dinosaurs + bunnies

touching showed.

2011-03-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted:  and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself--no cost,
No past, no people else at all--
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

philip larkin actually is my god.  that cranky old masturbatory librarian.

he is broken and ugly.  and i love him.   23 days til i fly out.

more tattoos

2011-03-30T18:30:00.000-07:00

i am going to try and write slightly more in here. and start a blog for travelling. the one linked to here, probably not, as it's going to be filled with SMUT and i'd rather keep it nameless and unconnected to people i know, apart from Dom.

we got tattoos last week; dom a line from a nick cave song on her ribs, and me, a line from Aubade, by Larkin, on mine. we are going to get more next weekend. it is sort of a birthday thing. i am almost 27, and what am i doing with my life? i know. getting tattoos with my Lady every other weekend and driving to nowra, and not cooking at home.

i dip in and out of blogging. this is my attempt to start again. i'm not sure how fruitful it will be, and if i feel the need to draw back around myself and not let the world into my mind for a bit. i find it hard not to confess and violate those sorts of quiet spaces that One Should Keep To Oneself.

it is under a month until america. and one month exactly until Tucson. this is significant, in a way i'm not sure of, but in a way which makes me both gleeful and embarrassed and apologetic, all at the same time, and leaves me questioning again, how much of an adult i am, and what the Fuck i am doing with myself.

Radiohead - Codex

2011-02-21T16:20:00.000-08:00

this is the song for right now.

words again

2011-01-25T01:54:00.000-08:00

it is hard, to describe in words, something that is, in honestly, nothing more than words.

can i re-use words that have been used in this context to make sense of it? or am i just an idealist? do i just have an overactive imagination? am i drawing this out of nothingness again? i like to live in words; it's a habit i fall into in darker times, over and over again.

but this is not dark. i have my Dom, and my house. i have my place, i have my job, and a world that's real. it's not like this is filling nothing.

and i know, i'm stopping the gaps. this is not ideal. this is JUST an ideal. sate it, elizabeth. make it solid. you have done this before. and i don't want it to end the same.

oh oh oh. i do not sense sense. i do not sense it well. i walk in the dark because i blind myself, and gleefully try and find my way through with hungry fingers. and now they are left with the keyboard, and they bring you out, into me. and i wonder. and i raise my eyebrows, and i feel, yes, like a fool. like a small hungry fool.

but you know, i am an optimist, i think, in some ways. maybe this time, things are different. ha.

books read in 2011

2011-01-03T19:25:00.001-08:00

ok, going to try and keep this a little better this time. not sure how to, however. need a better bibliography Thing. put them in endnotes? maybe i could have a word document of them.

JAN
My Invented Life - 5.1

Pretty Things 5.1

The Side Door 6.1

grubby metaphores

2010-12-30T00:31:00.000-08:00

i can't be bothered rifling around for them.

this year, it is simple. i am getting my mental health sorted out far better than i have this year. my head's stayed above water, yeah. i've had no major breakdowns, no complete moments of utter self destruction, but the lapping feelings of misery are getting more and more regular. i wake up and i cannot move. i cannot fucking move. i sit up to try and leave, and every bone in my body is begging me to lie down again, and hide, HIDE hide, don't LEAVE the room, don't leave your house, just close your eyes. if i push it, my brain starts pushing back angrily with a constant influx of internal monologue. it's a stream of hate and loathing, and it sounds like it's not my voice. then i doze. throughout the day, and night, i'll be awake for patches, but unable to read more than a few chapters of anything, and numb to the point of apathy. i don't even care i am missing work. i don't care i am losing money. i don't care i am paralyzed here. i'll have mild aural hallucinations - voices speaking to me just out of what i can hear - and if i try to do anything much, i feel as though i am being flayed.

i've had enough. i'm getting a full bipolar assessment done at the black dog institute.

the mania is fine. the mania is delicious. the mania is also really fucking destructive and needs to be managed because it's the Other Fucking Side of this.

i've also drawn the curtains on a four month relationship. this makes me achingly tired, because i stupidly, optimistically, thought that this time, it could be someone i may be able to start a life with. but not. and that's ok, i know, but i feel older and older, and more and more tired and unsure of what i want, apart from someone to walk with me and hold my hand when it's cold outside.

