The whole of her sermon

All chocolate Labradors are equal

2011-09-03T21:45:00.004+10:00

But some chocolate Labradors are more equal than others.

Yes, that is the light that shines out of the baby Jesus's arse illuminating her face.

Monogamy

2011-08-23T11:19:00.000+10:00

I wrote this ages ago for The Big Issue, but it's not online anymore and I wanted to show someone. So I'm posting it here.

Monogamy

Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
Dorothy Parker

There’s a school of thought that says a man begins his reproductive years young, dumb and full of cum. A woman, on the other hand, will road test a few men to get a sense of her options, then wind up with Mr Good As It Gets. At first, these two lovebirds are all over each other, but eventually – after a couple of years – it all gets a bit samey. She’s happy enough – sex is better when you really know each other, she tells her friends – while he’s either boning a compliant colleague or wishing he were. As the father of modern psychology William James put it: Higamous, hogamous, woman monogamous / Hogamous, higamous, man is polygamous.

Unfortunately, Dr James didn’t expect a development that was to, among other things, make the CSI franchise the televisual success story it is today – DNA testing.

You want monogamy? Marry a swan.
Nora Ephron, Heartburn

To work out what makes humans monogamous – and unfaithful – scientists have long observed the behaviour of other monogamous animal species. As it turns out, monogamy is pretty rare among mammals – there’s us, and few dozen others species – but common in the bird word. And birds are perfect for observational purposes – they don’t indulge in such experiment-skewing practices as popping a morning-after pill or opening several separate internet accounts.

What the swab-swiping biologists discovered was nothing short of a revolution. Yes, males are just as likely to seek sex outside their primary relationship as we’d thought. But – and here’s the surprise – females are also frequently unfaithful to their partners. With many bird species at least, the truth is not that males are polygamous and females monogamous, but that both genders are socially monogamous – they live and rear children within couples – and both are happy to avail themselves of extra-pair sex when opportunity presents.

There were clues, even before DNA testing. In their 2001 bestseller, The Myth of Monogamy, biologist David Barash and psychiatrist Judith Lipton describe a 1975 experiment where an American research team sterilized a number of male red-wing blackbirds to see whether this would help control their expanding population. It didn’t. In fact, a large proportion of the female partners of the infertile males miraculously managed to produce chicks anyway. Barash and Lipton speculate that male biologists may not have fully explored the ramifications of this research because of their own “unspoken anxiety” about female infidelity.

But DNA testing showed us that the bird species scientists thought were models of monogamy were in fact fully-fledged swingers. One study, amongst Australian fairy wrens, found that a staggering 95 per cent of all nest contained at least one chick sired by fathers from outside the immediate flock. Female fairy wrens are generally the initiators in these extra-pair matings. Now you can see where those unspoken anxieties are coming from.

Wives in their husbands' absences grow subtler,
And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.
Lord Byron

There are many reasons why males have a strong desire for sexual variety, but most of them stem from the idea that sperm is more plentiful and biologically cheaper to produce than eggs, and hence a less valuable resource. So while males can afford to splash it about and hope for the best as far as reproduction goes, the ladies need to be choosy. (Unsettlingly, in the month is takes me to release one egg, my partner can produce billions of sperm.)

What we now know is that it is also in the biological interests of females to seek extra-pair sex as males. Sperm may be plentiful, but that’s because a female needs plenty of it. If a male has only twenty million sperm per ejaculate he’s generally considered infertile. Having sex with more than one mate during fertile periods increases the chances of conception, and of the best stuff reaching the egg.

Sperm quality and difference are the aphrodisiacs here. Females need the social security of a pair-bond, but they can generally get a higher class of fellow from extra-pair sex – as we’ve already seen, males will do it with pretty much anybody, so a male may mate casually with a female that he wouldn’t necessarily pursue as a partner. Females also have a “strange male” preference – a desire to mate with newcomers or males from different localities over the local boys.

Studies also show that females of many socially monogamous species will seek out extra-pair sex with a male who has nothing more to offer than that he is popular with other females – a chick magnet. Think Sandy Freckle in Kath and Kim. He was thin-lipped and frankly revolting, but somehow the fact that he’d seduced all Kel’s other fiancés made Kath feel like her head was “screwed on backwards”.

The interesting thing is that humans are not the only species to believe males are by far the more unfaithful gender. Among many socially monogamous species, males don’t always bother to disguise extra-pair sex, but females will go to great lengths to keep it hush-hush. According to Barash and Lipton, a female macaque monkey (another monogamous mammal) deserves an Oscar for the nonchalance she affects after a quick extra-pair romp in the underbrush. Meanwhile, her male lover will immediately cover his still erect penis with his hand. Being caught in the act can be damaging for males, but it is generally disastrous for females – in the animal world, no one wants to be a single mum.

So for your face I have exchanged all faces
Philip Larkin

What does this all bird biology mean, then, for us? About a year ago, I found myself staring at my partner and thinking: I may never have sex with anyone else ever again. There’s a lot of hope and horror in that; a lot of comfort and doubt. What if I get bored? What if I fall for someone else? What if he does? Is it really love, I wonder, to demand such sacrifice of each other? Or is it just a pact with fear – I’ll promise if you promise, because while frankly I’d love to, I couldn’t bear it if you did.

And why, given the instinctive desire to be unfaithful, do people persist with monogamy in the first place? Like birds, humans instinctively want to shag, and we want to shag a variety of people. But, for some reason, right when we’re at our most shaggable, we give it all up and cleave to one person until we’re creaky and crinkly and no longer attractive. What’s more, monogamy requires ignoring culture’s deafening cues to do whatever feels right, and be mature in a world that no longer values maturity.

One answer to the mystery of monogamy is that there aren’t particularly great alternatives. Communes and other movements that advocate sexual freedom frequently crumble because, faced with freedom, men and women still persist in falling in love. Open marriages have never really taken off – there is no antidote to jealousy, it seems. Men sometimes advocate a harem approach – forgetting that that would probably mean that Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch would have hundreds of partners, while most ordinary blokes would have none.

Even serial monogamy doesn’t really work. Falling in love or into sexual obsession with someone floods are bodies with hormones. They’re the “going crazy” hormones – the ones that send you staring into space for hours at a time and absentmindedly putting the kettle in the fridge. Sure, it feels fantastic, but eventually you’ll need to find the kettle again.

Infidelity is such a problem because we take monogamy for granted; we treat it as the norm. Perhaps we should take infidelity for granted, assume it with unharassed ease. Then we would be able to think about monogamy.
Adam Phillips

Unlike birds, homo sapiens have the balls to argue with biology. The human experience of monogamy and infidelity is where instinct and consciousness collide. The truth is we want socially monogamous, sexually slack relationships for no other reason than it is our biological interests. But that being the case, we have built up around this system uniquely human constructions – marriage and mortgages and Jennifer Aniston movies. And we’ve tried to contain our lusts with virtues like restraint, fidelity and commitment.

These qualities have gone out a fashion, and frankly, that’s been a good thing. Historically, men have built invisible chastity belts out of virtues like restraint and used them to control women. But perhaps with our new knowledge of bird life we can revamp the old-fashioned idea of being good. We know now that monogamy is difficult for both sexes, but rather than get stuck in a hole where infidelity is sinful and fidelity impossible, we can build new structures that accept the former while striving for the later.

Many of the people I spoke to while writing this article – both male and female – posited that infidelity only happens when the core relationship is unhappy. That’s not entirely untrue – people in unhappy couples do seem more likely to commit adultery, and those more happily mated are more likely to resist temptation for fear of upsetting their union. But it’s not entirely true either – many people are unfaithful purely for sexual variety.

Infidelity happens. “It’s really hard to pin down what percentage of people have affairs,” says Rosalie Pattenden, a psychologist at Relationships Australia, “but there’s a general acceptance that it happens in around 30 to 40 per cent of long term relationships.” But this doesn’t mean monogamy isn’t a worthwhile goal. To understand what drives infidelity, and – perhaps hardest of all – to not take it personally if it does happen, can only strengthen and deepen one’s experience of being in a relationship.

There’s another answer to the mystery of monogamy – it does us good. As well as writing The Myth of Monogamy and several other books together, Lipton and Barash have also been married 30 years. It’s with some experience, then, that they tell us “the fruits of shared imagination may be beautiful”.

Monogamy may make sex less sexy, but it can make it more meaningful. It makes us – and our children – feel safe, secure, known and loved. And it means we can take time out from the relentless routine of getting laid and focus us on the making and doing and creating stuff. If love is a battlefield, then monogamy is our grand old warhorse. There are chinks in its breastplate, but it’s still our best chance of getting across that field alive.

All the Single Ladies

2011-03-10T13:51:00.001+11:00

In being single-related news, my friend Aristotle suggested I ask a man out. Why did you make this odd suggestion, Aristotle? It is a suggestion that preferences something that I’m not good at (i.e. asking dudes out) over other things I’m very good at (i.e. looking things up on Wikipedia; teaching my Labrador Martha to cuddle me with her front legs; remembering all the characters’ names in The Wire). As I said to Aristotle, “Aristotle,” I said, “If I see someone suitable (which I won’t), I’ll do it, if only because when said dude rejects me I can retort: ‘Hey, wasn’t my idea.’” Then I’ll do the thing my friend The Comedian’s (note that The Comedian is not to be confused with The Cobbler. I call The Comedian “The Comedian” because that’s what she is. Makes jokes, innit?) 13-year-old daughter taught me. Three fingers up, three fingers sideways, three fingers down, L on forehead. What. Ever. Major. Loser.

What happened next? Good bloody question — I've completely forgotten. To read the full article, go to The Pluck!

Things that shit me

2011-02-08T13:33:00.000+11:00

Why don't they make boots with heels like this anymore?

"Here's you bacon for breakfast."

2011-01-26T17:29:00.000+11:00

At the dog park, a friend tells me this story. Over the holiday, her partner, Polly, got very sick and they had to go to emergency.

Nurse: "What's your religion."
Polly: "Jewish."
Nurse: (Looks at computer for a long while) "No, it's not here. Would it be called anything else?"

If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it

2011-01-25T19:06:00.000+11:00

Oh traveler, please do wander over to Caitlin Crowley's famous website magazine The Pluck, wherein you can read the first of a rumoured series of articles about being fortysomething and single, written be me.

Things my dog does that would be creepy if she was my boyfriend.

2010-11-05T13:35:00.004+11:00

Sits across the coffee table and stare at me for hours while I watch TV.
Sticks her nose in my crotch so I can waggle her ears.
Sits on my bed for god knows how long in the morning, willing me to wake up and give her breakfast.
Goes to sleep on the bathmat while I have a shower.
Obsessively licks my friends.
Requires me to pick up her poo.

See? Dog = cute. Boyfriend = creepy.

I am now using facebook status updates as blogs to keep my blog functional. It's a bit sad.

Scoff. Cuss. Loathe.

2010-09-25T00:08:00.000+10:00

Somewhat of an argument over the intellectual merits of Elizabeth Gilbert lately with close friends. I was on the side of non-corniness. So somewhat of a relief to read this review of the movie in the Guardian latterly.

Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts's emotional growth, love the fact it can't last for ever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. Troubled traveller Julia finds fulfilment through exotic foreign cuisine, exotic foreign religion, sex with exotic foreign Javier Bardem. Film patronises Italians, Indians, Indonesians. Julia finds spirituality, rejects rat race, gives Balinese therapist 16 grand to buy house. Balinese therapist is grateful, thankful, humble. Sigh, blink, sniff. Check watch, groan, slump.

Film continues, persists, drags on. Wonder about Julia Roberts's hair, wonder about Julia Roberts's teeth, wonder about permanence of Julia Roberts's reported conversion to Hinduism. Click light-pen on, click light-pen off, click light-pen on. Eat crisps noisily, pray for more crisps, love crisps. Munch, munch, munch. Munch, munch, suddenly stop munching when fellow critic hisses "Sshhh!" Eat crisps by sucking them, pray that this will be quiet, love the salty tang. This, incidentally, makes me plump, heavy, fat. Yet Julia's life-affirming pasta somehow makes her slim, slender, svelte. She is emoting, sobbing, empathising. She has encounters, meetings, learning-experiences. Meets wise old Texan, sweet Indian girl, dynamic Italian-speaking Swede who thinks "Vaffanculo" means "screw you".

