My favourite lovesong, in three vignettes.

"your lips, my lips
your bones, my bones,
my heart, your heart,"

- Broken Records, 'Wolves'

blreerrrghexhausted.

I want my hour back.

My brain KNOWS full well it's not even 7 am yet, and no amount of steaming black Lady Gray tea is going to change that.

This day was a slanting misfire

Selfish infatuation -
All my lovers live on pages
It keeps me lonely, reading

-Sundowner, 'Traffic Haze'

Finally got my paws on this solid acoustic companion, Sundowner's Four One Five Two. Which is to say, The Lawrence Arms explaining their ethos and gifting haggard bleary-eyed truths to a Texan retirement home through interpretive song.

Bottoms up to you, Chris McCaughan, you rockstar!

Damascus' answer to Starbucks? Inhouse Coffee.

While competing with Starbucks for turf must be hard, competing with the concept of Starbucks in a spectator city, aware of the Goliaths of globalism but sealed tight to their havoc, seems to me the easiest venture imaginable.

Capitalism as wish fulfilment.

Me and the blog have been sitting across a fold-out table balancing china on our knees and taking quaint sips of tea, waiting and staring, judging how best to smooth out the wrinkles in time and tablecloth that have scrambled our easy co-existence.

I think I will fill in the Almost-One-Year in fragments and vignettes and let the rest of the story stay unearthed.

Another hurtling week smacking into a Saturday morning wall of sleep and coddling. I have been back in Edinburgh for almost a year - wide-netted sentences like this make me uncomfortable - and it has been hard to slow down enough to do anything introspective.

The reason the blog is back is that I do have to force my hand, and find that space again that likes to flirt with words and make sorceries out of simple ideas.

Here it all stands. Just like I left it.

The blog is back!

Believe it.

The more a gap opens up between myself and my past academic hijinks, the more I see how they relate to troo life. The weird thing is that what I love about philosophy is just how it doesn't tie in with life. I like the airy bits, the wild, uncontrollable connect-a-move of it, the exploits that give the finger to empirical verification and scupper benchmarks and prance around like intellectual trannies, jolly and outrageous. But for some reason, there are these two mini-case-studies that I've been getting massive nerd-milage out of in the dark chambers of my brain....

(Keys) Does anyone else get really nostalgic about the contents of their keychains? In particular, I find it pathetically comforting to carry around keys to my pseudo-domicilic places in other countries. And I think there's a solid reason for that. Keys are a dense memento, a piece of certitude, a chunk that evokes an uncanny mnemonic, recalling a way of being frisky with the world at hand, at point-blank short range, even though sometimes the extent of the world can seem so far removed, like a logic-laundromat of pressed and bleached concepts.

(Where in the world is Matt?) Correct me if this is not what those idiotic Youtube videos are called. But anyway, idea is, this feller goes to a bunch of famous tourist attractions worldwide and does a dorky dance in front of them. The cool thing about that is, again, the way it reaches into these fetishised scenes, these living postcards, and says, watch this, look how I am inside this landscape, and how I engage with it. And having so many different versions of the same dance scenario only strengthens that sense, because it itemises these sightseeing venues like they're a sequence on the back of a deck of playing cards, but at the same time it totally defies that alienation, doing its very hardest to fuck with the eerie stillness of the picture perfect, and to pretty much 'dance it back down to size'.

I am getting dirty overtures of 'please leave' from this cafe's staff. I mean, I didn't need the salt and pepper shakers or the lighting or the menu, but I don't think it would have hurt to just leave my table alone for a bit longer. Lame, but yeah, point taken.

A List of Things I Will Miss About Dubai, Heavily Biased By Things In My Photo Library.

1. My homeslice, Sumbuddy.

2. My karate club.

3. The symphony of (mostly nice) smells that accompany a run around the park.

4. My dodgy Mazda, short two of its door handles. And recently sporting a new injury.

5. The coffee at Caribou, Sassi Lassi juice at Tonic, dim sum buffet massacres on Saturday afternoon, Muffin Break muffins...