Book Time! 'one dimensional woman'

2010-12-01T23:59:00.000-08:00

One Dimensional Woman (Zero Books)

i'll admit i blatantly stole this idea off another blogger whose name i have already forgotten. but i like the self shots with the book.

Now - my main critique of this was the fact that it was .... too short. yeah. this is not something i normally find - i adore brevity in books, especially about ideas - but i don't feel things were... fleshed out as much as they could have been and as much as i would have liked them to be. but, it was a great start.

a lot of major issues with contemporary feminism, and porn, and the analysis of porn, capitalism, feminism, and the notion of 'choice' were brilliantly discussed. but, the thing i often like in feminist texts is the personal - and the lack of this was a bit frustrating - when discussing forms that post-contemporary porn may take that remove it from the troubling place it is in, she's not addressing issues in the porn industry, or the individuals who work in it - she discusses the work as an abstract.

and a pet peeve of mine - the discussion of pornography, but only touching the edges of her darker sister, prostitution. i think when discussing sex and commerce, and the enactment of sex as a commercial transaction, failing to look at least passingly, or acknowledge that obvious space and the fact that porn provides an image of sex, while prostitution is the purchase of time, flesh and some sort of physical intimacy - a far more explicit transaction, is an oversight.

and Oh how it is raining. oh how good it is. i just want to dive into the sound and never come out. i dread it receding back, and clouds parting. i just want rain rain rain, all over my flesh tone, and wrinkling my toes in my shoes.

open

2010-11-30T20:47:00.000-08:00

well, i've opened my blog up a little more now. hardly publicised, but it's not hidden. i've had a habit of doing so after a previous one was 'unearthed' - not that it was particularly salacious, unless you count a rather tedious diatribe about a nasty break up to be of interest - by someone who i'd rather, well, didn't contact me. if by some peculiar chance they choose to this time, well - /insert image of me, one eyebrow raised, confusion lighting up my face/.

reading wise, i've slowed down with the season. winter makes me withdraw, and i over-filled my time for six months. i fell behind at work, i fell behind in my general movements, and become tired. so now, i recharge. i'm listening to podcasts, and knitting a lace shawl from a pattern off ravelry. i'm trying to get better at chess; my Gentleman-Caller is excellent (he claims coyness...) and i'd like to at least be slightly more challenging than the feeble, easily defeated moppet i currently am.

workwise, i am attempting Ambition. there's a half-hearted attempt for me to find places to Go Towards. lots of dim lit scattered capital letters. they are quietly optimistic, but realistic at the same time.

things i've never seriously contemplated are seeming like serious and viable options - this is exciting and scary. i'm looking at circles and sparkles and i'm not sure how this makes me feel, other than extraordinarily happy, in a way that's new to me.

blogging is something that comforts me. i feel happy enough and safe enough to return to it, without more hungry ghosts leaping down my throat at phrases that do not belong to them. i've been doing this since 2000. it's how i purge. and i do it in silence, and not for an audience, and i occasionally forget, and remember again. it's like life drawing - the art of finding, and losing and finding the image over and over again until some sort of whole is made up. that's what blogging does, it creates a space for thinking and feeling and gives a comfortable context.

i'm thinking about study. real study - abstract, non-vocational, internal, intense study. everything is paused for the next six months though, until i know where i am going, and my god-forsaken library masters is over. two more subjects, and i have the paper, and i'll be walking out, awarded, MIS behind my name. furiously hungry to get rid of it. furiously eager to dig my teeth into something else. itching for this little patch of waiting and tapping my toes and saving every penny and eating out of cans to empty so i can uplift my belongings and start start start... perhaps.

Bands i have seen

2010-11-30T20:14:00.000-08:00

Work In Progress.

this is where i try and remember things, like all the BIG bands i have seen, and then find the dates when i see them. good work elizabeth! funzies! i am missing a lot - and they are ALL out of order, le sigh.