Roberts eats up the oxygen, preys on credulous cinemagoers, loves what she sees in the mirror. Julia shags Billy Crudup, James Franco, Javier Bardem. Ex-husband, rebound lover, true romance. Crudup is shallow'n'callow, Franco is goofy'n'flaky, Bardem is hunky'n'saintly. We hate Crudup, like Franco, love Bardem. Divorced Javier is gorgeous, sexy, emotionally giving. About his ex-wife we are indifferent, incurious, uninterested. She is absent, off the scene, unnamed. That's how Julia likes it, needs it, prefers it.

Movie passes two-hour mark, unfinished, not over yet. Whimper, moan, grimace. Wriggle, writhe, squirm. Seethe, growl, rage. Eat own fist, pray for death, love the rushing sense of imminent darkness. Scream, topple forward, have to be carried out of cinema. Reach life crisis, form resolution, ask editor for paid year's leave to go travelling. Editor stands up, shakes head, silently mouths the word: "No". Nod, turn, return to work. Personal growth, spiritual journeys, emotional enrichment? Not as easy as 1-2-3.

Tony Martin on Lee Child

2010-09-21T14:29:00.002+10:00

Wilcox (we're still friends — in fact, when he moved out, he really just moved round the corner) alerted me to this rather old — in technology terms — article Tony Martin wrote on The Scrivener's Fancy about popular fiction and the author Lee Child.

I rofled like a maniac rofler who was kicked out of Rofling University for being too damn good at rofling. In a sea of favourite bits, here's my favourite bit:

So, hang on, these literary cunts, they’re…what? Lazy? Slacking off? Leaving the reader to ‘do all the work’? I assume he’s referring to that half-arsed concept ‘ambiguity’, a concept that is, according to Child, completely devoid of enjoyment. Actually, I remember reading a lot of books where you didn’t have to ‘figure anything out’ and where ‘the work’ was already done for you. I used to love those books…when I was fucking five!

P.S. I inspired myself and got Less Than Zero from Blockbuster. I'm sick, so I got five movies to watch in bed after I finish a chunk of work I have to do. Review will follow. (Of the movie, not of the chunk of work.)

Blogged down.

2010-09-20T18:51:00.015+10:00

Does anyone blog anymore? All Twitter now, innit?

Sadly, I'm not quippy enough for Twitter. My real strength lies in long strings of various muddled strands of psychotherapy — Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, psychodynamic, narrative, expressive, integrative — intertwined with my own beastly sadness (well, whose else is there?) and an unrelenting need — a need I've never not known — to unburden myself in writing of My Terrible Secrets. All swinging underneath a soundtrack of nose blowing, Labrador snores and Harry Neilsson.

But apparently people do still blog. In fact, three of my dearest have just produced blogs. Which made me miss this freaking nuthouse.

But then I have this inherent problem with my blog in that I want to tell the truth, and yet so many of the things I do are really quite against the law. Or, at the very least, morally ambiguous. I deleted a lot of, well, startlingly moving and ... jeez, I don't want to sound like a wanker, but what the hell ... life-changing writing on this blog already, because it was about drug use. But I'd still quite like to talk about [things that were probably too personal. Sorry, but I've deleted what I wrote here earlier. Because it was too personal.]

So I continuously ravel and unravel my security settings, stewing over whether my employers could possibly find me, which could in turn lead to a shameful cautionary tale on Snopes.com about employees and TMI on the internet. You know, stuff like this. Blerk!

If I could just be me it would be ok. If I was a proper writer, if my publisher wasn't giving me the "How about never? Is never good for you?" treatment, if I was a little less nutty and, more pertinently, if I got of my arse and wrote more stuff, then I could be me. (Although reflecting on the blog so far, I may have to thesaurus my way out of the words "shit" and "stuff".) But I'm a jobbing writer, and editor, and an occassional trainer in writing and editing. (An example of my training: "Listen up people! Don't do fancy nouns. Most nouns can be replaced by 'stuff' or 'shit'.") I write copy and I copy-edit clever books written by Important People.

[More deleted bits. That's why this post doesn't flow.]

My parents gave me a book my 26th birthday. I was not in a good state then — it was 1994; I was depressed, saving to go overseas in a McJob, drinking, shagging, experimenting, using my abandoned box of the pill (I switched to condoms) as a morning after pill, full to the brim with delayed adolescent defiance in, simultaneously, the uselessness and the importance of every object in the world, in opposition to what "the man" thought.

The book was The Penguin Book of Women's Lives, given, poignantly and hopefully, from my desperately worried parents. It is an excellent book full of extracts of women's autobiographies — I still have it.

My favourite extract was Emily Hahn's. It began:

Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China. The opium addiction dates back to that obscure period of childhood when I wanted to be a lot of other things, too — the greatest expert on ghosts, the word's best ice skater, the champion lion tamer, you know the kind of thing. But by the time I went to China I was grown up, and all those dreams were forgotten.

[You guessed it! Gone. It was juicy too.]

But all I have is my stories. I don't want to give them up; I want to write them down. Shall I say, "Fuck employers! I have made steps to anonymise myself. I've tried. What the fuck more? Hey? What the fuck more?" Shall I?

This blog helped me once when I was very, very sad. The fact it's been so long between posts is because that sadness then became depression. A nice, old-fashioned breakdown. Wilcox left me — an effect of the breakdown rather than the cause, but the cause of a deeper breakdown.

Slowly, slowly, with therapy, and the unexpected love of dear friends, the low fog is rising. I want to move again. I want to adventure again. Emily Hahn did.

"Chances are, your grandmother didn't smoke cigars and let you hold wild role-playing parties in her apartment," said her granddaughter Alfia Vecchio Wallace in her affectionate eulogy of Hahn. "Chances are that she didn't teach you Swahili obscenities. Chances are that when she took you to the zoo, she didn't start whooping passionately at the top her lungs as you passed the gibbon cage. Sadly for you, your grandmother was not Emily Hahn."

I will never be someone's grandmother.

Enough of all this. Back to my mates, and their new blogs. Zigsma has produced Ope Shope Hope, a brilliant ode to her op-shopping, a pantheon for super-duper discarded stuff. Zigsma has impeccable, pitch-perfect taste, which I envy and admire.

George McEncroe is my funny friend. I know she's funny because she has a job at being a comedian. She's just started her blog and is promoting her new show, which everyone in the whole world should see.

It's on at Trades Hall from 28 Setember to 2 October. That's FOUR NIGHTS ONLY. Book here.

Then there's my friend Erica's new website and blog. She's an artist who does complicated things with mathematics and x-rays and plastic toys.

Hey, that felt good. I might come back here. Even if no one reads it. In fact it's better if no one reads it.

Blasts from one's own past

2009-08-09T19:51:00.006+10:00

Randomly, I started reading my old blog from years ago, and found this story. Wilcox was so sweet. This is from back in the thick of IVF — I was, admittedly, pretty nutty.

Don’t shoot anyone

The other day the guy in my local FoodWorks asked me what I was listening to on my iPod, then before I could answer he said, “I always get the feeling that you’re listening to someone saying, ‘Keep it together. Just don’t go crazy. Don’t shoot anyone.’”

I am aware I can look like a bit of a nutter sometimes – my iPod is basically stapled to my head, and I’ve a tendency to giggle and sing under my breath when I hear David Essex’s Hold Me Close – but I don’t think I fully realised the extent of it. It’s cause my brothers were so much older than me that I basically grew up as an only child, and I lived, and still do live, in My Own Little World. (See the spotty house description, below.) I notice everyone on the street, but I sometimes feel they can’t see me. I don’t like running in to people – I may be very distant, so far, far away, and it’s difficult to suddenly drop back in.

That’s sometimes. Other times I walk around so convinced of my own freckle-faced glamour that I’m surprised anyone can tear their eyes away. Although that’s not so often.

Anyway, I was premenstrual at the time (of the FoodWorks incident) so when I came home and told Wilcox I started crying. Then we stood in the kitchen while he patted my head and said, “You’re not a nutter. No one thinks you’re a nutter.”

52 Poems

2009-05-19T00:39:00.001+10:00

Three recipes I've convinced myself that I "invented"

2009-03-30T21:13:00.002+11:00

1. Mince Fried Rice!

Boil up some Jasmine rice. Right at the end, add yummy vegies such as cauliflower and/or broccoli and/or peas.

In a wok, fry up garlic, ginger, chilli, onion and/or shallots, mushies, zucchini and some beef or pork mince.

Cook it.

Add cooked rice and vegies.

Add soy sauce, oyster sauce, or whatever.

Cook it a bit more.

You're done! Turn off wok and enjoy!

2. Cauliflower Mushy!

Boil up cauliflower until it's mushy.

Drain.

Add salt and butter and garlic chives. Fuck it, add some parmesan if you want. Am I telling anyone? Am I your keeper?

You're done! Turn on So You Think You Can Dance and enjoy!

3. Anchovie and Caper Surprise!

Begin making tomato-based sauce.

At the initial fry-the-onions stage, add lots of anchovies and capers.

Finish making tomato-based sauce.

Add it to pasta or meat.

You're done! Watch The Bill on ABC2 because you missed it on Saturday and enjoy!

You're welcome!

Perkler!

2009-03-20T00:08:00.002+11:00

Wilcox's old schoolbuddy Justin has set up this awesome website called Perkler.

You sign up, you list all the loyalty cards in your wallet (no disclosure of identifying details involved) and they collate all the perks you're entitled to but forgotten about, plus several others you might like to take advantage of but never heard of. It's kind of like LibraryThing, but for your wallet instead of your bookshelf, AND WITH MORE FREE SHIT.

Totally super.

Death of a Bird

2009-03-18T11:51:00.005+11:00

An excerpt from the poem by A.D. Hope

She feels it close now, the appointed season:
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.

Try as she will the trackless world delivers
No way, the wilderness of light no sign,
The immense and complex map of hills and rivers
Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design.

And darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,
And the great earth, with neither grief not malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death.

Why Martha would have been a good dog for Sigmund Freud

2009-03-17T23:41:00.012+11:00

One of the great sadnesses of Freud's dying, apart from its natural conclusion, was that his beloved chow, Lun — who for years had fawned on him and followed him everywhere; who sat through Freud's every therapy session, sometimes to the discomfort of his patients — could suddenly not bear to go near him. By this time, the multiple cancers in Freud's mouth and jaw were allowed to thrive, because another operation would serve no purpose, except to prolong his excruciating pain. Freud was still alive, but bits of him, facial bits, bits of flesh inside his mouth, were dead. A cancerous lesion in his cheek turned into a gaping hole. He stunk. Flies gathered around his head. And Lun, his lifelong love, was suddenly afraid of him, and cowered in the corner.

This seems like odd behaviour from a dog to me. As far as Martha is concerned, if parts of me died and started to rot it would a meeting of her two greatest loves:

me
things that are dead and rotting.

If Freud's situation were mine, I'd probably die of suffocation, as Martha rolled on my face trying to wipe the scent of my decaying membranes about her neck.

Sadly, during the Melbourne heatwave, hundreds of flying foxes fell dead from their perches. At least that was the evidence I saw when we walked past the colony. Several weeks later, their decaying corpses are now at a peak desirability from a Labradorian point of view.

Sad, because even in death they're such pleasingly vampiric little critters.

If you want to know what this poor fellow smells like several weeks after this photo was taken, come round to my place and sniff Martha's neck.

In Canada

2009-03-15T13:54:00.002+11:00

This post is totally random

2009-03-12T09:32:00.009+11:00

Two dreams from last night

I am with two middle-aged men in the kind of independent bookshop that has a cafe/bar. One is psychologist. The men are 60s-era leftie ex-hippy types, and the psychologist is holding forth with some psychobabble, attempting to help me make sense of my life. It does not help, but I figure I may as well at least try to have an interesting conversation, so I bring up Freud (about whom I'm reading a book at the moment — in real life, not the dream). He interrupts and starts to explain his (disparaging) theories on Freud, clearly demonstrating his deep ignorance of the man's work.

The men warm to their subject, and order red wine. They entreat me to join them, but suddenly I realise that I must leave, that I am wasting my time with these people. As I leave the bookshop I see Freud on a street corner, idly tracing lines with his cane on the footpath, as if waiting for someone. He doesn't see me, but his presence fills me with warmth.

[NB. I am not a really full-on Freudian or anything, if that's what you're thinking.]
Wilcox gets up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. I realise that earlier I did a poo in the sink. I feel extremely humiliated because I know he'll see it.

[Ok, maybe I am.]

