Five former prawns at Thai Number One (since 1992)

Dinner on my own because Spike was working late in the studio, polishing glass (or was it the wooden base?)  Polishing for sure.  I dined at a local cheap n cheerful Thai restaurant for the first time.  It's funny how events or circumstances lead you to new experiences - even if it's only a plate of chilli basil noodles with prawns prepared for my table in about two minutes.  My van's electrics are broken so I took the train home from work.  Spike's working late so I'm fending for myself (and had a quick curry in mind from the shop between the station and Liverpool Road).  But the lift to the Liverpool Road side, which was out of order yesterday but back in order this morning, was back out of order this evening so I descended to ground level on the opposite side of the tracks.  And there I saw Thai Number One restaurant ("since 1992" the legend boldly proclaims.  So Thai it was.  No complaints here.

Show of the year ... so far.

Kirra Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne

Happy re-cycler

ME OF PANDA

To Rozelle and the bicycle shop to fit a new inner tube for my wheelchair then the car park at SCA to drop off a library book then the car park at Bunnings, Ashfield, (which is always a joy) then the car park at JayCar, Parramatta road, Croydon then the car park at the Addison Road Community Centre, Marrickville.  At least I got out the van there to negotiate the narrow paths of Reverse Garbage in search of "..ME OF PANDA".  Who knew?  At least one shopper seems to have found a bargain.

As I Lay Dying

I finished my essay on Addie's monologue from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.  It was only a short assignment (my piece comes in at 922 words, including the direct quotes ... so there's maybe 800 of my own words).  Nevertheless I couldn't find my way in for days and if I can't see the way in I have no chance of getting out again.  So it's a day late, which means two points lost before anyone starts to count.  I had no choice though.  Yesterday I had nothing but fragments.

Here's how I finished:

"My mother is a fish"

Addie’s passage is, therefore, pivotal to many ways of reading Faulkner’s novel: as an, at times, horrific re-working of Homer’s epic tale of the return home, suffused with absurd and darkly improbable humour; as an exploration of the tensions within and contradictions between public and private constructions of identity illustrated through variations of voice, tone, register and syntax among characters inhabiting the same, precisely delineated fictional world; as a cautionary fable concerned with the destructive and alienating effects of Modernity; as a recognition of ways in which the unmodern – in particular, death – persists (if not triumphs) in life; and as a writing experiment to demonstrate the author’s Modernist concern with the limits of language as a vehicle to express or explain meaning and truth.  

We'll see.






Illustration by Nate Olsen at NATEOMEDIA 

And today's number is ...

92.

Received my essay on Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) for my postmodernism course.  Happy camper.

Master of all he surveys

So I'm here.  I'm ready to start.  Master of the universe that I am I sit alone at the head of the table around which members of the Advisory Council of the NSW Lifetime Care and Support Authority will gather.  In two minutes?  May as well enjoy my tea and Tim Tam.  What else can the all-powerful Chair do?

In search of 750 words

William Faulkner and his typewriter in Hollywood

Working on my Faulkner essay, due on Friday.  Still not sure what I may write about Addie's monologue but I'll get there, with luck, by the submission deadline.

It's been observed in many places that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks without altering a word.  That may or may not be true but it's essentially beyond the point.  It's a brilliant work of what my tutor calls American Regional Modernism; a frontier tall tale of humour and horror; the point of meeting between myths of agrarian folk culture and cosmopolitan modernism; Homer meets Mark Twain meets Virginia Woolf.  It's hard not to be impressed; difficult not to feel daunted by such authorial power.

Time for Van Morrison

It's been that kind of day.  So, from Inarticulate Speech of the Heart ...

Rave on john donne, rave on thy holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down through the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on down through time and space down through the corridors
Rave on words on printed page

Rave on, you left us infinity
And well pressed pages torn to fade
Drive on with wild abandon
Uptempo, frenzied heels

Rave on, walt whitman, nose down in wet grass
Rave on fill the senses
On nature’s bright green shady path

Rave on omar khayyam, rave on kahlil gibran
Oh, what sweet wine we drinketh
The celebration will be held
We will partake the wine and break the holy bread

Rave on let a man come out of ireland
Rave on on mr. yeats,
Rave on down through the holy rosey cross
Rave on down through theosophy, and the golden dawn
Rave on through the writing of "a vision"
Rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on

Rave on john donne, rave on thy holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down though the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on words on printed page

Dog Debris in Dooralong

We're visiting Spike's parents at their self-built home in the Dooralong Valley.  When we arrived the soft toys of Fingle and Harry, the dogs, were scattered across the paddock like the collateral  damage of a bomb blast.  Spike gathered together the collection of sheep, cows and a rugby 'ball', ready for games of fetch after lunch.