Morrissey - Livid Festival Brisbane 2003
Mogwai - Livid Festival Brisbane 2003
Dirty Three - Livid Festival Brisbane 2003
The Cure - BEC Brisbane 2007
Arcade Fire - Big Day Out Gold Coast 2008
Bjork - Big Day Out Gold Coast 2008
Sigur Ros - Tivoli Brisbane 2006
Sigur Ros - Tivoli Brisbane 2006
Mountain Goats - The Zoo Brisbane 2008
Mono - The Zoo Brisbane 2006/7 (?)
Animal Collective - The Zoo Brisbane 2006
Gogol Bordello - Sydney 2010
Iota - Troubadour Brisbane 2005
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Troubadour Brisbane 2007
Low - Troubadour Brisbane 2006/7
M. Ward - The Zoo Brisbane 2006/7
Smog/Callahan - Troubadour Brisbane 2007
Dresden Dolls - The Zoo Brisbane 2006
Amanda Fucking Palmer - The Zoo Brisbane 2007
Amanda Fucking Palmer - Sydney Opera House Sydney 2009
Patrick Wolf - Rosies Brisbane 2007
Patrick Wolf - The Zoo Brisbane 2009
The Mountain Goats - The Metro Sydney 2010
Regurgitator - The Met Brisbane 2007
Ani Difranco - Playhouse Brisbane 2005
Ani Difranco - Canberra Theatre Canberra 2008
Mertzbow & Keji Heno - Powerhouse (this is not music festival) Brisbane 2005
Tenniscoats - The Zoo
Tujiko Noriko - Powerhouse
Sufjan Stevens - Tivoli Brisbane 2007
P J Harvey - Convention Centre Brisbane 2005
Boris, Melt-banana, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, et al - Sydney Opera House 2010
xiu xiu - Powerhouse 2010

purpose

2010-11-26T02:42:00.000-08:00

this is what kills me.

one of my earliest memories was sitting at the kitchen table doing a drawing, crayons and pencils, and a picture of rabbits playing tennis.

and halfway through, this chill went through me. why was was i doing this? what was the purpose, apart from the fun i was getting, of doing this drawing? it would rot away with time - the acidic paper would fade (of course, not knowing much about acid in paper when i was 7, my understanding of exactly how and why it would rot was limited).. and even if someone did love it, or it did sell, or whatever, well... then what's the point?

this really only proves i was a fucked up kid.
but this still plagues me hideously. it's friday night, and i should be relaxing. instead, i am wracked with guilt, and want to do something 'Meaningful' with my night. and then, it turns into this nasty sort of pattern - what is meaningful? what is pleasure? what do i want to do? what book should i choose? what would be the purpose though, of reading it if i didn't write about it, or reflect on it, or discuss it, or at least feel like i had been enriched by it. and even, were i to do that, what meaning does that give me?

essentially, i reduce it all back, and i come to a very nihilistic sort of place, where nothing ends up having any sort of meaning.

and this is all because it's a friday night and i am trying to pick between reading Gunter Grass and a novel about a guy who really liked The Smiths as a teenager. OH or writing something about my teen novels. or working. or. or, or... or....... what the fuck?

this is why i have the tattoo on my arm. to remind me of the circles and the patterns and to remember that this nihilism is something that's haunted me for as long as i can recall, and that no matter where i go, nothing is just behind and in front of me, because nothing is all i can honestly believe in.

i should start writing again

2010-11-17T22:38:00.000-08:00

or maybe it's time for a new blog. i dunno.

anyhow, regardless, i am pondering dinner. right now, all i know for sure that i have at home is tomatoes, and some couscous. should i get additional vegetables? capsicum would be pleasing with this. but maybe beans? i like beans. and chili. from memory, i have some chilli. oh, and spring onions! excellent.

there's a dinner.

wow. amazing. this is a spectacular return to blogging, elizabeth. you get a sticker of excellence. well done indeed. well. done.