6. My family, obviously.

7. The delusional cat that fell from the fourth storey (pictured).

8. Fanta Light.

9. Glorious, glorious sleep.

10. My pride'n'joy bookshelf.

I love rooibos tea. It tastes amazing even when you've forgotten you made a cup and it's that weird cold-ish temperature between hot and ice cold.

Okay, as you were...

A very close friend of mine is hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro this July.

She's going as part of a charity initiative. The agreed-upon recipient of the donations is the Mbagathi District Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. As a result of my friend and her team's pledges, the hospital will be able to build four paediatric consultation rooms and a new waiting bay to help treat sick kids.

All of this will happen through a totally unaffiliated charity group called PLAN, who look out for the needs of underprivileged children.

To raise her portion of the funds, my friend put together a pretty damn sweet project. She's launched an online store of sorts, where she will be selling some (gorgeous) scenic photographs that she's taken over the years. She's quite a talented photographer and the photos aren't expensive at all, and ALL profits will go towards the charity sum rather than towards her own travel expenses.

So you know, do something good. We all know it's fun to buy stuff online. This one should be guilt-free, as far as internet purchases go.



Snaps for Good



And I promise you my buddy is one of the coolest people ever, so if you're confused or want to work out your options or if you haven't got the money to give but want to say, 'hey, that actually kind of rocks that you're doing this!' drop her a line. Her email address is on the website.

Please feel free to join the facebook group too!

Blogger was being Arabic before. I'm pleased it's back to a Latin tongue.

McSweeney's has proven itself to me as a viable wellspring of awesome short stories. Now they need to make the subscription not cost two arms, three legs, and a couple vertebra. No worries for now though, as I have another three issues to get my fix from after I finish the current one (being, # 14). I think McSweeney's would make the ideal reading choice for someone who was into short fiction but didn't have a huge backlog of book purchases to get through. Busy people who don't have time to go book shopping but nevertheless love to read fiction, things like this. It's a big bonus, too, that the magazine / book / freak-format publication arrives in the mail looking unpredictable and pretty as you like, if you take the most orthodox route to acquiring the issues, at least.

Um, my search for a discman has still not unearthed anything good. I refuse to go back to double A batteries, you know? That is so 1995.

Also, there's a fruit called kiwiberry. Do you know it? I've recently become obsessed. The thing looks like a plump gooseberry, about the size of a ping-pong ball, a little smaller, and slightly oblong. It's got a smooth, shiny outer skin with faint latitudinal markings, again, like a gooseberry, and a little tufty bottom. But if you bite it in half, it looks precisely like a miniature kiwi fruit! And it tastes like one too, with the exception that it's not nearly as tart. It tastes like sweet, soft, over-ripe kiwi. Amazing! I googled this new berry, worried, I have to admit, that I was eating some kind of deliberate genetic mutant born of sinister horticultural tinkerings. But I couldn't find much literature on it. The website of the producer whose name was on the punnet I bought at the supermarket, NZKiwiBerry, made it sound like natural flora, but never explicitly denied that it was an evil GMO. Not that I have much of a problem with GMOs. I mean, I support all sorts of genetically modified individuals, most of them musicians. But like any honest citizen, I like to know when I'm being fed from the loins of Beelzebub...

I was in Lebanon for five / six days, recently. I had a great time, but was stranded amongst rural vistas and flowering plains. Such circumstances are usually awful, but this time was good. Mainly I learned that I have a large and expanding cousin population. We should just declare independence, like Kosovo.

Here's a photo.

It's been exciting to realise that I still get big kicks out of reading philosophy books, even though I've walked away from the intellectual explosion as pieces of analysis fluttered down, aflame, all around me.

So to speak.

