea how I'll do this - study for a degree and hold down a full-time job like mine.  I've no idea if I can afford it.  But if I don't enrol, don't commit myself to it, don't aim for a First then a Doctorate I'll merely confirm what we already know, repeat what I've done before, demonstrate yet again that academically I can't cut the mustard (whatever that actually means).  I / we / people have joked for as long as I can remember that I've got a brain the size of a planet. Time to prove it.
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Black hole

I looked high up to distant, empty space
in search, perhaps, of who I might have been
when I was younger, foolish, lacking grace
but full of childish wonderment and keen,
so keen to start upon the ways of men
whom I looked up to, learned from, loved;
men I thought would know the where and when
of how we might live lives no longer shoved
from here to their and back again, like pawns
in games controlled by silent, unseen hands
of unknown forces drawing up each new dawn's
sun beneath which every hopeless dreamer stands.
That distant space seemed empty for good reason.
Boys who name it live for all time with that treason.
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Monday, January 18, 2010

Hoocgh!

Too much You Tube Dougie

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Making a splash in Bondi

So we shopped. Two trains took us quickly, without incident, to Bondi Junction where we turned left rather than right in the station. That meant Spike had to push my dead weight round three steep sides of a bus station square. In search of a cheap suit (maybe), blue shoes to complement a yellow frock, books from Borders and maybe some spectacles we managed to establish that suits don't really go with me and my wheelchair (so the $1,500 Paul Smith number wasn't coming home with me today) and didn't have enough time to check to the bookshop but Spike did by two pairs of glasses for the price of one (for less than the price of one pair offered at her eye test last week) and a $10 pair of pink pumps. Go figure.


We ate noodles at one of the Ich Ban Boshi chain. Spike ordered Japanese Cider but something got lost in translation. She received a bottle of Ramune, Japanese soda. It come in a codd-neck bottle (see below). We couldn't quite see at first how it opened. I said, well it has screw top beneath the plastic ... try that. Spike tried, resting the bottle on her lap, on the table; holding it up before her. No luck. Then a light came on in Spike's memory. She found the plunger in the cap, pressed down on the marble held under pressure in the bottle neck then .... whooooooooooooooosh .... Japanese soda everywhere, including Spike.

I know when it's best to say nothing so I kept my mouth firmly shut ... for about a nanosecond.


Codd neck bottle (from Wiki)


In 1872, British soft drink maker Hiram Codd of Camberwell, south east London, designed and patented a bottle designed specifically for carbonated drinks. The Codd-neck bottle, as it was called, was designed and manufactured to enclose a marble and a rubber washer/gasket in the neck. The bottles were filled upside down, and pressure of the gas in the bottle forced the marble against the washer, sealing in the carbonation. The bottle was pinched into a special shape, as can be seen in the photo to the right, to provide a chamber into which the marble was pushed to open the bottle. This prevented the marble from blocking the neck as the drink was poured

Soon after its introduction, the bottle became extremely popular with the soft drink and brewing industries mainly in Europe, Asia and Australasia, though some alcohol drinkers disdained the use of the bottle. One etymology of the term codswallop originates from beer sold in Codd bottles.[3]

The bottles were regularly produced for many decades, but gradually declined in usage. Since children smashed the bottles to retrieve the marbles, they are relatively rare and have become collector items; particularly in the UK. A cobalt coloured Codd bottle today fetches thousands of British pounds at auction[citation needed]. The Codd-neck design is still used for the Japanese soft drink Ramune and in the Indian drink called Banta.
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Friday, January 15, 2010

Plums


When I was a little boy, I don’t recall exactly how old I was – maybe six or seven and we still lived in Aberdeen or maybe 10 or eleven when we returned to Aberdeen for a holiday – my best friend at the time, Christopher, and I stole fruit from a box sitting with many other boxes of fruit and vegetables in a display outside a grocery store.  I snatched a handful of ripe plums, purple as a bruised arm and soft,  The grocer called out, hey but I was already running for all I was worth, speeding round the corner  and down the hill to some waste ground where buildings had been demolished years before.  The ground was overgrown with bushes and long grass, like wild wheat had reclaimed the vacant lot.  A rough path cut diagonally across the derelict corner block, stamped out by commuters heading for the bus stop at the main road.  Every morning and evening they marked the path more with footsteps light or heavy with dreams, hopes, successes, failures or the repetitive drudgery of thei nine to five existences. 