space

2010-10-26T05:22:00.000-07:00

cut open a vein and let me see what is inside tonight.

and i don't mean this as more than a passing reference, a graze, maybe, to self mutilation. i am just talking about rawness, and falling, and trust, and opening your heart again with the simple ugly understanding that you will JUST lose them in time and it , maybe, all that you deserve.

i don't know. when i drink too much i end up just hating myself. i forget that. and when i wonder, or worry, if i am misplacing and that oh no, why the fuck would they care? then i am horrified and scared. and i look impassive in the face of that because i guess that's how i survive this. i don't know.

i feel like my own ignorance is a catch phrase. and what are you DOING with your life and your brain and your heart and your purpose? i drink it away and i move day to day hand to mouth, gnaw to gnaw, whim to whim with no direction. and i hate it, and i turn it inside and i hate myself for it.

i forgot to get more pills and i feel an aching sickness in my stomach of effexor withdrawals. oh GOD boy, why do you bother with me when you are beautiful and smart and have the whole world in your hands. you have had women so much more gaspingly wonderful than i. i am just some scruffy idiotic australian girl with nothing to say of worth. oh GOD why do you bother? i would not bother with me.

i need to drag myself back and sleep now. i sense the lights draining out of my heart and i sense a darkness fading in, and i need to pull back and fix this before i snap.

upper spine

2010-07-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

is it trite to say how much i love yoga? i love it. it's a form of meditation i don't find difficult - you slow the mind right down through holding the body, and knowing the body, and feeling the body.

what i love too is feeling the body get stronger week by week, and feeling an intimacy grow. how was i not that intimate with my body? how did i get so distant from the flesh i inhabit? no, not inhabit. i don't inhabit my body, i am my body. it is what it is that is me.

ooooh oooh morrissey does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body ... i dunno...

in which once again, the smiths prove to be the source of all wisdom about all things. it is strange when certain poses push too far, or not far enough, or the more you learn about a pose, the way the feeling of going to it, and then holding it, and then exiting it shifts. even the really simple standing poses - the more i do them, the more aware i become of every inch of my body - down to my fingers being stretched properly - to muscle areas in my thighs and how they should be facing to best experience the asana.

i can feel it helping my posture. i have one vertebrae in my neck that juts out at an odd angle due to years and years of slouching and terrible posture. through pulling it back, and trying to tighten the muscles around them, and through my teacher's explaining how we are supposed to work towards a shoulder stand, i can feel what muscles are fucked up.

and thus ends my yoga diatribe.

this is the advantage of keeping this as an exercise in exposure/narcissism/emotional-mental-verbal-defecation - i can blatter about without caring what impact this does, or doesn't make.

i suspect i need to start getting into work at a decent time. this is, i admit, more than fair enough. i'm attempting to read more. i am already becoming lax and indifferent towards my uni studies. wow. this time, it took me what? a week? maybe i should read Is History Fiction? either that, or The Master of Go by Kawabata. last time i was in brisbane, i went on a terrible (read - exceptional) book spree, and spent a few hundred (ok, probably close to 400) on books. am attempting to make the rule of Read Five For Each One i Buy. i find the Read Five for Each Binge I Have seems to work better.

tomorrow, sydney-town to see STEPHEN FRY oh JOY!LIF_IC_ATION!!!!

neglected

2010-07-24T00:12:00.000-07:00

conference in melbourne, tedious rashed affliction, uni work, etc etc. this makes me tired, and takes away the things i feel like i could put in here.

i'd like to say that words were the best of me, but i don't know what best means. i tend to think my bookshelf was/is; it's built and shaped and molded with just the right number of cracking fissures to make it charming, and enough solidity to keep it standing. if i were to introduce myself somehow, i would do it with my books - sweeping arm around them, polishing them, leaving them glistening. it's cleaner than i am, it's more of who i would like to be. there is an element of concealment i've never be able to manage. a 'mystery', a sort of complexity, rather than a stripped heart on sleeve bluntness that i wield like a clumsy sword.