I just finished Raymond Geuss's Idea of A Critical Theory, which was a pretty okay introduction to critical theory except I'm now unsure whether I've just lived my whole life misinformed about what critical theory actually is or whether Geuss tackled a very niche form of the critical theoretic field. If the former is what's up, then it wasn't just pretty okay, it was excellent. If the latter is the case, then it was kinda bollocks. 'Pretty okay' is an average, a pending review, to be reassessed after some therapeutic wikiing.

And I'm starting Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere, which, too, promises to be long, painful, and strangely gratifying on a rather masochistic level.

I do have fiction to read. Lots of glorious fiction. I'm just stocking up on intellectual rigour manna before I begin to hit that.

The Update Post We All Deserve

1) Let me begin with a small update from the world of essential gadgetry. After crankily accosting several electronics megastore clerks at several different electronics megastores, I have come to the genuinely depressing conclusion that one cannot buy a discman any more unless one fancies strutting around carrying a clunky, antiquated, cheap-as-a-two-dollar-ho plastic mammoth with the dimensions of a wheel of gouda. I am so sad. I need a new discman! My pure, sleek, pearly one got stolen out of my luggage, for hevvinsakes. I don't know what to do with my CD collection anymore. I hate you, stoopid free market economy. Hate you you suck.

2) They are beating up emos in Mexico. But in Mexico 'emo' rhymes more with 'demo' than 'Nemo'. Los punks and los rockabilies and ----lo!---- even los hare krishnas are in on it. I'd tell you more but je ne suis habla espanol.

3) The job I mentioned is some things, and isn't some things.

It isn't:-
* In Melbourne.
* Selling out, no matter what you think.
* A river-dredger gig on the Ganges.
* As cool as being a rockstar.
* Less cool than being a flippant hobo.

It is:-
* In Edinburgh.
* Going to be lovely, please disregard previous naive dumping on said city.
* Not going to benefit from the existence of copious social contacts -- I'll be quite the lone cowgirl...? ...Camel jockey? ....Landlocked pirate?
* The result of an accumulated total of about five hours of interview time. After it was over I felt like my brain'd been filleted and laid out tartare style in the middle of the conference table, garnished with origami lilies made out of copies of my CV.
* A dream job as far as getting a foot in the gilded entryway to Donald Trump-like business chops and industry shaman status is concerned.
* Except it could be that or it could be far less, depending on how hard I work.

And to be clear, I intend to work like a fucking MULE. I am so bored of being a woman of leisure, my god! I am wide-eyed and appreciative like what for being given a chance at all, let alone a good start. I will be a machine at this job, a machine! A mechanical mule! Out of my way, peasant.

hangman, hangman, slack your line

This mutant pack of gum and I are waging a war for supremacy. I thought I'd won -- after finding that three pellets in a row were minty and not in the least fruity, despite false package advertising to the contrary -- I was rewarded by two fruity pieces. But then, the latest piece was minty again.

My sanity and gumophilia are on the line here. Somebody tell me what's going on!

backwards through the megaphone

Guess who somehow managed to land a sweet, sweet, sweeeet job?

No, come on, go ahead, guess!

Excuse me while I go bounce off of a few walls.

Dunno where else to cry about this: I just got out of a taxi and left my suitcase full o' clothes in the trunk. I'm just the most serious, no-nonsense, pile of shitass douchebaggery known to the civilised world. And now I will have to showcase this by dressing in my hobo wardrobe, possibly for ever and ever and ever.

I RITE FINGS WHO IZ DEPRESING (sadly, that's not the title of the poem.)

***

Exfoliated from the beginnings of time
your scraps float round you, an aura,
a telephone cord for a halo.

You were not born to end up drowned.

But here,
submerged among your miscellany
muscles thicken, amber bunches
trap not spirit nor oxygen
but
a microcosm of barbaric looters,
plunderers, savages,
teeming with insight.

The stinging musk of death is the last glamour
left over
from the exhausted industry of animation.
Tears hang on the chandelier.
Ripe smells insult a stagnant frame,
organic and woody.