I rounded the corner from the grocery store as if the hounds of Hell were in pursuit, two or maybe three ripe plums in my hand.  One fell but who had time to care?  I ran.  Christopher, who may already have pilfered his fruit of choice was waiting for me half way into the block.  So I ran and ran, racing towards him, legs pumping furiously, lungs aching with the strain, oblivious of anything in front of me down the track.  When I reached Christopher I stopped next to him and after  one quick glance back up the path to be sure the grocer had not followed, judging his two plums and whatever my partner in crime had purloined to be not worthy of the chase, offered to him his share of the spoils.  It was just as we split the proceeds, one of my plums for one of his bananas, that my father came up the path from the direction of the main road.  

Hello Douglas, he said, where did you boys get the fruit?

A better liar, someone more skilled at evasion might have pulled it off.  But not me.  I paused, thought too long about what might possibly be a plausible explanation from a boy who would curl up and die before he’d spend precious pocket money on fresh fruit.  I may have blushed as I struggled to find words.  My father didn’t need to ask, of course, but he was a fair and reasonable man so he gave me the chance, at least, to go quietly.

Shall we go up to Mr Anderson’s shop Douglas and talk?   

No could never have been an acceptable answer.   I think the term is ‘busted’.
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Art after hours art AGNSW

I’m tired, a little damp and dirty at the edges after traipsing through the city in the aftermath of a summer storm with lightening, thunder and torrential rain. But it was warm and not unpleasant to sit, as we did tonight, on the edge of the harbour looking out at the weather from the open but sheltered terrace of the café at the Art Gallery of NSW. A four-piece band played to the patrons inside, the sounds of the accordion, double bass, acoustic guitar and fiddle waxing and waning with the opening and closing of the automated glass doors between the busy inside world and the sparsely inhabited exterior. We ate penne with ricotta and spinach, a pea, lentil and haloumi salad then cake … crumble for me and an orange blueberry slice for Spike.

Fruit bats flitted across the sky seemingly undisturbed by the storm around and above us and them. Maybe you have few choices when you’re a fruit bat. Maybe you don’t care. Darkness falls, it’s time to fly, to forage then eat. If it rains, it rains and if lightening splits the night, so be it … you’re a fruit bat. The humans, who may have seen too many Hammer horror movies, probably think that bats, thunder and lightening are meant to meet on any night you care to mention.

The gallery was packed for a ‘fashion show’ of contemporary sari by a local designer. The cat walk parade was linked to the big exhibition on Indian art that fills a large part of the gallery at the moment. I can’t recall seeing a larger crowd at any previous late night event. Once it got started though the parade was something of an anti-climax. We watched the same clothes paraded up and down the stage maybe three or four times by ten or so delightful models, one assumes amateurs but none the less intent on strutting their stuff for our enjoyment. They appeared first as single demonstrators – once from the left then once from the right; then in pairs; followed by trios until the climax … eight young women and two young men up on the platform before us, weaving carefully around one another like carefully orchestrated iridescent lorikeets in azure, gold, scarlet, emerald, deep purple, bronze, silver and just about every shade in the colour wheel. Jewellery weighed down wrists, jangled and crashed in discordant resistance to the poorly co-ordinated music on the PA. Gold and silver stilettos flashed into view beneath the gorgeous fabrics and it seemed only by virtue of their will to succeed that the whole troupe avoided the most colourful pile-up one could ever imagine.

SareeHaven web site
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Delete at your peril


This most recent nonsense comes with eights,                           
all eight of them along a pretty row                               
like pretty maids.  See how they grow and grow,          
to mushroom outwards on towards our mates,   
our friends and foes and family, colleagues,                       
vicars' wives and, somehow, total strangers  
who may recklessly dismiss the dangers            
and reject these absurd viral intrigues                
by declining to send further on such junk                       
ideas of how to get rich quick, find love
lose weight, gain friends or all of the above       
through schemes devised by some bored punk         
who sits alone in some dark, teenage place;        
who knows nobody hears us scream in space.