i am fantasising about making my apartment beautiful. i want to grow potatoes. i know, they are cheap, but i would love to do it, dig them up and get the dirt under my nails. there are little paper lights in the loungeroom, and i want to hang them from my walls. i want them draped and sagging around the apartment.

there is a constant push pull inside of me. the gentleness i wish i could have, the slightness, the wider eyed beauty, the reaching out, and a butterfly sitting on my fingers and a pause, and a mysterious smile, and i remain like that, an enigma, cats resting on my lap, a puzzle to be solved, and yet, and yet, i end up being this over inflated flesh to be taken at will that races off and feeds it to anyone. and i don't know if i want to be either, or if i can be either. i feel like the 'dance drink screw' refrain of common people in my head, dance drink screw, dance drink screw, round and around like horses on a carousel rising and falling. and then i try and pull back to control it, because i just don't want to sleep alone anymore, and i want honeysuckle and free roaming bunnies, and drawings of botanical illustrations made into wall paper, and ahh shit i don't even believe in anymore. and i'm afraid of the dark without you next to me, i thought, and then i opened my eyes, and i don't want to be a pretty girl, a maiden fair, because i an not a pretty girl, and i'll never be like that, no matter how many muscles i pull trying to fit into the sweet little floral dress.

i don't know. enacting whatever parody of self i want to take out to play confuses me. it's a game, a puzzle, and i have no sense of how to fit together some image that will move me anywhere, or if i should be 'genuine' or if it's even possible to be genuine.

if i could roll myself back to a point before i became, well, filthy, would i? it's not that long ago really that i'd never taken drugs, or had sex outside of a loving relationship. it's a matter of a few years that i pushed the skin i thought i was in out, and reformed myself into a parody of the narrow line i used to be. and you can't quite go back. i can't sew the marriages back together, or pull memories from night after night after night in alleys and goonbags and up trees and down streets and in the rain, and i would not trade this filth for the world because i love it. it feeds me more than the cottage does, because it takes me away.

in other news, i found exciting cider, that tastes like strawberry, and i have a blog about being a librarian that even i can't bring myself to read.

oh how we are hungry

2010-07-11T00:17:00.000-07:00

we, or me, i don't know.

i like pushing things, this is what i do. this is how i do it. i don't know why i do, though, and it doesn't really matter.

i wonder what bridges i burn though, and even, if it matters anymore. i feel more wide and open, but older and more tired at the same time. but this is ok. and i am hungry.

i don't know what's happened to my words. i've been exhausted, and run dry. emptied out. i keep trying to fill and fill and fill, but is it empty still? i check the levels and oh, oh yes. it is. again? or not again. it is hard to see if i am walking in circles.

you always fall in love again. but i get so tired of it, you know. it leads me on, my carrot slightly out of reach. i am a sucker, emotionally, for that flood, that movement of one soul into the next, blah blah, all words that have little to no meaning, but oh how i like it, you drug you. it's my way of being creative, because i feel like i cannot make anything other than other bodies work. ha, and i fail even, over and over, at the idea of finding that connection. i fail well. i'm hungry.

pottering

2010-06-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

i am reading the guardian, as i always do, in love with most of the articles. i adore that newspaper. whenever i feel low about the world, or the internet especially, i turn to the guardian to have some faith restored.

i am, Uncommonly, bored right now. unusually bored. infuriatingly bored. sinking skin crawlingly bored. this is a symptom. i know this. i know you well.

semester crawls on. one essay left, on the Dewey Decimal System. what sort of librarian cliche is that? chew of my LEG for god's sake. i just want to TEAR things into shreds, it is like there are bugs crawling under my skin right now, that growling prowling scratching feeling of a cat left inside all day.

saw an amazing show monday night. laurie anderson. lou reed. meltbanana. boris. bardo pond. i could go on. the sound growled through my body and i felt alive and calm and taken down and under until i was re-written. it made me deplorably pleased.
only now, i want more of that sort of pleasure. and it is so dry here, so dry and sandpaper-y and rough. there's something to be said for 'making the best' but i just cannot keep making things up anymore. i am not a magician, and i am not out of this world. i want to be drunk on the earth, and clamber up church towers and i want to fall off things until i bleed it out, this desire, red into earth. not violently, just engulfing until i cannot breathe.