Your house of matchsticks stood behind its red door,
playing matador to a hurricane.

What frightful grotesqueries, these; white
hatchback mushrooms half swallowed by rivers with
tarmac banks
while ritual neon markings
cast the deepest rushing waters
silver and gold;

The rubbish of life caught on branches,
skewered soggy, deflated by dew;

The saddest thing by far is open eyes:
little jewels more and more
tarnished and oxidized,
dogged by a bully current, when they've
been
sightless quite a while already.
They go from brown and black and green to grey

and if they were grey before
now they are bruised - not like shins and biceps,
but like fruit falling unattended,
far from salvaging palms.

....blogroll update!!

I am the one who haunts your dreams of mountains sunk below the sea (this is the end)

Review: St. Jerome's Laneway Festival 2008 - Melbourne

A devilishly good idea: herd top musicians of alternative persuasions into the alleyways of one of the world's most unbeatably hip cities, and have them perform for a menagerie of scenesters whose hairdos and body jewellery and faux-fossil retro garments and baroque make-up you couldn't ... well.... make up.

And boasting a line up to make even the most deadpan pretentious music snob a *little* inwardly giddy, St. Jerome's had my nerd-nerves sizzling with anticipation.

....but.


I hate to even have to say 'but'. There are a million ways to qualify the 'but' to make it sting a little less, most plausibly, by making an appeal to my inherent nature... maybe I'm just not a festival person. I've never done well at fairs or expos, though I do have a track-record of joviality when it comes to markets and concerts, so the jury's out. But I digress.

Man, I don't know. All the ingredients, arrayed on the chopping board, ready to be tossed into the melting pot, were delectable. Just look at this (partial) list of artists....!!

Feist, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Gotye, The Presets, The Panics, The Basics, The Devastations, Broken Social Scene, Manchester Orchestra, Okkervil River, Dan Deacon, Bridezilla, The Holidays, The Vasco Era, The Brunettes, Little Red, Stars

.... and make no mistake, the idea behind the venue, putting three stages in laneways and one on a blocked off main road, was glorious. The live shows were surrounded by an organic gallery of some of the coolest street art I've ever seen, and everything was nice and cosy.

Well, thing is, too cosy. Vomit-bags look cute too until you fill them with puke.

There wasn't puke at the festival, as far as I know, but there were people. Thousands of bodies. Masses of humanity. Squished into alleyways. This wasn't a problem of major proportions for the first several hours of the concert, but by about Feist's 7pm set, I was starting to pray hard for an airlift. And actually, even before Feist, when the area in front of the main stage was still fairly roomy, the stage I was anticipating like what, the Caledonian Lane Stage, was a bad situation. There was a small span of sweetness in the lane, fiercely defended, but otherwise you were sandwiched too far from the stage to hear or see, or you managed to trickle through to the very front of the audience, where you marvelled at how NOT populous shit was, rubbing your hands together like the thief at the beginning of Aladdin or the squirrel from Ice Age, only to realise three seconds later that this was because the first ten metres from the stage spelled sudden death for your inner ear hairs. I've been to tons of rock shows, and am in the habit of crudely flipping off my precious hearing by standing in front of amps when in need of a good vantage point, and I swear, I could've cried at the aural assault.

So yeah - definitely an apology to Manchester Orchestra. I didn't turn my back on you and the mythical front row railing thirty seconds into your first song because of my distaste for your music, but because I wasn't yet ready to don hearing aids for the remainder of my life.

Blah blah blah logistics... what about the rock n roll?! That's the rubbish part. I can't even talk about the music because I didn't catch much, being either in geologically slow transit between stages or too far to hear or see for most of the acts' sets. Again, maybe I'm just not a festival person.