A very funny "It's Lovely, I'll Take It"

I love this blog about lame real estate listings and each post usually makes me rofl, but this post made me rofl and rofl and rofl and rofl.

Some observations from my local dog park

Thirty/fortysomething single women generally have largish dogs, like Labradors and German Shorthaired Pointers. These women are sometimes slightly mental.
Fiftysomething single women generally have small white fluffies.
Lesbian couples have compact and very energetic dogs like Miniature Schnauzers.
It is a complete myth that handsome single men have dogs. There are no handsome single men at my dog park and sometimes you see the single thirtysomething women walking around rather dejectedly, feeling ripped off.
Dog park locals generally see each other every day. But you don't need to learn anyone's name. You must, however, learn the name of their dog, be able to identify the breed, and find out how old the dog is.
When you see another person and their dog, you greet the dog by name and say "hi" to the person. When you part, again, you must deliver a personal goodbye to the dog. A general "see you", or even a more rakish "later", suffices for the human.
When you meet another dogowner you stand around and watch your dogs play. All conversation must revolve around the dogs and their idiosyncrasies. This is very pleasurable, because you have finally met another person as obsessed with their dog as you are.
If you are Wilcox, you must sometimes take the long way round the park in order to avoid inane conversations about dogs, because there is nothing that bores you more.
People really do pick dogs with whom they share a physical resemblance. For example, there's one couple who are both really tall and skinny and quite regal — they have a Great Dane. The lesbian couple and the Miniature Schnauzer are all sprightly with grey hair. Also W (my friend who gave me Martha)'s mother thinks that Martha and I look alike.

Just some pictures of Martha

Seriously, it's like looking in a mirror.

While we're on fashion...

2009-03-10T15:24:00.004+11:00

I just want to share with you a selection of my favourite dresses from my ever burgeoning net-a-porter wish list.

Catherine Malandrino
Ruffled cashmere knit
£417.02

Vivienne Westwood Red Label
Striped sleeveless dress
£217.02 (Comparatively affordable really, for someone who isn't me.)

RM by Roland Mouret
Mirabeau pencil dress
£1,089 (Comparatively affordable really, for, like, THE SULTAN OF BRUNEI.)

I couldn't actually fit in to any of these dresses. I'm just admiring them.

Anyway, back to work.

George at Spleen

2009-03-09T23:02:00.004+11:00

Here is my totally rocking friend George doing a bit of stand up.

George McEncroe at Spleen from Miss Schlegel on Vimeo.

I so know what I reckon youse all should do. I so reckon you should all come to George's show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. You can book here.

Am I mutton, dressed in drag?

2009-03-09T19:23:00.007+11:00

Apparently, if you're over 40, you shouldn't wear miniskirts.

I am 40. I wear miniskirts.

Let's get our definitions clear here. A miniskirt, as far as I'm concerned, falls mid-thigh. A micro-mini falls mid-arse, or thereabouts, and is best left to the spawn of Geldof. A pencil skirt falls on the knee.

I am very fond of pencil skirts, but they don't concern us here. No, I'm talking miniskirts.

There is a world of difference, by the way, between a summer miniskirt — in other words, a skirt accessorised with naked legs — and a winter miniskirt, with which you wear opaque stockings. I wear both, but I'm thinking of giving up the bare-legged variety next summer, when I'll be 41 and officially long in the tooth. Plus, I am the colour of a cage-laid eggshell, so bare legs require pots and pots and pots and pots of fake tan, and that shit don't come cheap, I'm telling you.

There are exceptions to my bare-legged miniskirt rule though. Even when I reach the age of 204, and I fully intend to, I will still wear summer miniskirts:

on the beach, with thongs, and while eating hot chips, and
on those ludicrous summer days that only Melbourne can produce when the temp is 45+ and everyone stays indoors with a frozen hand towel over their face, crying.

However, I'm not quite sure I'm ready to give up mid-thigh winter dresses with nice thick tights. A July evening; a laneway bar; a smattering of one's closest, cleverest, wickedest friends; a Worthy Australian Novel, almost certainly written by Eliot Pearlman, to viciously diss; an inappropriate affair to dissect in favour of the partner most likely to provide one with future work; a hunky new single aquaintance to set up with the spurned half of the inappropriate affair — all these things need an outfit that makes you feel like you're still in the game, that you're still chic, and rakish, and still, relatively, young.

Ish.

And now, according to, inter alia, The Daily Mail, I have to worry that my skirts are too short.

Ok, par example, I took a shot of one of my winter staples today:

Note that Martha would not be included in the actual hypothetical laneway bar gathering. And I would look much cooler if you could discern from these crap photos that my boots are uber-retro and made of denim.

Yes, denim.

Am I mutton dressed in lamb? At forty, can I still get away with this crap? Or do I have to resign myself to thumbing through my copious collection of pencil skirts every Friday night? Which would be fine, except it means I probably have to go on a [*blurk*] diet, because pencil skirts necessitate some kind of waist, and my waist is currently in hibernation, living off its own fat until the next millennium.

Or, in other words, is 40 too old to wear miniskirts? Please to be commenting, ye few readers o' mine.

Calm down everyone! Jonathan Rhys Meyers has got better!

2009-03-03T14:03:00.007+11:00

I like to think I broke the story, although given that no one commented on my previous post or even, according to Google Analytics, looked at it, that is admittedly unlikely.

Anyway, the sentence I highlighted in Jonathan Rhys Meyers Wikipedia page (see previous post) is gone. I noted the following comment on the relevant Wikipedia Talk Page*.

Down Syndrome?
Could it possibly be accurate that he was "retroactively diagnosed with Down's syndrome"? Down's syndrome is a serious genetic disorder that results in greatly impaired cognitive function and marked physical characteristics. Rhys Meyers shows NONE of these characteristics. This is simply bizarre. I wonder if the person who put this here got the syndrome mixed up with another?

I guess he'll probably never know about it, but I save JRM's bacon. He owes me, and one day I'll be collecting.

* Would you capitalise "talk page"? I don't think I would really. Still, it's done now.

Is Jonathan Rhys Meyers really a mong?

2009-03-01T10:55:00.003+11:00

Or is this someone's idea of a clever joke?

(You have to click on it to make it big.)

Kanye West. So dope! And gay!

2009-02-20T15:49:00.004+11:00

"I like to embody titles, y'know, or words that have negative connotations, and explain why that's good. Take the word gay — like, in hip-hop, that's a negative thing, right? But in the past two, three years, all the gay people I've encountered have been, like, really, really, extremely dope. Y'know, I haven't, like, gone to a gay bar, nor do I ever plan to. But where I would talk to a gay person — the conversation would be mostly around, like, art or design — it'd be really dope. From a design standpoint, kids'll say, 'Dude, those pants are gay.' But if it's, like, good, good, good fashion-level, design-level stuff — where it's on a higher level than the average commercial design stuff — it's gay people that do that. I think that should be said as a compliment. Like, 'Dude, that's so good it's almost ... GAY.'"

Message from Martha

2009-02-14T17:46:00.004+11:00

Martha's poo

2008-09-29T12:26:00.005+10:00

So fresh it has a use-by date.

2008-09-23T09:56:00.005+10:00

This morning, while Wilcox and I were still in bed, Martha did a poo so stenchful that we convinced ourselves she had done it in the room, if not in our actual bed. We both woke up retching. In fact, the two steaming piles of poo were outside the back door. Which, admittedly, was open. Still, that's some stinky poo, right?

When we got up there was a wattle bird in the kitchen. They're beautiful birds, the wattle bird — so long and lean and mottly. They have wattles under their necks, little dangly bits, for what purpose I do not know. We shut all the doors in the kitchen except the one that goes outside (the one with Martha's poos — possibly why the wattle bird couldn't manage to exit??) and left her to it (Wilcox said it was definitely a her). She left via the small section of doorway unobstructed by giant piles of stinking dog poo. Pity. I was getting quite attached to her.

Meanwhile, all this, and it's only 10am!

Is your computer screen dirty?

2008-09-21T23:45:00.004+10:00

You types are so savvy with the www that you've probably seen this already. But if you haven't, and your screen is a bit smeary, click here .

Here's news!

2008-09-08T21:37:00.013+10:00

This is Martha. She's my dog.

She's getting all growed up now. But this is her just a few weeks ago.

Ah, yeah. I know, right?

Okay, you deserve an explanation. So, remember my doggy dilemma? (Dunno why I bothered linking that — it's just a couple of posts down.) I dearly wanted a dog for a very long time, really since I last had a dog, which was when I was when I wee mite. But Wilcox and I couldn't agree on the size ballpark. He wanted something teensy and hassle-free, like a miniature Dachshund, or perhaps a new cushion, and I wanted something hefty and gallopy, like a Great Dane or a pony. I wanted something to walk with me around Yarra Bend, he wanted something that wouldn't, as a pathologically tidy type, send him round the bend. Besides which, I really felt I should get a rescue dog. Surely it's enough I have to suffer White Guilt — must I now be burdened with Breeder Guilt? Oh, and I also wanted a puppy, which of course go like hot cakes at the rescue places. Plus we rent. And, oh, it was all too hard.

Meanwhile, well, you also know all about our Personal Tragedy. I've been absent from this blog lately because, to be frank, the blues got worse before they got better. Actually they haven't yet got better. And Wilcox has been hardly euphoric. So we were jointly suffering from the depressive's inability to decide anything. My brain function slowed down to Punt-Road-in-peak-hour pace, during which it moves slowly and in fits and starts, and makes me cry by sending visions of people making speeches at my funeral while at the same time half listening to Hamish and Andy.

I choose to unburden myself of this difficulty at regular intervals, particularly if moistened by a bottle or two of Chardonnay.

"Oh ffs," muttered my friends to each other during their secret meetings without me. "Why the devil don't they just get the dog already?"

Then, one day, one of my dearest girlfriends (let's call her W) got me drunk at a dinner party at my own house (the cheek!) and said, "Okay, if you could have any sort of dog you wanted, what would you have?"

"I'd've a choclt Lbradr," I mumbled. "Ther so chocltey." I finished my ice cream and started on hers. "But I'll never get one!" I wailed.

"Why not?" said W.

"His Highness," I slurred, tossing my head toward a sober, resigned Wilcox so violently that my hair stuck in my mouth, "wantz dachshun. Besides, puppy rscu. Muz rscu pppy."

"El. Ay. Bee. Ar. Ay. Dee. Oh. Ar..." replied my friend as she scribbled in her moleskin. "Uh huh." I was just about to ask her why she was scribbling in her moleskin when I suddenly felt like a little lie down.

"No, not the couch!" the guests gasped. "Don't let her get on the couch!"

Then all of a sudden it was the next morning and my neck was all stiff. I was still on the couch. The guests were gone. I spat the hair out of my mouth.

***

{the passage of time passes through the passage of time}

***

About a month later, when Wilcox was at work, the doorbell rang. I answered it. My friends W stood there. Also G (as she shall be known), close friend of mine but (at this stage) more new friend of W, through me. I didn't know they saw each other when I wasn't there. (See what I mean? Secret meetings.) G is the one who bought me the massage that time.

W had a chocolate Labrador puppy wrapped in a towel.

I stared at them. They stared at me. No one moved. Or spoke. They were grinning nervously. I started crying.

Then we all hugged like girls. And squished the puppy.

In the kitchen, I got a better handle on what they were giving me. It was kind of like a puppy kit. It comprised:

two tins of puppy food
two towels from the op shop
one pink fluffy hot water bottle cover, also from the op shop
one rope toy
one hundred dollars
one puppy.

It was W's idea, but they'd gone halves. The puppy looked like this.

These situations seldom happen. What does one do? Cry, feel thankful, panic about Wilcox's reaction. "We didn't ask him," said W proudly, "because we knew he'd say no!" We took the puppy out to the backyard, which he investigated enthusiastically. He was, I saw, a fine pup — waggy-tailed, velvety soft, wet-nosed, bright-eyed. W admitted that she'd craftily got me drunk in order to squeeze my breed preferences out of me. Surely that's what the government should use when they want to get information from terrorists and such — Chardonnay. I mean, if terrorists are anything like me and my girlfriends...

W also said that I'd said, that same night, that I wanted a boy dog. (Although I can't remember this and dispute that I would say such a thing, being, insofar as I care at all, which I don't really, more of a bitch lady.) Anyway, she'd got me a boy one.