uni vers ity end god please

2010-05-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

it makes me wracked. wrecked. i end up useless and moved without warning from high to low. stress is unbearable for me - it shifts my moods faster and faster and they run rings around me. i end up not knowing what i am doing, or where i am going, or why, and i forget things, like getting to work on time, or how to stay awake, or how to sleep, or why i can't spend all my money, or what i was studying today, or even why i was bothering, why? what am i DOING? it's not like i am career focused to start with - but combined with study and stress and frustration and chewing off my legs in irritation and slowness and static one day will this fucking END feeling i forget why i bother.

i am bored. i am bored out of my mind. i need something to ram against, and push against. i need something that's so hard and complex i cannot solve it. this is why i date so many arse holes. they are puzzles, ugly mutated ones, that i want to put together. i want to pull myself apart and spread out my organs, one by one, and tell my own fortune from the entrails.

i want this semester to be over.

i also just finished reading Benjamin Law's book :

which made me feel really really happy and warm. there's one essay that ends just an inch too soon, but apart from that, i just adored it. he is funny, but it's also really touching and simple, and... kind? you have the most intimate feeling for the family, the loved ones, and yet you don't feel as though it's an invasive look at someone's family - it's respectful, and open, and funny, and there's fart jokes. i love all that stuff.

still plodding in Moby Dick. it's delicious and heavy and i want to swim in the fat of the words.

extra-ordinary frustration

2010-05-16T23:01:00.000-07:00

small factors added up. no internet at home. (thus lack of posts, my iPhone toting reader/s).

i am waiting, stasis, in this repulsive town, tapping toes, watching sand, slip slip, waiting for gravity to take me. reading trash, watching money dust around me, eating broccoli, drinking beer, soft red fringes, sleeping (always sleeping) endless frustrated twitching, come ON, now, come ON....

but i'll get there. i know that. i am happy, just frustrated. moving, slowly. escape route delayed a few months, still waiting. letting some sense of that grinning stomping joyful creature i am seep back into me, and i stand tall, and i take in air, and i gather back everything that hungry hollow ghosts stole out from under me, day after day, more and more gathers below me. and i will get free of this, oh yes. i will.

storytime

2010-05-06T02:11:00.000-07:00

i've been working with the most amazing papers the last few days - of the author Jack Lindsay. i've been looking at the correspondence in his later years - he was in his seventies - between him and his contemporaries. one particular narrative captured me - a friend, colin, who wrote of his love affairs, and son and the mother of his son, of his mental health and struggles with drinking.... interspersed with, to be honest, pretty sub-par poetry. i sort of fell in love with him, this man in his 40's, fighting through life, falling in love and apart, and writing so passionately and desperately to his friend, typewritten letters from the late '70's.

i don't know if colin was prominent enough to end up being recorded - i mean, i could find out what happened to him without too much effort - when he died, etc. but i want to know what happened with his son aaron, and his wife, who also wrote to Jack using this big, floral script with little circles over the i's, and pastel coloured pencils.

cold

2010-05-05T02:22:00.000-07:00

now, it's like scalpels. it's like being choked and dragged down the street, or like your body is being pushed from every single angle by opposing forces, until you crumble under the weight. i forget how fast it gets cold here. it's only my third winter.

it brings with it a quiet darkness in my mind as well, which wraps around my neck as well, pulling tighter. and it'll grab me forcefully and kick me to the ground and yell at me about being meaningless again. and it's a lie. i know this. it's only a week, or a few days even. i know what's happening, and this too will pass away, and soon i'll slip back into my more normal state. but a change of seasons will bring it in, dark curtains over my head, and i will drown a little day by day until i swim again.