Of those musicians I did get a chance to appreciate, I really enjoyed the barbershop-trio-esque / Police / Exit / Mustard Plug / other wholesome 60s bands with third-wave ska foresight / etcetera stylings of Melbourne's The Basics... their songs 'With This Ship' and 'Hold On' were so damn catchy and the drummer / vocalist has a powerful and crystal clear voice.... a Harman or Bose ad of a voice.

Also fantastic were The Brunettes of New Zealand, who I caught again at a separate show two nights later, and left feeling like the festival-shaped void in my sad, disenchanted heart had been filled by something worthy and provident. 'Her Hairagami Set' is THAT sort of song: a Samson-song that could carry not just an EP but an entire full-length on its back unaided (luckily, with 'Structure & Cosmetics' it doesn't need to), a song to deliver newborns to, and to play at funerals (absurdity of the lyrics aside), the rightful heir song to Frou Frou's 'Let Go' and before that, Emiliana Torrini's 'To Be Free', and a song that suddenly finds an impossible burst of excellence within itself when you thought it couldn't possibly get any better (around three minutes in). The Brunettes are lovely. More sexual tension coursing between the two singers than could be mustered by the X-Files' will-they-won't-they royalty, incidentally, which, you know, is prettttty hawt. Plus a song about Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen?! The world does not deserve you, Brunettes!


Broken Social Scene and Okkervil River looked like they'd played tight sets when I caught the tail ends of their shows, and Still Flyin' get seventeen thumbs up for audience involvement, light-heartedness, and strategic use of a plush monkey and a boogieboard.

I wasn't very impressed by the dampened version of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! I saw at the festival - I'll stick to my cd, thanks - and Melbourne darlings The Vasco Era and Little Red were too Jet-esque man-rock and quirky britpop for me, respectively. Just a matter of taste.

To be fair, people who were at the festival for the DJ sets probably experienced something totally different, because from what I witnessed, those two areas seemed less congested and very laid back, with people sitting around on plastic beer crates sipping something cold. My review is really only of the rock component.

But, achh. I don't want to end on a sour note. So here are some photos of gaiety!

Two-thirds of The Basics - Lonsdale Street Stage

People milling about in the laneway between sets.

Banter between The Brunettes' Heather and J.B. - Caledonian Lane Stage

These are hands down the most savvy, self-aware, tuned-in things ever produced by Arabic media.

And they are brutally hilarious.

smack that

oops, i did it again

candy shop

don't cha

hung up

and my personal favourite....

hips don't lie

Book Review Round-up.

1. George R.R. Martin - A Feast For Crows. Mr. Martin is a literary rockstar. Not like that douche from Nickelback, but more like John Lennon. How can anyone write a 600 page fat fantasy epic without actually saying a thing? Baffling, no? What about a 600 page fat fantasy epic keeping mum on any actual plot progression while reading like pure, honeysuckle poetry from front cover to back? Not so baffling, actually. Science has a good explanation. It's called the GRRM phenomenon. As fantasy buffs are aware, this book is the misguided result of the brutal surgical separation of one (probably straight-aces) book into two, due to publishing constraints, and the unease shows. Nothing builds, and very little resolves. Still, as a piece of back-story and world-building, AFFC cannot be faulted at all, and indeed makes rollicking reading, juicier thanks to the knowledge that most of the really fun characters get their moment in the wan, portentous sun in the next instalment.

2. Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves. Ohhhh. You did not just go and write the book I hoped this would be even as I pre-emptively dismissed it as another over-ambitious bit of experimentation! My God, man. You could power a small nation with the creative energy that went into this novel / opus / piece of scripture / end of the world. I loved this. It shook me, sending waves of slow-burning, sad fire through every last nerve fibre in my chest. I wish I'd thought to collect all the ways I've described this book to people, but the one liner that I think best captures the book's essence went something like: "a cocktail of Thomas Pynchon's literary wankery, a Walter Benjaminian cultural theory paper, and the Blair Witch Project." I'd maybe venture to add to that a light sprinkling of The Ring. Presented in a way that'll give you new respect for footnotes even as you itch to sign up for Greenpeace, cringing at all the blank pages, House of Leaves is on so many levels a trip, and on so many levels multi-levelled. A fan-out of secondary sources interpretive dancing around a crazy topic, a black hole of a topic, the story progresses in tame chronological fashion through a fabled home-video from the mid-nineties even as it irreparably fucks with the concepts of space, time, and layout. The central topic? A house. A house that'll quake you, scarier than any bogeyman, and yet guileless, mere projection, mere fascination, mere boredom. If you're imagining your cute villa, or dorm room, or apartment, you've got the wrong idea. Rather, imagine what you would do if confronted with the anomalies of Special Relativity on your way to pour a glass of apple juice, or if you didn't have to peer all that distance to the night sky to contemplate infinite nothingness. There are some things you just should leave be -- how horrific is it when those things call to you, seductive, dementing your every moment? Not a book to be missed.

3. Andrew Wilson and Neil Williamson (eds) - Nova Scotia: An anthology of Scottish speculative fiction. I wish I remembered this collection better. *goes upstairs to get the book. Okay...* Generally speaking, I am agreed that a person should take away some appreciation for a culture that graciously hosts her for a protracted period of time. It helps a lot, for someone lazy and impatient like me, if that appreciation can be condensed into one manageable shot while still being a broad and worthy illustration, and as a matter of personal preference, a contemporary one too. As far as meeting those specs, Nova Scotia rocked it, man. This bundle of bests and brightests features offerings by everyone heating it up in the indie-lit SF Scottish Invasion. Bests: In 'The Last Shift', Hal Duncan turns a touch of twisted world-building and a smattering of Rip Van Winklesque imaginings into a solidly bizarre (if bizarrely solid) offering. And as usual, he does it with more panache than any one writer really deserves to wield. Finnish import to Edinburgh Hannu Rajaniemi shows he's worthy of all the local buzz with 'Deus ex Homine', a macho story that addresses family, love, and stability while exploring new terrains of cracked-out emotional and mental destitution, terrains that sparkle chrome rather than powder white. Jack Deighton and Andrew Ferguson also left lasting impressions, the former with 'Dust', an apocalyptic story resonant with the melancholia of dying calls emanating from creatures large and beached, and the latter with 'Sophie and the Sacred Fluids', a sly, mischievous tale reeking of a loudly confident mastery of the craft and.... er.... bodily excretions. Worst: The story written in Scots (apparently, like, a whole language, and not just a few slang phrases) is too much to process for someone who can't understand the dialect, and I didn't 'get' either of Andrew Wilson's or Michael Colby's stories -- likely because of my own aforementioned laziness and impatience. On the whole, a sizzling collection, a bit Sci-Fi heavy for me, but definitely a glowing reflection of the vital statistics of the SF scene in Scotland.


....music reviews to be posted when my brain regroups.

A sentimental little con.

So, Melbourne.

See, it's not so much about Melbourne as it is about change. I mean, I'm a Sagittarius, I mean yeah I sort of do have the rump of a stallion and an eye for a well-placed shaft (HAHAHAH) and as much as I don't believe in horoscopes, sometimes things that are a crock of shite are truer than things that make sense.

But actually, scratch all that. I'm being cheeky because I've still got Johnny Truant on the brain, poltergeisting in my narrative voice.

So, Melbourne.

The only thing I have to say about that is, I need my future to be expansive, like an open field, and not narrow, like a tunnel laid with rusted tracks. Yes - the open field is piles and piles of danger. You have exposure to the elements, and predators, and worrisome new Australian cereal addictions, and worrisome new Australian music scene disillusionment. It could go like Edinburgh. It could go worse, by far, especially if no one wants to hire my has-been ass whose fifteen minutes of fame were lamely in an academic setting, much as she'd have wished she could have been leaping about on a rickety stage, droplets of beer being flung at her enormous dream-whip hair by the one dude in the front row headbanging, brewski in hand.