The weirdest bit was when they left. We were just there, then, together. We had a little game with the rope toy, but he seemed to prefer gnawing on me. Then he fell asleep on my lap, while I googled "puppy how look after very unprepared". I stroked his back and marveled at that velvety softness.

Wilcox wigged out a bit when he got home. He felt affronted by W and G's failure to consult him on a purchase for which he's going to be partly responsible for the next decade. Fair enough too. But then he got a load of the puppy, and the puppy looked up at Wilcox with his big hazel eyes and his velvet ears and his adorable moist little shnoz. They a little bit fell in love. Also, he tells me, I looked happy, which I hadn't for a bit, and that was good too.

After much discussion, me and Wilcox decided to call him Dudley.

A couple of days later he was sleeping on my lap again — he did a lot of that when he was really little — when I realised he was my dog, my responsibility, and that his good health and enjoyment of life was entirely up to me. It seemed very grave.

So I examined his tiny body, from his soft little paw pads to his floppy-doppy ears. It's interesting, what makes cute. Somehow this constellation of features — big eyes and ears, naked belly, softness, sleepiness, littleness — kicks our instincts to nuture into high gear. Cuteness is distinct from beauty, but just as manipulative.

"Hmm," I frowned when I got to his naughties. "This doodle looks just like a little vajayjay. I guess pups are just genitally generic when they're little." But I was consumed with disquiet. His penis was definitely weird. Small. Way too far back.

Girlish.

"His boy bits look like lady bits," I told Wilcox.

"Did I ever tell you I went to school with a guy who became a vet?" asked Wilcox. So we sent a pornographic picture of Dudley to the schoolboy vet on Facebook.

"After consulting my anatomy books," he messaged back, "I can verify your pooch is a FEMALE. There were two giveaways. One was the absence of male genitalia. The other was the presence of female genitalia." The schoolboy vet diagnosed a case of SFBS, or Stupid Fucking Breeder Syndrome. Who knows? W reckoned the breeder had the Glad Eye for her and got muddled up.

"She doesn't know if she's Arthur or Martha," I said to Wilcox or Wilcox said to me, I can't remember which.

"Yes she does," said the other. "She's Martha."

And that's how Wilcox and I came to share our lives with the amazing, sex-changing Martha Epstein McArthur. (Thanks to W and G she's half-Jewish, half-Catholic.) She is sixteen weeks old now and I am madly, unconditionally, obsessively in love with her. I don't care to hide it and bore acquaintances with the same story I just told you. I love being a dog owner and going to the park and hanging out with the other dog owners talking about dogs. I took Martha to puppy school and she was brilliant. She can sit, stay, drop, high-five, and touch my hand with her nose on request. I'm now teaching her not to pull on the lead. She waits to be told to eat before she eats. She's teething now, and most of her soft coat has been replaced with proper grown-up Labrador hair, but her ears still feel like velvet. And she still sleeps on my lap, although now only her top half fits. (She's here right now, as I type this.) Sometimes she puts her paws round my neck and hugs me. My last Google search is "dog watery foul-smelling anal sacs".

Here are some framed photos you can print out and stick on your fridge.

*heart explodes with love*

2008-06-30T22:07:00.002+10:00

I'll be off-line this week. Tasks be need doin'.

Meanwhile, literary types might be interested in Five Dials, a new pdf format magazine from Hamish Hamilton (which is a Penguin imprint). I know it sounds like one of those advertising magazine-y things but it isn't. It features Alain de Botton as a Agony Uncle and has an article by Gustave Flaubert.

Disaster Dentata, and why I am not really Red Symons

2008-06-27T14:42:00.003+10:00

Last Sunday morning, Wilcox gathered his kit and drove Geordie, in the car Geordie came in, to the house Geordie lives in. In Canberra. Which is the same house Wilcox grew up in. Geordie was going home forever. Wilcox was coming home on Thursday. Which was yesterday.

With me so far?

"Ouchy toof," I grumbled to myself on Sunday afternoon, after they'd left. I felt for the tooth but it was the tooth that wasn't there. I have a missing tooth. (I already knew that. It's been missing for some time. I didn't just go to rub my tooth and discover it was missing.) I rubbed my gums instead. I missed Geordie.

"Really, really ouchy toof," I wailed on Sunday night. And tried to rub my gums, but they were too tender to rub. And took some painkillers. This is not always a good move for me.

"shoot me, grandmammy. my leg is broke. be strong for me now, boy. old smithy can have the house! just shoot me, just kill me. wait! wait! dig two foot down under the old apple tree, just two foot mind. alrighty, now do it," I whispered, sliding in and out of delirium at about 3am Monday morning. I think it was the worst pain I've experienced in my life thus far. It wasn't so much that it was so incredibly excruciating, it was more that it was so diabolically unrelenting. You know how doctors want you to put it on a scale from one to ten? Well, it was only about a seven, really. But a lot of people have pain that's a ten for five minutes, then they slide back down to a five for a minute or two, which is a release for them. I had no release. This was just consistently, persistently seven. Or maybe even eight.

So I took some more painkillers. This is sometimes bad for me.

After that I got some sleep, and did try to pull myself together on Monday. I was just in pain a lot. But, hell, I thought, this isn't the first time I've had tooth pain or fillings falling out or indeed teeth falling out since I last went dentist six years ago! Jeez, oversensitive. Gimme anovver one doze nurofenz plus. And that was all out loud but to myself because Wilcox is gone to Canberra, remember.

Memories of Monday night and Tuesday and Tuesday night are a bit hazy jumbled together. At one point I vaguely remember being pleased that I hadn't eaten anything except alcohol and nurofen for twenty-four hours so was bound to have lost some weight, and actually it wasn't that bad, I wasn't even hungry, so maybe I could just keep it up for a month and be size ten again. The pain was completely consuming — I could think of nothing else but the side of my head. Wilcox was gone and while I could talk to him on the phone, I couldn't ring anyone else or move much or do much except think about the pain or take nurofen or sleep. At one point, crashed out in front of the telly, I realised the vision in my left eye was blurry. Either that, or... Is that my cheek I can see?

I went to the bathroom mirror. The whole side of my face was puffed up like a cat fish. I though I had a black eye, until I realised it was just the shadow that this great pus-filled ball was casting on my face. And yes, I could see my cheek out of the corner of my eye.

I felt a bit faint.

I went back to bed.

I thought, I should probably ring a dentist. I wonder if it is morning or night.

I don't even have a dentist in Melbourne. Stupid dentists. I used to have perfect teeth until I was twenty-five. All pearly white and no cavities or nothing. Then everything went downhill, quite rapidly — a filling, then another, then a couple more, then it was straight on to the root canal. I noticed in my early thirties that smoking had taken its toll — as Rob Brydon says in A Cock and Bull Story, they're not so much white anymore as Barley Meadow or Tuscan Sunset*. Consequently, I became, at that late age, at over thirty, afraid of dentists. Though to be honest, I am more afraid of the pain of them draining my wallet then the pain of them draining my gums, though I'm afraid of the pain too.

The upshot was that I ended up avoiding dentistry for a couple of years. Then, in my late twenties, I lived overseas for several years, and rationalised that I couldn't go at all, because I was overseas, and all the overseas dentists were bound to be foreigners. Then one of my molars actually fell out, which was a shock. It didn't fall out all at once, it fell out bit by bit, but the shock was the day I realised it really just wasn't there any more, in tooth form. It had become a stump.

So I got back to Sydney, where I lived back then, and went to the dentist my flatmate recommended. He worked round the corner from us, in Darlinghurst and was (and I'm sure still is) an excellent dentist, highly prissy and poofy and precise. My flatmate would sometimes bump into him at some big faggy party when they were both on Eing off their nuts, and yet the dentist could still make Tezza feel somewhat guilty about not having seen him professionally for seven-coming-up-to-eight months. He want to smile, but end up sliding his hand over his mouth. And Tezza has really attractive teeth.

My mouth was a mess, but he was kind and fixed it up for me in exchange for my first born child. (Sucked in him — turns out I'm infertile!) Unfortunately, I accidently forgot to ever see him again. And then I accidently forgot to get a dentist when I got to Melbourne. So I don't have a dentist. But I knew Wilcox has a good friend who has a dentist near us, so I texted him to ask her. Eventually, I managed to speak to the dentist's receptionist.

"I need to see the dentist. Quite urgently really. I'm in some pain."

"That's fine," she said. "The dentist will be able to see you or one of your ancestors in 3017."

On Wednesday I went to the doctor. Dr Head Girl was busy so I had to see another doctor, so as you can imagine I was immediately on the defensive. However, she was great, she gave me a script for what she said were the strongest antibiotics she could think of and said, "Get it filled out now and take right one now. If it gets any worse, go to the dental hospital. No, no! Don't do that! Go straight to casualty!" I was well pleased with her drama and the depth of the wrinkles in her concerned forehead. Doctor Head Girl is too contained to be dramatic.

My head, by this time, was the the size of a pumpkin, but even just as I got home and before I took my new pill, my mouth filled with green pus. Sorry, but it did. The thing had bust, just by itself. So I took my anti-biotic and spat green pus out on to tissues and I did immediately feel better. I've been getting better ever since. I'm not totally better — my gums are still pretty cushiony on that side of my mouth, but I'm nearly better. Wilcox came home and that made me a lot better. But I still miss Geordie.

Anyway, as my Swedish cousin would say, "And so it was." That signals the end of a story.

Meanwhile, Red Symons is not Miss Schlegel — I made that up to fool youse all. I'm feeling especially proud of not being Red Symons because I caught him being a dickwad the other night, after I saw the doctor. I went to the bottle-o, which, yes I know, I shouldn't have done on antibiotics — because what does it provide but fuel for my sorrow and tooth pain and my general despondency I was right in the thick of at the time? Oh, and make the antibiotics work less well. And the antidepressants. (It does turn the heat up on the Aunties though!) Anyway, there was a chick in there getting served and I just stood next to her and stared up at the rows of reds, like big vials of blood behind the counter, trying not to cry. Then I heard the door creak and felt a large man behind me. The girl beside me turned round and obviously started, then he said, "Don't worry, it's only me." She laughed and said hi. I assumed they vaguely knew each other.

Meanwhile, she paid for her booze. I didn't look at anyone cause I was still trying not to cry, and was aware this might have made me look grumpy which I wasn't, just sad. The guy behind the bottle-o bar (which is attached to the real pub bar) was the oldest guy they have, a very sweet old bloke who's probably worked there since the war, and probably came with the place when the latest owners bought it. I got ready to tell him what I wanted because it was my turn. But the big guy behind me just threw a fifty buck note down on the counter and pushed his bulk in front of me. The old guy looked at me, and suddenly I was really grumpy, very grumpy at people and their lazy and overdeveloped feelings of entitlement and their pushy-in-ness. I said, "Please," and let him get on with it.

Anyway, that was Red Symons.

After he left, the lovely old bloke behind the bar reached over and squeezed my arm and said, "Sorry love, you were next, I know." He found my cab sav for me. "You know that bloke, that's Red Symons, from the telly. He's a rude man. The other day he came in here and wanted money from the EFTPOS and we didn't have it yet. We don't carry money specially for EFTPOS, we have to make it first." I agreed that I knew this because I had been caught out with the same problem, although of course I was perfectly charming about it because I have good manners. "Anyway, he got stuck right into me. Totally pissed off. Well it's isn't my fault. It's not the way we do it round here."

Tosser.

Manners. I was going to post once about manners, but I've gone on too much so I'll save it for another time. Instead I'll leave you with one of my favourite bits of an interview ever. It is from an interview with Stephen Fry in The Times, during publicity of The Ode Not Travelled, which I own and have read, although, shamefully, I never finished all the exercises.

... the chief cause of bad verse, says Fry, is laziness.
“You cannot work too hard at poetry,” he says, tapping his saucer for extra emphasis. “People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don’t have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It’s not as if you’re ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted.”

He puffs contemplatively on a full-strength Marlboro, and pours more tea.

“It’s so easy to say, ‘That’ll do.’ Everyone’s in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy …”

Morally lazy?

“All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don’t stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it’s not good enough.”
The solution? Poetry, thinks Fry. “At its best poetry engages with the realities of existence. That’s why it’s so grown up. It’s the absolute opposite of this Disney idea that if you dream hard enough you can get anything - that’s so manifestly not true. Good art has a skull showing. We just need to knuckle down and produce it.”