My friend Liana forwarded one of her periodic viral e.mails.  Send it on to eight good people and within 4 days you'll receive money.  Delete it, the message goes on, and you'll be poor throughout 2010.  I'd rather live in poverty than hit the forward button.  But I owe a debt to Liana; half an hour after reading her e.mail I had this poem written.  It may not be much of a poem but it's more or less a sonnet.  Practice makes perfect and this is my first creation of the new year.  So thanks Miss Kong.
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Monday, January 11, 2010

Where have I been for 40 years?



I started reading To Kill a Mockingbird on the train journey home.  The first two pages or thereabouts are astonishingly well-written.  They quite took my breath away.  Who knew?

First day back at work ...

... received invitations from the Prime Minister and the Premier to attend separate Australia Day functions.  Business as usual.  Not.


Sunday, January 10, 2010

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Hail the conquering hero


A belated part of my gifts from Santa awaited my arrival at the breakfast table.  The board game called Cathedral was hidden within the coolest gift-wrapping imaginable (machine-sewn remnants of previously used Christmas paper).  Spike and I played two games.  I lost the first of course (continuing the long line of defeats suffered by me on Christmas Day in her parents' house).  I am pleased / relieved / proud / thankful (delete as appropriate) to announce / confirm / boast / note humbly (delete as unlikely) that I secured a famous victory in the second match.  One-all and everything to play for ... unless I lose, in which case we'll go on forever.  Oddly, we opened the set with its purple cathedral on the very same day I start to read Purple Hibiscus in which Roman Catholicism plays an important part.  Ooooo ... beyond the Twilight Zone!

Cathedral game web site
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Alien

It may be true, as Ridley Scott's advert for the movie observed, in space no one can hear you scream.  Fortunately,  for those of us not crewing the Nostromo, there is blogging.  Here is one example.  And with an immeasurably larger readership, one of my favourite spaces ... The Guardian.


I read the first Guardian blog of 2010 by A L Kennedy here today.  I posted the following response after another reader wrote that one can write for onself to help stay sane.  I accept that.  I believe, however, that whenever one hits send or posts a text or proposal to an agent, editor or publisher it's clear the ego has an audience in mind.  I know I do.

I realise it may be true that one can writes for oneself. Gerard Manley Hopkins could be an example I suppose, although even he thought he was writing for / to an audience. The fact that he believed that audience was God doesn't necessary imply insanity. Aiming high maybe bu not categorically nuts. 

 Sadly, those of us of a somewhat more pedestrian disposition end up writing for ourselves largely because a cruel and heartless world inists that the texts be of publishabe quality (Lord Archer excepted to prove the rule). Still, in one's more poetic moments it's helpful to remember that even TSE was read by his mate Ezra first. And wouldn't it be destiny calling if the effluent re-cycling guy on the flight to Toronto ... we've all met such folk ... I worry that I might be him at times ... turned out to be a guy called Don from New York wh had just completed his masterwork.

I think that, deep down, we all write for someone else, even if it's only the Guardian's blogsphere inhabitants.. Supporting evidence? In the immortal words of one of the Bee Gees ... Barry ... I have a huge ego and a huge inferiority complex at the same time. 

Looking forward to the new book Alison.

A L Kennedy's web site here

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Friday, January 08, 2010

Cannery Row


I finished reading Cannery Row this morning, chuckling throughout as I read. It’s been at least ten years since I read the short novel / long short story. It might even have been longer; two or three decades. I’m pleased I found it just as engaging. It’s one of Steinbeck’s finest works. What wouldn’t one give to write anything even close to the territory it occupies?

Thursday, January 07, 2010

It's Complicated



After an hour or thereabouts visiting an inmate of Long Bay prison I re-joined Spike (reading in the van parked adjacent to the jail’s massive sandstone walls) then we drove to La Perouse where we enjoyed coffee / chai and cakes on the deck of Pete’s Boatyard Café (an element in several of my poems a few years back).  We wandered around the point, which is not as romantic as it sounds.  Spike had to work hard pushing me up the hill.  We sat at (Spike on) a bench at the top of the hill for a while then Spike suggested we go to the movies to see It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and a sadly miss-cast Steve Martin doing … anything but funny.  