It is warm and cosy in this tunnel yeah, but you know, is that a train I hear in the distance? I'd just really rather not.

I wish I could say, next, that I had a job lined up, even if it involved an apron and a lot of one on one time with a milk steamer. But I don't. I've got a supportive pair of genetic profiles who've undertaken curiously effective rearing schemata, and a sinusoidally fluctuating reservoir of ambition.

And I mean, this is my land of opportunity, by elimination. Believe me, wherever you're living -- I tried to go there. Not because Melbourne is not awesome. It really, really, fucking wholly, and woahly, and truly, is. But because it is far. Far enough that I know part of me has been walking around with a torch in my hand for the past month or so, looking to lay waste to structures that facilitate rewind, return, regret.

So yes, this is mildly destructive. And I know it isn't sound. Who leaves a town whose pavements, wheel rims, and Razr phones are lined with gold? Who? Fuckin' nobody sane.

But the fit isn't right. In fact, the fit's been chafing and making fistulas and a little bit festering. I'm not wonderful right now. I'm aimless and tired, and every time I leave my neighbourhood my eyes hurt from all the things I haven't bothered to discover because I've been busy acting like a pre-operative marsupial plus additional perseverative www obsessions. Dubai is different now. Maybe it's better. Certainly cosmopolitan, at least on the surface. Everyone looks alternative. There are people who speak like me, walk like me, their dusty Vans shredding denim hems, and think like me, even. Nobody bothers to stare anymore; the novelty of subculture or a-fashionism is gone, replaced by the ooooh, sparkler excitement of This City That City miniverses, and This Project That Concept megamalls, and This Culture That Trend milestones.

I think this city is amazing. AMAZING. A case study in a million different things, and a culture -- think petri dishes, not heritages -- very much worth examining.

But it's not my scene. Not without the padding of my best friends. Without them, this city makes me sedate, effecting a lobotomy in comfort and privilege.

There's something to be said for being roused into action by your own survival instincts.

Maybe that's what this is about; giving myself a reason to be vital again, to matter again, and not through my contributions to blogger, facebook, or flickr, either. That's why I was so romanced by Beirut in November. It reminded me there are dances other than those tangos of tapping fingertips I've become so accustomed to. It drew me out of the fog of accomplishment that a good blog post will precipitate, or a warm, friendly email, or the magnificent hope an earnest job application or short story submission can bring.

Fuck, life's more than that. Even if it's less, you know? Even if it's so much more mundane.

The truth is, I need to sift through the mundane to strike gold. There is no loophole in the backalleys of the internet. There is no path to success encoded in heartfelt lyrics bellowed into the steering wheel on an empty stretch of road. There's nowhere, and nobody, and nothing. And although absence and emptiness and nullification are topics that matter to me, they exact a price. To plumb these voids, you need creative nutrition, you need enaction. Otherwise the dull throb of absence eats you before you open your mouth on the podium to call its name, seduce it with song.

I need to feel alive before I can do the absurd.

And it's not only about art. It's about obligation and responsibility. I had a dream this afternoon, while I was napping through the appointed hour for my karate class (I wasn't lying about being a slug.) I was carrying my little brother around -- he was about seven, and he was faking being dead. I passed him through windows and hauled him up stairs and dropped him onto lawns and wound him through landscaped mazes. At first I think he was trying to punk me, about being dead, but eventually we were both in on it, and we were trying to fool others.

But I think the real joke was on me; in reality I'm the dead weight, and it's my family who have been carrying me from one day to the next, maintaining their appearances and my own. Maybe it's time I rally, and sculpt myself into someone who can be a pillar again, for the people who I love.

The thing that nags at me is the combination of Melbourne and inertia. That thought scares me half to death. What I have to do right now is push, punch holes in the new and raw and undecided, and not let a stale something settle in.