* To remember the exact shades of Rob Brydon's teeth in A Cock and Bull Story I googled it and arrived at one of those "memorable quotes" pages, where I cacked my pant over the following exchange. Dr Slop, you'll remember, was played by Dylan Moran in a pitch-perfect, I'm-just-in-my-living-room-aren't-I-?-What-are-all-you-people-doing-? performance. This dialogue may not be funny if you haven't seen the movie. If you haven't seen the movie, STOP WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING and get to a video shop.

Dr. Slop: I can't extrude the baby's head before the mother has a chance to mash its head to dough. Captain Shandy, make a baby's head of your hands. You're to imagine these sleeves are Mrs. Shandy's... funnel.
Rob Brydon: Funnel?
Susannah: Meat curtains.
Rob Brydon: Meat curtains? Brother?
Steve Coogan: My brother knows nothing of women.

Posting less, working more

2008-06-22T20:17:00.007+10:00

... which indicates improving sanity levels. Hopefully. Looming deadline, anyway.

Thought I should mention, though, this fabulous exhibition Design for the Other 90%. There was a terrifically interesting interview with the curator, Cynthia E Smith, on Sunday Arts this week. Basically, it's self-explanatory — designers put their talents to creating low-cost solutions to the basic survival problems of very poor people in very poor countries. You can't actually go to the exhibition, of course, unless you're in the very northern hemisphere — i.e. Canada, at the moment — but the website is very smart-looking and thought-provoking.

Right now, thought, I'm watching this Schapelle Corby documentary. I hope y'all are too. It's frickin rivetting.

Sleepy bye-byes

2008-06-17T22:50:00.001+10:00

Haven't posted much lately. Think it's this Zoloft business. I have insomonia at night and somnolence during the day. It really does say "somnolence" on the pack. It struck me as a pleasing and slightly underrated word so I wikipediated it, and discovered that: "[Somnolence] is considered a lesser impairment of consciousness than stupor".

Thank god for that.

Of course, I should add that my somnolence was compounded today by an an hour and a half of massage, bought for me as a treat by an extremely remarkable, talented, hilarious, clever and stunning friend of mine. It was so cool of her, and totally compensates for not being able to have children.

Oh, and my current somnolence is further compounded by the glass of wine I'm having. Oh, and the Aunty Val. (My last full one. I'm gradually reducing my dose, because despite what you're insinuating my doctor doesn't think I'm THAT BONKERS that I need both Valium and anti-expressos. So we're winding down from the Aunties — half tomorrow, then ever downwards, until my packet runneth dry.) (My doctor, by the way, is another source of amusement between Wilcox et moi. She's his doctor too. She is tall, blonde, kindly but ever so slightly stern, clever, well-postured, attractive of waist and bottom, younger than us, extremely conscientious, and generally exuding of prettiness and tidiness and efficiency in both appearance and character. We are sure she was Head Girl, Captain of Hockey, recipient of the Maths & Science Prizes, and runner up of the English prize and still not quite sure why and occasionally cross because her carefully plotted little essays let her down of some 1950s boarding school that doesn't actually exist anymore, and has timetravelled into the twenty-first century, where she gets to treat GenX losers like us. Last time Wilcox was there he said, "Me and Miss Schlegel joke that you must think we're the screwiest couple in this practice!" and she said, "A lot of people have problems. You're just doing something about it." And then she said put her hands up beside her face and pretended to be a cuckoo clock — or at least that's what Wilcox said, but I don't really believe him, as she doesn't really have a great sense of humour. Last time I saw her — which was pretty much the day before Wilcox — I tried to lighten the mood between Kleenexes by telling her that when I was a kid I used to steal my parents sample packs of benzos like Valium and stuff — my folks both being doctors themselves. They used to keep them in a ancient, red plastic bowl on the top shelf of the pantry. I thought me and Dr Head Girl would have a laugh but she looked a bit stern and mumbled, "...even then..." and wrote something down. Secretely we think she must go home and tell her husband — who, by the size of her engagement rock, either has a double-barreled surname or works entirley in private practice — "Thank god they couldn't reproduce!")

Oh, and I've got more somnbulation from the brisk hour-long walk Geordie and I had earlier.

I don't know that I mentioned that Geordie is my parents-in-law dog, and very soon — in less than a week — he and Wilcox will be driving back to his real home. I will stay home alone. Good for work, of course. But I'll miss my Geords. The truth is he doesn't much care for me, except as a source of walks and lamb shanks. But I'll miss him. Of course, we need our own dog. We have an ethical delimna about this which I will seek your help with in a future post.

Anyway, so this massage, it was in St Kilda. The first thing we saw as we got the corner of Akland St was a guy throwing up on his sneakers. It was gross, but I kind of envied him the somnolence he was going to enjoy as soon as he got home. He would probably somulate most of the day, then go out again later for some more somulators. Then we got to the place and it was super posh. The girls were all uniformed and efficient and impertinently young, like it was WWII or something. Afterwards we wondered where young masseuses go to die. Eventually they must turn thirty, right? What happens to them then? It's like that joke comedians often make about never seeing baby pigeons.

My lovely youngly was called Christina. At the beginning of the massage she put stones on my back and talked about chakras, and during the massage she played this synth and pan pipe new age music, which I don't get. What's wrong with Bach? I would have liked to hear Glenn Gould playing the English Suites. I would have blissed out at Bach. But apart from that it was pretty much the perfect massage. She was great at the massaging bit — firm, but not painful — she didn't speak except to say what she was going to do before she did it, so I didn't jump, which I tend to when people unexpectedly touch me with fluids in private places.

Wilcox: "So was it a full body massage?"
Miss Schlegel: "No. It was just my boosies and vagina."

(Actually I stole this joke off of [note use of my new favourite idiom "off of"] said friend who bought me massage, who originally told me it was five minutes of clitoral massage, followed by a short break, then off and on again for the whole 9o minutes.)

Meanwhile, another friend of mine — Erica Seccombe — gave me three framed prints of her artwork, which is worth about a million dollars. I will direct you to more of her amazing artwork when she finally gets her website up, but here's a taster.

Erica Seccombe, Nanoplastica, originally uploaded by glasscentralcanberra/ the Kelly Gang.

Her artwork is complicated, but the short answer is she takes x-rays of novelty toys. Pretty incredible, huh?

I know I go on about my IRL friends a lot, but it's only because I'm trying to milk my "tragedy" for all it's worth and develop some competitive spirit amongst them so they keep one-upping each other with treats. Jokes! (As Wilcox says.) The truth is I keep going on about because I can't get over it.

Ok, since you insist, I will seek your help now with my ethical dilemma re a dog. I want a dog that is robust, and will go for a big walk/run with me each day like Geordie does. Wilcox wants a smallish dog that won't shed too much, or take up too much of the house. We both want a puppy. I feel ethically unable to get anything but a rescue dog. Wilcox thinks we can't save the world and we have a narrow range that's suitable for us so we should be allowed to get a dog from a breeder.

What do you think?

This:
Or this:

I'll see your Nunhead Cemetery and raise you a Yarra Bend Park

2008-06-13T14:11:00.027+10:00

Yarra Bend Park — the journey. The walk around the entire river bend takes about two and half hours or so, door to door. That's my door, obviously, not yours, so you'd have to factor in your personal location in order to calculate a more accurate estimate for your own purposes.

But why bother? When you can take a stroll with me and Geordie the Golden Retriever. I would call him the Wonder Golden Retriever except I am no longer twelve.

Okay. So we start in the suburban park opposite our house. The city skyline looks remote in the photo, but it looks closer in real life, and it's only a fifteen-minute trip from our house to Flinders St Station in central Melbourne, as long as the train puffs up as soon as you get there. Otherwise it takes four hours of watching actual grown-up people reading Harry Potter books. Still. I mean, aren't they old hat or something now.

A local park for local people.
I wish I knew what it was actually called.

"I feel very thtrongly about law and orderlineth."
[Pause. Miss Schlegel sniffs and looks around a bit. Then she returns the camera to its case.]
"Okay, okay, I did the thing you said. Now get bullthit thith thing off me!"

Firstly we climb high up the banks of the mighty Yarra River.

Then we move meander back down.

By roads not adopted, by woodlanded ways

Which takes us to more lovely parkland.

You can't see the river, but it's just to your left. This path takes us to Studley Park Boathouse, complete with some examples of Karl Popper's falsifications.

Geordie woofs a lot at the falsifications. I try to explain to him they don't actually exist, but I get in a muddle.

Studley Park Boathouse does look tempting, and they can make a presentable coffee there, but Geordie and I disdain to mingle with what I assume must but a bunch of other barren depressos who are supposed to be working from home and their neutered retrievers. Instead, we cross over the suspension bridge, and continue our walk round Yarra Bend on the other side of the river.

When the proper path finishes, we take the secret and treacherous path. This is my favourite bit. It's not really secret. But it is quite extremely treacherous. Note the sign that says Beware of Snakes. Please don't note the sign that dogs should be on leads.

"Oh pleath don't makeme wear my howwid lead, Mith Thlegel. I want to go thwimming and we-tweeve some duckth!
For I am a Golden We-tweever!"

Told you it was treacherous.

A gum tree. I wish I had photos of the gorgeous flocks of black cockatoos, eastern rosellas, red-rumped parrots, wattlebirds, willy wagtails, superb fairy wrens and kookaburras that we frequently see, but I am a crap photographer with a shitty camera and slow-motion reflexes. If you're interested in the birds of Yarra Bend, there is a complete list here. It's just a boring list.

I love birds — colourful, inquisitive, clever Australian birds. When I was writing a big chunk of my book in Tasmania late last year, I watched a family of superb fairy wrens teach their babies to fly. It was wow.

There's a little bit where you have to go up to the road. It's a very posh part of Kew, I think. If I had a gazzilion dollars, and I practically do, I'd buy this house.

And this would be my view.

And this would be mysteep path.

At the bottom of the path, we walk along the banks of the Yarra for ages.

"I wasn't like every other kid, you know, who dreams about being an astronaut, I was always more interested in what bark was made out of on a tree."

Hansel in Zoolander

Till you come to the flying fox colony. It was raining by then, so the pictures is too dark, but the colony is several thousand strong.

Then a bit more of a walk.

Under the ugly but kind of cool and spooky bridge.

Then over the pipe bridge past Fairfield Boathouse.

You can't see Fairfield Boathouse because it's behind those trees. The other day I suggested to Wilcox that we get married there. I like to throw these things at him to ensure he's not in danger of having sudden heart attacks. It seems he is.

Then we go home. I didn't take any more pictures because I got bored of taking pictures.

So. How was it for you?

Oh, and by the way, if you're thinking to yourself, okay, this "Miss Schlegel" must live around the Northcotey, Clifton Hilly, Collingwoody area of Melbourne, she — if she really is a she — is cultured enough to have read E M Forster and quote Betjeman like an ABC-type, yet sometimes sardonic in her approach. Hey, I think the real "Miss Schlegel" might be...

If you thought all that, then I tip my hat off to you, you're right.

Six word memoir

2008-06-12T20:56:00.003+10:00

Oh! I forgot! I got tagged for a six-word memoir.

Ok.

How about... no, I just deleted it. I didn't like it. Okay, now I have three alternatives:

Like you, but with more freckles.
Not totally un-super-dooper, if you squint.
Lawks-a-mussy, I forgotted to grow up!

Of course these only work if you count un-super-dooper and lawks-a-mussy as one word, which I wouldn't frankly. Anyway, you can choose the one you most relate to, and I'll be that person for you.

If I could paraphrase and rip one off from someone who said something like this in a review of a Quentin Taratino film once, I'd say:

An embarrassment of riches, without riches.

Hi ho! Hi ho! It's off to Zoloft we go!

2008-06-12T13:43:00.012+10:00

I am trying not to go on about things, you know. But it would be true to say that I am not really getting any better. Feeling very tearful and missingy of children not to be had. I try not to go on about it because in the infertility crowd you always had to be careful of the "it's worse for us" types. No matter what happened to you — no follicles, no embryos, no pregnancy — it would always, for some reason that didn't really matter in the scheme of things, be worse for them. I guess they're they types who, if they have children, think that is harder for them than it is for other parents too. These people exist.

Still, it's good to share. It does me good. Here are three things I'd like to share with you.