It’s not the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, not by a very long way.  I doubt that it would have seen the light of day if Ms Streep’s name had not been linked to it.  She, of course, is completely engaging but the truth is that she would be compelling viewing even if she was reading the phone directory.  But almost everyone in the (small) audience laughed at some point.  Me too. More than once.  I did giggle at the first scene of Meryl Streep doing whacked on dope and the family breakfast scene the morning after the lunch time assignation.  Two truly funny scenes aren't really enough to hold tegether an entire movie though.  It was a bit of a missed opportunity (especially with the three leads).  I guess they meant well and you know when you weigh movies in the balance ... let's try It's Complicated and Transformers: Rise Of The Fallen ... there really isn't much to confuse you, is there?  Meryl Streep at 2/3rds of capacity ANY day of the week before any amount of Michael let's blow something up Bay.

 

After the movie we dined in the Bavarian Bar Café at Fox Studios.  It’s hard to believe we were there at all except it’s the closest cinema to La Perouse.  Even harder to believe was our choice of restaurant.  Neither Spike nor I eat meat.  We don’t drink beer.   So … Bavarian Bar Café?  I chose fish and chips.  Spike chose prawn salad and a glass of rose wine.  Go figure.


Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Jim Davidson


So ... I'm just off the phone to my mother.  It's 10:20 p.m. here, 11:20 a.m. there.  My mother, who sounds tired but well, tells me that she's been out to have her hair done, the clothes she's wearing later have been chosen and she's not long after a cup of tea with a roll and sausage.  There's a layer of snow on Mansfield Road, she says.  Near May's house in Aviemore there is a metre of snow and May's daughter Victoria, who went skiing yesterday, had to brought off the slope by a snow-clearing team because the lifts are closed.  May, George and the girls only just made it south over the Drumochter Pass before the snow gates were closed on the A9.  Yes, says my mother, the flowers arrived yesterday and they are lovely.  I tell her that I'll call again tomorrow.

I guess its natural that we don't dwell on the details of Jim's funeral in two hours time from now.  He died on New Year's Eve, eighty-five years old.  My mother's second husband.  A decent man.  Together they were mad as brushes but they lived happily for almost twenty years after both had buried the first spouse.  Rest in peace Jim.  You've either found the answer or not.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Whales in Alaska


This is one of a series of photograps appearing in today's Guardian.  Taken by a British photographer (Duncan Murrell) from a kayak, the photos strongly suggest to me there could be more valuable / fulfilling activity in a man's life than working as a public servant in NSW (as necessary as that might be).

See all five photos here.
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Monday, January 04, 2010

Fantastic Mr Fox


It isn't ... fantastic.  Between lunch and shopping at Woolies we watched Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of the Dahl story.  The movie is cold, heartless, too knowing for its own good and neither funny nor engaging.  It also looked as if they had skimped on the animation budget.  Stop motion this ordinary makes Wallis & Gromit look like Van Gogh.  It was a big disappointment because I like Wes Anderson's films.  Maybe next time.

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Tim Minchin's Storm



I'd never heard of Tim Minchin until Spike mentioned him today.  I've been missing out.
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Saturday, January 02, 2010

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes



It's mildly bonkers but I enjoyed it hugely.  I'm looking forward to the inevitable sequel.  If Professor Moriarty is anything like as good a baddie as Mark Strong's Lord Blackwood we're in for a treat.
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Olafur Eliasson at the MCA


I'm not quite sure what I made of this show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I felt a little underwhelmed to be honest.  I expexcted, maybe wanted more.  The artist is obviously very bright but the works lacked soul (it seemed to me).  Maybe that's what Nordic / Icelandic minimalism does for you.  It's bare, spare, full of light and large, sometimes oddly shaped objects.  I'm not sure it had heart though.  The colour tunnel was beautiful and the lego table simply wonderful (mostly because of the way it drew people to make amazing, weird shapes out of thousand of white plastic bricks).  But the show didn't move me much or engage me hugely.  Maybe I need to go back after I've read more about the artist's intentions.

For me, the best work is one called Beauty: light shining on a misty shower descending from the ceiling to recreate the Aurora Borealis.  Wonderful.  It's housed in a pitch black room.  Spike stepped back from the wall of light in water, took three paces then slammed into the end of the gallery saying ... and there's the wall.  Forgive me, I laughed.

Friday, January 01, 2010