I hope I'm up to that task. I think, -- if only because I'm too proud to spoil the change I'm masterminding --, I think I am.

Um, I know it's a dreadful thing to blog and run like this, but I will strive hard for the energy to produce better, more plentiful words.

I am moving.
To Melbourne.
In five days.

I saw and heard (my eardrumsz is all like, ouch, you wankers flooring yer SUVs) a highspeed police car chase yesterday. I do not lie.

I just joined an online writing workshop. You'll be the first to know if it changes my life :)

ratatatatat-tat. The wind is all up in my trees (steelin' my frootz) and making noises like artillery fire as shit bangs against other shit.

Also, I am, once again, oh! joy!, procrastinating.

PS. Not to kill the buzz, but something about Ryan Adams is really yucky. I'm almost nauseous just listening to this one song. He's like a country/folk Michael Buble. *shiver*

i knew today would be different, though nothing's changed.

There is a really easy formula for a happy Sara.

It begins with a shipment of four zines from a rillly rillly rilllly upstanding gentleman in Toronto, when only a single zine was sheepishly requested.

And once I'm in that zone, all it takes is a dose of hardcover 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' with those frilly frayed pages for just 10 measly dirhams (1.5 GBP; almost $3).

Awesome things from the world today:

1. The epigraph to my new, shiny book. ("First of all: / I am tired / I am true of heart! // And also: / You are tired / You are true of heart!")

2. These poems by Jayne Pupek on Thieves Jargon, especially the second one.

3. Paste Magazine.

4. These words: deracinate, senescent, orrery.

5. House of Leaves.

6. Inspiration.

7. My happily refuelling laptop.

8. Digital Slang # 2 sampler, gratis.

9. How amazingly good The National sound on live recordings.


I think it might be a good idea to make these lists regularly. I'm all cheerful now.

Just spent A LOT of money on a new charger and battery for MyGlassElevatorII. I'm feeling moderately guilty, but not so guilty as to attenuate my joy at the laptop actually charging when it's plugged into the soup. (that's right, THA SOUP)

I've been waiting for job offers and reading and starting to fill out applications only to want to slice up my eyeballs on a Japanese mandolin at the 'what is your greatest achievement' and the 'why do you think we, as a company, are pimp?'.

The reading goes well. I'm reading House of Leaves, now. And by reading I mean, being blown away by the sheer depth and force of the academic mimesis. The narrator, one Johnny Truant, is a fantastically humanising voice to what is otherwise a quack piece of hermeneutics about the MENTALLEST HOUSE EVARR, a place where space and time spell a grotesque downfall.

I'm not finished it yet... something like halfway through, but I will report back with the full (burj al 3emlaaq) scoop.

There's this other thing I've been realising about poetry, in the aftermath of reading The Black Warrior Review. It's not a big discovery, and it's probably something I should have known all along, but it has to do with how big of a role description plays in the genesis of a good poem. Another way of saying the same thing: "Now I know how not to start every poem with a narcissistic 'I' or 'My'."

AAAHH, I'm all yawny and stuff but I really should be submitting some CVs right now. I won't have time to do it later this evening.

*gets on with it*

break my arms around my love.

I bought some scarves today, on super-sale. Scarves are a thing I could really get into. I guess there's no reason cotton scarves should cost more than, say, a couple of feet of cloth like the sort you buy to get tailored. Not that I'm bursting my own bubble or anything. After I post this, I will go try on my new scarves, even though they aren't going to look right paired with my dodgy pyjama get-up.

I'm listening to Plus44's best song, "Weatherman" on repeat. I think it'd be instructional to divvy-up the world into people who listen to songs on repeat, and people who don't. Strange to think that I'm happy to listen to the same song twenty times in a row, but I'll never re-read books, not even my favourites. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the only exception to this rule to date. And that was because I had to, for class. Of course, I'm really glad I did. The second go 'round was 'mayyzzin.

Review post is a-comin...