1. My friends actually are the best friends in the world.
Recently, my friends have:

offered their eggs to me
bought all the favourite snacks I mentioned in an earlier post (crisps and mixed lollies and etc) and left them on my doorstep
come over to my house and cooked me an amazing dinner and didn't let me do anything except sit in the kitchen and drink wine
left a complete meal, including wine and chocolate, on our doorstep
offered to borrow me their dogs
booked us in for a massage
rung me up and not got offended when I haven't rung back
listened to me cry a lot
made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

YIPPIE-AYE-AY FOR THE LADIES!!

2. My medicine cabinet has changed.
It used to be full of IVF drugs and pregnancy vitamins and hope.

(Actually there aren't any IVF drugs there cause I already threw them all out.)

Now it is full of Valium and anti-depressants and sad-nods.

Yeah, I've plunged the anti-deppresso plunge. It's better, I think, than too much wine and Valium, which was how I have been self-medicating. Oh, it worries me. It worries me that it'll dull my UNBELIEVABLY INSPIRING AND GENIUS LEVEL creativity that — I know, I know — smooths the cotton bedclothes of your nights and spring-in-your-steps your days. I heard an interview with Edna O'Brien the other day in which she said, "Only unhappy people write." (I also heard an interview with Umberto Eco in which he said he wrote The Name of the Rose because, "at 48, you either run off with a chorus girl or write a novel, and my wife expressed a preference for the latter".)

Wilcox actually wrote an article about this once. Anti-depressos and creativity I mean. He came to the conclusion that while it may be true that unhappy people write, they don't usually write when they are very unhappy. They know despair, but they do not write when they are in despair.

I take comfort from this.

3. I found some more cool street art near my place.

Yes, I know. There's one missing.

Now what would you would like to share with me?

More street art

2008-06-09T17:15:00.006+10:00

Recently, we've had a guest from Canberra staying with us.

I don't know what it is, but there's something about Melbourne that brings out the inner artist. Our friend, Geordie, has discovered a talent for street art, man. Here he is posing in front of some of his creations*.

* I made up the bit about him doing the actual painting.

Three humungous artworks

2008-06-06T21:39:00.000+10:00

ONE
The clever and cultured Badger, one of my favourite bloggers, took these incredible photos of the Tate Modern Street Art exhibition.

God I wish I lived in London. If you could bottle all the me wishing I lived in London, you could make it power a rocket that would take me all the way to the moon. Which would be slightly irritating, because I would rather the bloody bottle rocket could just drop me off as it passed London. For a start, I don't think this exhibition will be showing on the moon.

The other weird think about me wishing I lived in London is that everyone I know who lives in London seems to hate it. For e.g., one of my old school friends I've just got back in facebook with has been living in London for over a decade but now she's coming back to live in Melbourne. Whereas everyone who lives in Melbourne seems to love it. Indeed, paradoxically, I am one of those people who lives in Melbourne and thinks it's absolutely pretty much pretty bloody perfect. I moved halfway cross the country and halfway cross the world to be here. I think it genuinely is the world's most livable city. And I live in what is objectively** the best part of it.

AND, more's to the actual point of the post, Melbourne is is hardly a stranger to the spray can, and in fact may be considered the street art capital of Australia. See Geordie's work in the post below, which was just some bloody anonymous alleyway we happened across in Collingwood.

When I was younger — say 30 — it was very fashionable in my crowd to be tired of London in order to prove you were NOT tired of life. Oh, it was all New York New York then. It was all Bristol and Bangkok. It was Saigon, where I lived for two years myself.

But I was always loyal. I loved London then, and I love London now.

Badger's posts always make me love London. Specially this one.

TWO
Meanwhile, look at the first photo from the Tate again, and then consider JR, a French photographer, and his rendition of Otis from Liberia. There's something neatly symbiotic about the two artworks — as if they're pointing at each other. According to JR, his work "mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, beauty, freedom, identity and limit. He is an artivist, extract of artist and activist."

You know how most artists are full of shit? JR isn't.

Please watch the video.

OTIS - LIBERIA // LONDON
Uploaded by JR

THREE
Okay. You've all seen it. But it's humungous. And it is beautiful. But I'm poor and haven't got the moolah to pop over yet. Soon, but.

* Or near enough. See here.

** If by "objectively" you mean "subjectively". I'm going to take you some photos of where I live in the next couple of days. I'm going to prove something to you. You're going to be impressed. Prepare.

P.S. For all of youse wondering why I don't just go the fuck to London, it's VISA — you got it? Can't get a GODDAMN visa.

Which is more comforting?

2008-06-05T23:31:00.006+10:00

Wilcox's brother thinks that you cannot feel unhappy listening to The Banana Splits theme song. Yet I find The Wombles theme song far more comforting. Sure, it's more modest in its ambition, it's less showy, yet isn't it more soothing? Or not?

So here they are. Which one do you prefer? Which best nurtures your inner Grade One-year-old? Which will you hum on your death bed, to the affectionate bemusement of your clueless grandchildren?

Message to my man

2008-06-05T21:42:00.005+10:00

EDIT: I should have credited this. You can make words with Flickr letters too — here.

Tuck my tag in will you?

2008-06-04T11:17:00.004+10:00

I have tagged myself for this meme that I saw on Lorraine Crescent as I've never been tagged before and I want to feel like a proper blogger. Also it's been all doom and gloom around here lately and I thought it was time to cheer youse guys up a bit. Look at your droopy little faces.

Here it is:

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world

Smiths plain crinkle cut chips

Hot chips

Milky Bars.

Pate

Mixed lollies. But no Clinkers. Mostly milk bottles and bananas.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

Little tins of salmon

Navel oranges

Little tins of tuna

Lupini beans

Rice crackers

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Live in the UK — one house in London and one in Wales.

Give lots away to people who needed it.

Buy the best digital video camera in the world and spend my entire time making mini-documentaries about interesting things I come across with no pressure to make them interesting enough for other people to choose to view.

Buy Wilcox a plane ticket and concert ticket to see Bruce Springsteen in the country of his choice. Wilcox's choice, not Bruce's choice.

Live alone in my private cinema and collect my wee in jars.

Five jobs that I have had:

Packing show bags for the Royal Easter Show in Sydney.

Teaching English at the University of Ho Chi Minh City.

Teaching bureaucrats how to write like human beings. I did this for years.

Acting. I was in a production of The Crucible in about 1995 in Hobart and made $67 after a three week run.

Standing in the middle of Sydney Exhibition Centre with a chambray shirt knotted at the stomach smiling at people and offering them no help in navigating their way around whatever exhibition it was (I've forgotten) whatsoever.

Three of my habits:

Drawing people's attention to birds.

Going for long walks along the banks of the Yarra River and crying.

Drinking.

Five places I have lived:

Darlinghurst, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Swansea, Wales

Spreyton, Tasmania, Australia

Melbourne, Centre of the Universe

EDIT

Whoops! I totally failed to cut and paste the first question. It was:

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Living at my friend Stan's house in Chippendale in Sydney, preparing to go overseas in July. I'd just finished my Cambridge certificate in teaching English as a second language. I was going to Thailand first, then Vietnam, where I thought I'd stay a couple of months. Instead, I stayed a couple of years. It kind of feels like that was the beginning of my real life. I was just about to turn thirty.

I was obsessed with op-shopping in those days; I had the most enormous and fabulous (I thought) wardrobe. Before I left, I invited all my girlfriends round, dumped all my clothes on the living room floor, and let them fight over them. I remember sitting in an armchair as they scrambled and shreiked and tried clothes on over clothes and ignored me. I was watching them, loving them, wondering what was in store. There's a part of me that wishes I could just stand behind that armchair and whisper in my ear, It's all going to be heaps of fun, but there's a bigger part that's glad it was a surprise.

From bad to worse

2008-06-03T20:41:00.013+10:00

Infertile women will understand that it is hard to hear friends are pregnant. Particularly just after hearing you never will be. I (or we) got a card today, from a close friend and even closer colleague, who, with his partner, has been on IVF even longer than us. It's twins for them. So good for them. I am happy for them.

Then I took three Valium and drank a bottle and a half of wine and cried more tears than I thought I could possibly contain.

Grief is real and deep. Some people get addicted to grief, but I do try just to understand that there's something to be respected in grief's grip and tenacity. I don't want to get off on it. I understand that it allows for levity, although it will not let you be flip.

I hang fast to beauty. I know I'm being a wanker, but it strikes me that grief is pretty weighty with beauty. This is my favourite poem about beauty.

Assault

I

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

II

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Here are five other things that are helping me tonight.

1. You've probably all seen this before, but Phillip Scott-Johnson's Women in Art video is a perpetual comfort to me.

2. This poem.

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice

3. This video, which I shamelessly copied from Elberry, after giving him a lecture about feminism, which he didn't need, because he's one of those irritating perosnages who is younger than one, yet smarter than one.

4. Australian wildlife. Particularly with loved members of my family forming a backdrop.

5. And, more than any other, this poem.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of a wood:
They never forgot
That even dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry.
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

Infertility

2008-06-03T12:34:00.006+10:00

It strikes me that there's a few folk here from NaComLeavMo who probably wonder whyfore this blog, given that most of the NaComLeavMo are infertility blogs and this chick just keeps crapping on about "fascinating" things she's read online like I've never seen the internets or something, who the hell does she think she is "discovering" things like street art which I was pretty familiar with actually, thank you very much, not being a complete philistine, as seems to be being suggested.

Jeez, bit over-sensitive, aren't you?

It also strikes me that in my last but one post I was a little unfair in alluding to high drama and not coughing up. I can only imagine the knuckle-curling frustration and quivering uncertainty with which you have been madly checking this blog in anticipation of, in the language of Extreme Makeover, The Big Reveal.

(Although it your collective blog-checking doesn't seem to be showing up on my stat counter — weird. Must be something wrong with it.)

So, to be clear, the parent blog of this blog was an infertility blog. Wilcox and I are infertile, barren, our cupboards — both of them — are bare. For this reason, about a year ago, we went on IVF. We weren't very good at IVF. I began to have a Pavlovian response to the word "scan" and the rather corporate waiting area of my specialist's rooms — honestly — I would walk in and start crying, even if it was just to pick up a script or something.

The drama of last week or month or whatever it was — a bit of a blur was what it was — was that our (lovely) doctor told us we should stop with the IVF, cause it ain't going to happen for us, and that our chances of ever being pregnant with our own genetic material were less than 1%. (Very specific, I thought. How did you work that quite specific percentage out? Then I realised she meant we have no chance. Bar a miracle.)

This left us with several options:

I could have a mental breakdown.
We could think about the possibility of donor eggs.
I could have a mental breakdown.
We could give up on having children and focus on other stuff, on having full, creative lives, of making books our babies, of doing our bit for kids in other ways. The book I've just written and am still editing is about a kid who was a ward of the state — he's dead, but sometimes I feel so close to him I think that maybe he is a pathway that leads to a picnic ground that leads to a tap that I could turn and release the flow of my need to mother.
I could have a nervous ... oh, but jeez, you can't cry forever, right? I so refuse to be bitter. These days, seeing children makes me cry. But it never makes me angry, and I want to keep it that way. My brother says, "It just seems to unfair." But I've never thought about it that way. Life is neither fair nor unfair, is it? It just does its thing. Do you know A. D. Hope's poem "Death of a Bird"? The final lines are: "And the earth, with neither grief nor malice / Receives the tiny burden of her death". With neither grief nor malice.

When I was in the middle of IVF, I remember seeing a flock of sparrows, and thinking, If one of those sparrows is infertile, which I suppose some sparrows must be, what does it possibly matter? Perhaps that sparrow, once a year, has some instinct akin to frustration or confusion. But the flock keeps on, sparrows are still born. Sparrowkind prevails.

All of you who reach this post through NaComLeavMo and are infertile will get what I'm saying. We have that bond thing, huh? Even those who have babies after infertility get it. While I've not been a really active member of the infertility blogging circle — I was too cowardly to face other people's pregnancies — I feel we share an experience that easily fertile women do not have. Amongst its otherwise very ordinary prose, Ben Elton's book Inconceivable expresses this feeling, I think, in quite a lovely way.

... every mother and child I see begs that question, a simultaneous moment of exultation and despair. Every pregnancy is a beacon of hope and also a cruel reminder that for the present at least there is nothing inside me except the longing. And perhaps there never will be. I don’t know why it is that women feel such a deep need to create life from within themselves, to yearn for a time in which their own flesh will bring them comfort, but I know that they do. That’s the one experience that women who have children easily miss out on in life ... The intensely female grief which accompanies the fear that those children might never exist.