The Hurt Locker

Guy Pierce in The Hurt Locker

Three years late I finally caught up with Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning movie, The Hurt Locker.  It's a good film but I wouldn't call it great (as some did).  There are moments of tension, of course, and it's highly dramatic in places (once or twice slipping into melodrama even ... the implausible expedition into the night after the tanker bomb, the drunken fight in the barracks) but (once Guy Pierce was finished) there was never really any risk that any of the principals would not make it out alive.  The final scenes were no surprise at all.

But it is a good movie.  The performances are excellent.  There are plenty of worse ways to spend two hours of your life. 

I read something of John Pilger's criticism that the movie reduced the circumstances and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths during the American occupation of Iraq to an almost unseen backcloth.  He compared THL to The Deer Hunter in that respect.  I think, yes John and no.  It's broadly correct that there's an almost total lack of political context set in the movie but it's not wholly devoid of critique.  The American forces are clearly identified as an unwelcome, occupying force - even the way bystanders simply observe the troops' predicaments indicates that their presence is neither heroic nor justified.  There is too, I think, an attempt (not entirely successful) consider the alienating effects of the war on those who fight it.  Pilger's criticism depends (in part) on viewing The Hurt Locker as a film about the war in Iraq.  I'm not sure that's quite right.  It's more a film about the effect of war on men sent to fight that's set in Iraq.  That said, I'm not sure I buy entirely the conceit established with the aphorism that opens the film. 

The life of a student ...

So, it's student Friday for Dougie, here at the university of Sydney.  We're at the end of a brief Indian Summer (I have no idea what makes such late-season, balmy days Indian).  That may explain my lethargy.  So too may my bizarre decision to watch online all of Any Coulson's evidence to the Leveson Inquiry in London.  It was 2:00 a.m. by the time I reached bed.  I was back up at 6:30 a.m. (this being a Friday).

We looked at the two short films of Tracy Moffat in my ten o'clock tutorial: Nice Coloured Girls and Night Cries.  Both are intriguing takes on being an indigenous Australian woman at the turn of the Century.  NCG, the earlier film, is a more straightforward look at the relationships between European settlers (then and now) and the indigenous peoples of this land.  White racism (paternalistic then, more personally vindictive now) pervades the film.  Time and power relations are mixed up to make us adjust the way we read the text.  It succeeds.  The re-framing of testimonies from the past, turning written colonialist evidence into the spoken word while re-telling the testimony of the local population through written extracts (the privileged form) raises questions about reliable / unreliable narration (Among others).  Some of the film has not travelled well through time but those drawbacks are minor details about costume, character and mise en scene.  The ideas on the screen - to do with gener, race, colonialism, class, wealth and power - retain their power.  It's still a thought-provoking piece.  The movie NC is much more complex: it's closer to abstracted art and surrealism, inter-textual (as all postmodern texts must be); about and not about aboriginality; about family, women's business and domesticity; deals with mother / daughter bonds; takes apart and relocates Christianity's role in the 20th Century assimilation policies.  There's much more.  Good stuff.

At Noon I attended a tutorial on Virginia Woolf's Jacb's Room.  The discussion was tentative at first but after one woman reported that she's not realised that Jacob dies (until after reading the introductory essay when she'd finished the novel) our conversation picked up with talk of death, loss, fate and absence.  Good fun.  Excellent novel.

Now - halfway through the 3 to 5 Friday afternoon shift - I'm at a lecture on two Australian post-modern poets,John Tranter and Gig Ryan.  We populate the auditorium sparsely, like raindrops spread across a car windscreen just before the storm begins.  Dr Lilley, a poet herself, does her best.   

Silver threads and golden needles ...