The problem with infertility is that the end — when it is not the delightful gift of pregnancy, after which all is forgiven — is excruciating. I quoted Tim Winton in an earlier post: "The day you finish a book is simply the day you decide to finish. For everybody's sake."

Today is not the day we've decided to finish. But it's close, and, like any endurance race, desperately sucking oxygen into cramping, spasming muscles in those few final metres is not fun, not fun at all.

My bottom bone's connected to my cunt bone...

2008-06-02T11:44:00.003+10:00

Some Engrish to entertain you...

Where the hell have you been?

2008-05-24T13:15:00.013+10:00

And by "you", I mean "me". Where the hell has me been? It's been a long time twixt posts.

Well, thanks for your concern.

As it happens, while most of you probably believe that I was born fully-formed around a month ago when this blog started, and think of me as a small and womanly but flat and two-dimensional sprite in the manner of a Cottingley fairy,* I am in truth old lady age of nearly 40, and have real-life events in the "proper" world.

So anyway, I have had one recently — a real-life event, that is — a sad one for both Wilcox and moi, and so we've just been laying low and dealing with that. Srsly, I have been going a bit potty — for example if someone who knew me had to point me out to someone who didn't know me, they'd probably say, "That's her in the corner. That's her in the spot. light. loo-zing her religion." My doctor, trying to stem the dam of tears that busted in her office, prescribed Valium.

"Isn't Valium rather old-fashioned?" I said.

"It's old, but it's not old-fashioned," she said.

"I'm pretty cut up." I said, peering over the table as she wrote the script. "Are you sure that's enough?"

"Quite enough," she said, cunningly, because she knows I have addiction issues. She knows about my addiction issues because I'd just finished telling her all about them through tears and hiccups, and because she was in part prescribing me the Valium to stop me from guzzling various cocktails of over-the-counter drugs, Heath Ledger-style. (Except not to that degree, obviously.)

Please note that it's probably best not to read the below if you are related to me.

I used to buy Valium when I lived in Wales years ago. On the street, I mean. This was a period when I took drugs. We used to call them Aunties, as in Aunty Val. Perhaps everyone calls them Auntys — I dunno. We did.

When I said I used to buy them, actually my flatmate would buy them and I would buy them off him. All through my drug taking history I was the least cool purchaser of drugs imaginable. I fumbled, I let the corners of folded notes peak out between my fingers, I pulled off the whole look-like-we're-shaking-hands-but-really-we're-swapping-money-for-drugs thing beautifully, then immediately drop the bag of white powder on the footpath between the dealer and me, usually just before the sudden, coincidental appearance of a wandering police officer. I sniffed very obviously after snorting drugs and I nodded off too conspicuously. I always forgot the street names for drugs and would ask for clarification then say, "Oh, I remember, it's COCAINE, isn't it?" I was tall and conspicuous and posh and nerdy. I once had a dealer who refused to sell to me because he was so worried my Keystone Cops routine would get him caught. True. A friend of mine had to buy the drugs for me.

So, I started this blog as an anonymous type so I could write about very personal stuff, and in talking about my drug history that's clearly exactly what I'm doing. But, as it happens, while I can do the drug stories, I am not ready to write about the aforementioned personal event that has prevented me from posting these past weeks. That I need to sit with a bit longer.

The point is, I have been away. But now I return, like your dad after a business trip, feeling a bit guilty that I shagged a colleague in the bathroom of my hotel room after a drunken company dinner, feeling a bit confused because I don't actually work with any women, but now happy to see you and maybe get outside and kick a footy around together. In other words, I hope we can resume our blogger/reader relationship and I'm sorry it took a while.

* Do you know about the Cottingley fairies? British readers will, no doubt. Australians may not. It's a good story. Please to be sitting down.

Two young cousins — Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. Elsie was sixteen and very pretty, as you can see. She was the grown-up one — little Frances was only ten. Frances said later that Elsie made the whole thing real for her. It seems like she was always a bit confused about whether what they said happened really happened.

In 1917, Elsie and Francis took Elsie's father camera to Cottingley Beck, behind the back of Elsie's house. I don't exactly know what a beck is, but it seems to involve a small waterfall and a little stream. When the photos were developed, they were of the girls playing with fairies.

Elsie's father did not believe the fairies were real. But — incredibly — everyone else did. In 1919, the spiritualists got hold of it, and turned the photos into a cause célèbre. Spirits and such were very fashionable at the time. I can't remember the name of it, but when I was about 20 I read Rebecca West's autobiography and her commitment to spiritual matters astounded me. She had an affair with H G Wells, of course. Anyway, the biggest celebrity supporter of the Elsie and Frances and the Cottingley fairies was Arthur Conan Doyle, who bought it hook, line and sinker, despite the fact that, to our eyes, the deception seems, well, elementary.

Sorry.

Incredibly, the girls insisted the fairies were real until 1981, when Frances admitted: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud — it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in — they wanted to be taken in."

Ain't it always the way.

"Living day by day, pulling stuff out of your arse."

2008-05-20T13:35:00.004+10:00

Mostly, I've left Tim Winton to other chaps. I read Cloudstreet a few thousand years ago, because everyone else was, but it didn't quite fly with the Oxbridge/Albionesque/ and-did-these-hills-in-ancient-times/Elliot/Thackery/Waugh/Greene phase I was going through at the time. About three years ago I read The Riders, and loved it — adored it even! was transfixed by it! — then forgot about it, and him, completely.

So goodness me but I was rather surprised to find myself listening to Tim Winton talk about his new novel Breath at the Anatheum Theatre in Melbourne the other night. My mate took me — got freebies, you see, she said, tapping the side of her nose with one of those pencils with a rubber on the end of it. And I loved it, I loved him, I bought his book and now I'm loving the book. He began very breathy himself. Nervous and hesitant, in fact talking about being nervous, but apparently happy to give it a crack one more time. He's been doing these author appearances for a long time, but he seems to pretty much hate them. He was badly dressed and a bit fat and of course he still has his horrible hair. He shouldn't be an attractive man, but then there's talent and charisma and all that stuff. He has that. He looked out of place, in a building.

What was interestingest was the way in which he concealed this learned lyricism behind his fish 'n chips mateyness. He'd be talking about keeping good surf breaks secret or the trauma of middle-order kids, then suddenly string together seven words that, individually, I'd probably have to look up in a dictionary, but in sequence and with context and his own economical poetry transmitted some amazing insight that made the audience gasp and mummer. He doesn't look clever, but he's very clever. Very nice too. He seemed like a very nice man.

He had some lovely insights on writing: "Living day by day, pulling stuff out your arse." Later: "I have to. I need to earn money. There is no Plan B. There has never been a Plan B." (Later, ruminating on this lack of a Plan B, he mentions his son, something about seeing his sins revisited. It made me think, someday the son will be the father's age, and he'll say, "My father saw in me the thing that drove and tormented him.")

Before he started working on Breath, he was working on another novel that he could not make work, and it turned him "in hate with the world, in anguish, getting myself in to hell's own tizz".

His favourite writers are Mark Twain and Faulkner and another I can't remember.

He says: "The day you finish a book is simply the day you decide to finish. For everybody's sake."

So, anyway, I'm reading it now. Breath, I mean. Tell you about it when I'm done.

Portrait of a schoolgirl

2008-05-17T00:19:00.005+10:00

Riverside School, Thamesmead Portrait #34 1977, originally uploaded by Mak'm.

From 1976 to 1978, George Plemper was a teacher at Riverside School in Thamesmead in London. "I was a chemistry teacher, but not a very good one." Burdened with writing so incomprehensible the kids couldn't understand his blackboard scribblings, he started taking photos of the kids instead. They had to invent the internet before the rest of us could appreciate them.

I've been trying to work out why these photographs are so arresting. Mostly, the kids aren't smiling. I wonder how he stopped them — kids get so posey around that age, always mugging for the camera. They don't look curious either, which perhaps reflects that happy era before digital cameras, before the "show me, show me, argh, delete it, no, print it out!" rigmarole that succeeds photograph-taking these days. The product of the snapping must have seemed so theoretical.

Then there's that remarkable contrast between the crispness of the lines and the soft frankness of her gaze and hair.

Plus, there's something about the way she's locked in the 70s. We all know what's in store for you, missy moo. We know what you'll be listening to when you're eighteen (Blondie — The Tide is High), how you'll bury your face into your pillow at twenty-one, crying with the sheer floaty loveliness of Lady Di's Emmanuelle wedding dress, how you'll get your hair cut when you're twenty-five (short, bouffy, tousled), how you'll always love Gary even though he can be a right bastard sometimes...

Or perhaps something else entirely.

Here's another.

Riverside School, Thamesmead, England. Portrait #10 1976, originally uploaded by Mak'm.

George Plemper:

"His name is Sam Uba. He was a Biafran refugee and therefore a relatively new arrival, stuck on this remote housing complex. There was something about the photograph of this schoolboy from a war-torn country — something shone through."

Mr Plemper's abortion of a teaching career reminds me of those Armstrong & Miller sketches about losers becoming teachers, you know, like this:

Bernice Bobs Her Hair

2008-05-13T21:14:00.010+10:00

I had a literary earworm* yesterday — a sentence that rattled around in my head like dice in a dicebox for hours and hours and hours.

"There are only three topics of conversation: you, me, and us."

It knew it was advice about flirting with boys, advanced by a young and socially successful woman to her gauche, naive cousin. I was certain it was F Scott Fitzgerald, and I was fairly sure it was in the short story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair". So I went in hunt. I don't own a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald short stories — although I am always on the lookout for one, because I particularly love the stories based on his precocious, privileged and melancholic boyhood. Instead, I looked on the internets.

I found "Bernice Bobs Her Hair". The girl with the advice is the fairylike Marjorie Harvey, "justly celebrated for having turned five cart-wheels in succession during the last pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven," and her gauche cousin in Bernice, pretty and with what Fitzgerald calls "high colour" — rosy cheeks, I've usually assumed — but boring as batshit. I located what appears to be the relevant passage:

As Bernice took down her hair she passed the evening before her in review. She had followed instructions exactly. Even when Charley Paulson cut in for the eighth time she had simulated delight and had apparently been both interested and flattered. She had not talked about the weather or Eau Claire or automobiles or her school, but had confined her conversation to me, you, and us.

It's just that it's not right, it's not my earworm. Somewhere in my memory Marjorie gives Bernice the advice; in the story, the advice is only found in Bernice's reflections. I'm so convinced that's not how it happened I keep thinking I must have read another, earlier version of the story. Or perhaps a page of the manuscript was lost in the last couple of years and I'm the only person who has noticed it. Or isn't there a school of thought that says the whole universe dissolves every second and magical goblins are constantly rebuilding it, and when you lose your keys but later they turn up somewhere you're sure you've already looked at, that's when the goblins forgot for a minute? Well maybe that happened to a paragraph in a F Scott Fitzgerald story.

But I guess it's really just that when I first read the story it was so real to me that I heard Marjorie's flirting advice, and I've never forgotten it.

And there my story ends. Having written it, I now realise it wasn't really quite interesting enough to blog about. Oh well, you've read it now.

Meanwhile, moving on, I was just wikipediating a few interesting facts about The Bill** recently, when I came across this little nugget:

In November 2006, thieves stole editing machines and master tapes from the shows studios in Merton, South West London. Posing as a worker and wearing a high-visibility jacket, one of the thieves followed a real worker into the studios and took the equipment, walked out with it and was driven off in a getaway van. This caused continuity problems for all storylines between 2007 and the end of time.

Well, let's face it, The Bill will run until the end of time.

* Next time you get a musical earworm, relief is at hand.

** Yeah, like your life's so amazing.

Only connect!

2008-05-12T10:11:00.003+10:00

This blog has now had four titles — Only connect, The prose and the passion, The beast and the monk, and The whole of her sermon. All come from the same short passage you'll find at the bottom of this page. I suppose it's a bit wanky, but it meant a lot to me for a long time, and besides I don't care about being a bit wanky, I was at a dinner party recently and was chatting with the host about David Marr's piece about Patrick White in The Monthly, and PW in general, and someone else suggested that talking about PW was a bit wanky (so you can imagine what this person might think of abbreviating Patrick White to PW as a sign of familiarity because how wanky is that??), and I just think that's complete bullshit. I hate the way you can't talk about anything more highbrow than Andrew Denton in this country without people thinking you're a total tosser.