  My side of the bed because ... the floor is not for filing.

once Upon A Time

Watching Episode 7 of Series 1 on the American television programme Once Upon A Time this evening I was surprised by the murder that occurred.  Given the gentle introduction of this series until this point (all the deaths so far have come about in the fairy universe).  The series, entertaining in its own way, is no less silly than it has been but tonight's episode took a surprising turn into darker territory than I'd thought the programme had been pitched at.  My surprise may tell us more, of course, about me but there you have it.  Silly but fun and, now, not as saccharine sweet as it has been until now. 

Roberta Joan Anderson

How long have I been listening to Joni Mitchell; singing along.  Forty years?  Forty five?  According to Wiki (so it must be true!!!) her first studio album was released in 1968 (I was eleven and have no recollection of any track from it).  But a year later cam Clouds and I do know Chelsea Morning and Both Sides Now.  I'm pretty sure that BSN caught my attention as a twelve year old, probably as a result of my big brother's record collection.  He would have been 15 going on 16.  He was into contemporary folk - Pentangle, Donovan (but not Dylan, funnily enough), Joan Baez, CSN&Y, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell - as well as - let's think - John Mayall, Cream, Hendrix (of course) and way out there on the Californian edge of blues-based rock n roll, The Doors.  You can see where my tastes come from.  Did we all look west ... to America?  Anyway, I've been listening to Ms Roberta Joan Anderson sing for at least 43 years. Still am.

So I'm sitting here in Sydney, early in May, listening to Night Ride Home (1991).  As I type, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, based on Yeats's The Second Coming, is playing.  Sing on Joni.  Sing along Dougie.

I love the whole album; no track is better than another but this poem / lyric / song never ceases to grab me.  The unanswered question is audacious, irrefutable, unanswerable: Who you gonna get to do the dirty work / When all the slaves are free?



Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)

Magdalene is trembling
Like a washing on a line
Trembling and gleaming
Never before was a man so kind
Never so redeeming

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Ecstasy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

I am up a sycamore
Looking through the leaves
A sinner of some position
Who in the world can this heart healer be
This magical physician

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Misery
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, climb down, climb down he says to me
From the middle of unrest
They think is light is squandered
But he sees a stray in the wilderness
And i see how far i've wandered

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Apathy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, all around the marketplace
The buzzing of the flies
The buzzing and the stinging
Divinely barren
And wickedly wise
The killer nails are ringing

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Tragedy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Very few degrees of separation

Wallace Stevens

Spike asked me this evening if I knew of a poet named Wallace Stevens.  I said I did / I do but couldn't recollect any of the poems.  Spike mentioned Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which I vaguely recalled.  We looked at the poem on line and I remember being introduced to it years ago at Stirling University as one of the literary links between Poe's The Raven and William Carlos Williams's The Red Wheelbarrow.

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called The Death of a Soldier, which I may have confused in my memory with a poem by Randall Jarrell.  I remember still the shock of reading the final line of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jacob's Room

I finished Virgina Woolf's first experimental work today (it was VW's opinion that her first two novels are conventional).  She tried to build a fictional world with none of the structure of the novel up to that point.  So there's no beginning, middle or end (the penultimate sentence is an unanswered question).  Time is pervasive but never chronological.  Architecture informs character, mood, perception but we seldom linger anywhere, in any building, for long (the Reading Room of the British Museum maybe; the Parthenon and St Paul's Cathedral perhaps but always in an elliptical manner, coming back and forth, moving in and out).  It's a short, affecting read.  I made what may have been a mistake by playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata from the point in Chapter Three that Woolf writes "... the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz." (page 54 in my edition, Oxford World Classics).  What a powerful (depressingly so) sense of a doomed, lost generation of young men it evoked.  It's as effective ... not quite maybe ... as the middle section of To the Lighthouse which may be unsurpasable IMHO.

Jacob's Room is an impressive read; eye-opening about what can be done with fiction; moving.  It's not perfect though (what is?).  The butterfly metaphor was overdone (particularly in the chapters before we get to London) and that social strata upon which VW turns her perceptive gaze was irritatingly narrow but given who she was and how the First World War affected her own connections I suppose one can forgive her.  It's certainly a novel to read but not on any day you're a bit depressed by life's ability to subdue one's enthusiasm.