Anyway, I've settled on The whole of her sermon now because it goes with the actual address, and seems quite apropos for a blog, which is a kind of a sermon in a really superficial, not-really-at-all way, and especially one written by a her.

Meanwhile, to add to the wankery I thought I might call my partner Wilcox, just like Miss Schlegel's boyfriend.

Me (talking about the titles of this blog): Do you know where they all come from?
Wilcox: I dunno. They come from books and shit.

Just then he was on the phone making an appointment with his doctor, who is also my doctor, so I whisper, "I'll make an appointment after you", but he just hangs up, then says to me, "Sorry, but I just thought it would confuse them. One phone call, one appointment. That's how it works."

Not posting, working

2008-05-11T13:35:00.003+10:00

I have been busy working. I will be back in a day or two. Meanwhile, get your street art fix here.

Constance Eakins

2008-05-08T11:31:00.007+10:00

Clever people are so clevery.

The Paris Review, as you all no doubt know, has a Q & A or two with some genius writer in each edition. (This quarter, it features my particular favourite gent Kazuo Ishiguro — excitement!) These interviews are lengthy and often gently earth-shattering — I read one with Joan Didion which has helped me immeasurably as I've muddled through my own piece of shit book*.

In 1958, the Paris Review interview featured the syphilitic American writer Constance Eakins, author of the Saposcat, America, The Rude Violence of the Poor, inter alia. Eakins — lover of Rita Hayworth, turner-down of the Pulitzer Prize, adventurer — was declared dead in 2001, thirty years after simply wandering off, in Italy.

Except none of that happened. Constance Eakins is a character in Nathaniel Rich's novel The Mayor's Tongue.

Except that it all kind of did happen. Nathaniel went to such great lengths to create Eakins, to make him real, that covers from his old paperbacks have started popping up around the internet. See the author's site. See the Eakins covers pool at Flikr. These two are designed by Joanna Neborsky, but there are many others. Really, really excellent others.

A writer that doesn't exist. A man's name that sounds like a girl. A spontaneous art project. A book cover that perfectly replicates the aesthetic of Penguin in the 1960s. It's everything that's rocks, isn't it? I gotta get to a bookstore.

* Sorry. Bit depressed at the moment. The editor is suggesting changes, thereby shattering the illusion that it was perfect.

Dev on Sam Newman

2008-05-08T11:04:00.003+10:00

If you feel like some straight-shootin', no holes barred, really really excellent feminist critique, Catherine Deveney rocks in The Age today.

The Bookeriest

2008-05-07T22:25:00.002+10:00

What do you reckon was the best Booker Prize winner? You can vote here. And you should, because Life of Pi is currently winning. Sweet book and everything, but it wasn't the Booker of Bookers.

I voted for The Remains of the Day, but I was torn by that and Vernon God Little.

Coupla things

2008-05-07T09:46:00.002+10:00

The beautiful settee of Bay-zhing

So this shits me. Beijing, which is the capital of China, and they're having Olympics there soon, is not pronounced Bay-zhing. Or Bay-shing. It is pronounced Bay-jing. The jing is pronounced as in jingle.

I'm right, aren't I? Cireena, if you see this, perhaps you could:

confirm, or
deny.

As far as I'm concerned, the whole issue gets to the core of the value of public broadcasting. The Australian Broadcasting Channel gets it right. Why? Well, it's not because its journalists are ever so slightly brainier than Channel Nine's journos — although they are — but because it has SCOSE. SCOSE is the the Standing Committee on Spoken English, and it has been a part of the ABC, in some form or another, since 1944 — I interviewed the woman who worked there a couple of years ago, she sounded like she'd been there since 1944, she sounded like was happily stuck in a dim but cosy basement surrounded by dusty dictionaries. She makes rulings on how to pronounce certain words, and memos go round to all staff, and the young journos all coo and think them quaint and ignore them. If I was French I'd make a film about her.

Nugget and Crow Boy

Bloggers from the Sunshine Daily News. Deadset legends. Ok, so it's all a bit yesterday now, but check out their take on the 2020 Summit. They thought Warnie should have had a say.

Sick of those damn 6.30 parties

2008-05-05T10:15:00.014+10:00

Every week, Melvyn Bragg sends me* an email to let me know how his BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time went. The last one contained this delicious coda:

PPS: Something that was too late to get into last week’s newsletter but I thought worth a mention. Last Thursday I went to one of the best parties I’ve been to. The fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the Monitor programme under Huw Wheldon. It was lovely to see people like Nancy Thomas, Ann James, David Jones, Humphrey Burton and, of course, Ken Russell. Those years in the early 60s were probably the happiest of my life in every possible way. I have deeply gone off literary parties and any sort of 6.30 parties in London but this was an exceptionally happy event, full of people whose lives have been devoted to making TV programmes about the arts that brought the arts to as many people television could reach.

After the party we piled down to a nearby restaurant where conversation was free and easy until the last hour, when Jonathan Miller held forth in his inimitably brilliant manner about materialism and his view that consciousness would never be “cracked”. There was no way it was sufficiently observable for us to understand what it was and yet he declared himself a total materialist. And so the day ended as it had begun.

Being Orstraylyan and all, I have no idea who those people are — aside from Ken Russell, who I always imagine in a comedy wig. Oh, ok, and Jonathan Miller, but only because of that Pete and Dud biopic. Despite/because of this, Melvyn's PPS fills me with envy and despair. I want to be making telly about art at the BBC in the early 60s. How depressing that I wasn't even born in the early 60s. I want to be in Melvyn's gang smoking fags outside Broadcasting House in spectacles and scratchy woolen overcoats, being serious and funny and feeling just as locked out of all goings on in Carnaby Street as the citizens of Reading (see Gervais below), but not caring because we know we are the sparks of a different and far more thrilling cultural explosion, firing away in in folders and cameras and fountain pens.

It's the same London A S Byatt's Fredrika came to live in, in the 60s, in one of those books... um... Babel Tower. She's escaped her awful marriage and rents a tiny basement flat with her son and lands (oh so easily) a job hosting an arts show on TV. That was in the olden days, when youthful, alarmingly clever but not-really-that-attractive girls could get jobs in broadcasting, in the days before THE BABY BOOMERS TOOK OVER THE WORLD and no one could get any jobs at all any more, except hotties. Meanwhile, Fredrika's friend Alexander the playwrite is part of group that's deciding whether the government should abolish grammar in schools. Which is frustrating, because in the novel they're all wondering what the consequences might be, and we all no da end of dat stry, hay?

I want to live in that world and don't care that it's so seductively nostalgic mostly because it's basically imaginary.

But what's a "6.30 party", I wonder. Anyone?

I got the same overwhelming feeling of urgent envy when I saw this picture of Daphne du Maurier the other day. I don't know why. She hated being a mum, apparently, and had to get rid of those kids to write anything.

Look at that shard of face under Daphne's arm. The daughter. Already obscured by the shadow of a glamourous mother who looks desperate to escape.

*DAMN. THIS PHOTO SEEMS TO HAVE EVAPORATED. I'M SEARCHING THE INTERWEBS HIGH AND LOW TO REINSTATE IT.*

* I think other people get it to, so, you know, whatever.

Things are really taking off around here

2008-05-04T21:53:00.011+10:00

Just got my first report card. (If it's too small, click on it for a larger view.)

I'd just like to thank my friends, family and agent for making this blog such a huge success. Big smooches! Thank you all! You make me great!

*points to and grins spastically at a couple of random people in audience before being led away from the podium by some bemused So You Think You Can Dance runner up*

Kurt Vonnegut's eight basics of creative writing

2008-05-04T20:53:00.004+10:00

I've just heard from one of the main characters in the fictionalised non-fiction book I've just written. She's just read the draft, and she's got some iss-yous. Happy too, but I think that's just politeness. I'm not sure what her iss-yous are yet, but I feel rotten — deflated, disappointed, disappointing. I have to tell the publisher.

For that reason, my favourite of Vonnegut's basics is number seven. Because I wasn't trying to fuck the world. I just want to make the dead person the whole story is about happy.

So here they are. From the preface to Vonnegut’s short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to number six. I wonder if it's too late to kill her off earlier in the piece. Say in the foreword. Nothing violent or nothing, just a disease or something, jeez, that seems harmless enough.

Hey, snaps for me on number five. I did in fact start close to the end. Woo-hoo!

I can hardly vait vor dis one

2008-04-28T09:09:00.009+10:00

From an interview with Ricky Gervais in the The Observer. He's talking about his and Stephen Merchant's new telly series. The journalist was expecting the hysterical giggler from all those DVD extras we know and love, and instead found this calm, brainy guy.

The working title, says this oddly serious Ricky (a change I like but which I find strangely disconcerting nonetheless), the working title is The Men from the Pru. It’s about a group of twentysomethings working in an insurance company in the early Seventies. In Reading. This is where Gervais was born, in 1961. ‘It’s a period piece for a couple of reasons,’ he says. ‘We wanted to show, for instance, that the sexual revolution was only really going on in Carnaby Street. Not Swindon. Not Reading. It is, essentially, about blue-collar people getting white-collar jobs.’ And it is about people who would live and die in one town. ‘Which was one of the big differences between then and now,’ he says. ‘So much, we forget, was door to door. Ten pence for a duster, the man from the pools, the insurance man; people saving a penny a time for their funeral. Tens of thousands of people knocking on doors. Also, you would get married at 18 and still live with your mum. And then, at that time, some would watch the telly, have their eyes opened to different countries. There’s a line in it where we have a character being asked, “What do you want to go abroad for, there are parts of Reading you haven’t seen?”, so it’s a bit like that.’

When I was a kid, in the early 70s, we still got orange juice on the doorstep.

I love that idea too, of the place the social revolutions forgot. Which was just about everywhere, really, except Haight-Ashbury and Carnaby Street, and who was there? No one we know. As for me, I was in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the Southern Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, as I styled it in those days. The sexual revolution didn't seem to hit our house in any way that impacted on me, but mum did turn in to a bit of a hippy, doing pottery classes & growing native plants & etc.

The interview's terrific. Read it all, if Ricky's your thing, which he is.

Intricate paper cut outs

2008-04-26T23:18:00.003+10:00

They're so delectable.

WIGMDVC* I'm going to make a mini-docu about little things. My favourite little things are little cut out things. For example:

Peter Callesen's amazing A4 pop-ups. See —>

Hannah Maybank's beautiful silhouettes. (This opens a pdf file.)

Hélène Delprat's delicate cut-outs. See below.

Stick Meon's super cut sticky wall cut outs.

& etc

* When I Get My Digital Video Camera

It makes my heart sing

2008-04-26T23:06:00.008+10:00

According to Salon, feminists can be funny chicks and totally sexy, even if they are only at the very upper end of averagely attractive!

Here's a bit from the Amy Poehler interview:

Poehler, a self-proclaimed feminist ("Absolutely I am!" she declared without hesitation when I asked her), once told Bust magazine, "I get worried for young girls sometimes; I want them to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled." She has also delivered some of "Saturday Night Live's" most female-friendly material, like her Weekend Update routine exhorting Hollywood's young stars to stop removing all their pubic hair. ("Ladies, what's up with all the deforestation going on down there? You need hair down there! ... There was a time when a lady garden was as big as a slice of New York pizza!")

I have a woman's crush on her.

Vanity Fair on the same topic, but which I mean comediennes in general and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in particular. You'll remember it was in Vanity Fair that Christopher Hitchens had his "Why Women Aren't Funny" spac attack.

How excellent is this?

2008-04-26T17:40:00.007+10:00

The problem with my old blog was that I should have guarded my anonymity far more jealously. I shouldn't have told everyone I had ever met where to find it, then crapped on quite so pathetically and fulsomely about my general, you know, emotions. Who wants to hear deeply personal stuff about biological clocks, right, from someone you must then encounter at work, or at a mutual friend's for dinner? I overshared. Suddenly everyone knew a damn sight more about my life than I did about theirs. It got awkward, with some people. Or maybe it was just me that didn't feel comfortable.

But I like it here already. I feel very safe. Mostly because I know absolutely no one is reading this at all.

But less of all this later.

In art news, I though y'all might like to see the portrait I think should win the BP Portrait Award finalists. That's Amanda Smith at Vincent Avenue by Simon Davis to below. I know nothing of Simon Davis except he's 39 and from Birmingham and he's a comic book artist.

Amanda Smith is his friend. Look at her hands. Aren't they beautiful?

You can see the other finalists here and here.