i want to buy books. somehow i feel like this will cheer me up. or i'll have a bath. i ate duck, and it was good, and drank red wine. i want to be coiled up around another warm body like a spring, reminding me i am alive, but i don't trust myself. i don't trust what i want, or what i'd veil in cautious optimism as a possibility. sshhhhh. shh. don't put your eggs in that basket. remember, it always ends like this.

dry

2010-05-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

the words feel dry in my mouth tonight. it's not flowing in any way. i don't feel like i have anything to say, or any way to say it, or any way to tell people to give me a job, or give me a chance, or give me a moment.

oh, little chicken, you're barking up the wrong tree again. just go back to sleep, because you, and your little impossible dreams are not going to get you anywhere. you might dream it real, but you are small, and invisible, and you will sleep alone again tonight, like last night, and tomorrow.

not that i'm bound to this, or that it's a real outline of who or what i am. i don't believe i am worthless or unlovable or unloved. just right now, i feel isolated and stuck, and like i have forgotten how to get where i am going. or even why i am going there. i get caught up in the magic of my own deceptions, this thrilling tail chasing glee, circles in the mud, giggles and fleeing my own time and heart, and then i stop, and i am here, and i am left, silent and alone again.

i'm not trying to fill a space. i just wonder if i'm left looking for things in ridiculous places, or if my idealism is constantly misplaced. i feel like i've been awake for years when it's been a day, and i feel like i'll never feel that shuddering shrugging joy of slipping away into another human being again mutually. you are being stupid, little chicken, you know this. close your eyes, open up, stretch out and wait. and wait.

but i am tired.

study

2010-05-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

it always leaves me feeling dragged and buggered without enough preparation. i hate it. i hate it. i struggle painfully with the constant heavy anxiety. and now, i'm over the halfway mark of this semester - three pieces of assessment down, two to go. i just have to scrape through, and keep going. one word, one step, one movement after another...one barely connected thought after another.... stringing it together, one day at a time.

i am stubborn though, and determined to get there. i drank tea, and wrote dewey numbers, and fuck, i don't even know if i did any of them right, but let's hope i did well enough to scrape through.

i'm also very ... unreliable with uni. i don't care a lot about it. i care about finishing. i care about getting the qualification. but i have no work ethic. i have no passion for what i am doing. i find it boring, and frustrating, and time wasting, and i just want it over. so, day. after. day. one day at a time. i can get this thing done.

escape plan ... this too will pass away.

winter

2010-04-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

canberra winters always end up shuddering over the top of me before i realise they are there. i am sitting waiting, waiting for the cold to end up taking me under. at the moment, there are leaves up to my knees on the side of the road. i love that too; i walk through them, i wade and kick, and run, and have them crunch underfoot. light filtering more and more through the trees as the leaves fall away, less and less, and yet the sun does less and less....

i find that one of the stranger things. the sun in brisbane is heavy and heady even in the middle of winter. you will sweat, heavy and hot, wade through the humidity not leaves, the feeling of the heat on your arms, the smell of the air when i walk down brunswick street, treading water? treading over the cement on the sidewalk... near the cliff face, near the trees, oh you can stand on it and see the fucking world unfold in that river....

it's been since, november? october? since my last visit... my old haunts have shifted - my favourite cafe, a place i practically lived in for a few years, has shut its doors. my old friends have new lives in new places. things change. it's the way it goes, over and over again. that comforts me, actually, i like that things are not static, and i go back, and it's all different. the place, my last year in brisbane which was glorious and wonderful and mad and fun, and silly, well, that world's as dead as the person i was then is. it's passed away, hand over hand, into a new placement of people. you can never go home again. it never is home again.

and i am not settled here; the streets are sanitized, but i can feel a humanity, a warmth in them. i am still looking for an out, and i have found one - a job that fits all the necessary things i need to apply to an institution that's not mine - and maybe, well, i'll do it. things are slowing, and it's time for a change. my feet itch, i am hungry, my palms are open, open open, and i want to drink the world up. of course there is potential here, but the quiet, the streets, the wideness of the streets have done me in. the lack of frottage on streets with strangers just trying to struggle to work, the smell of the air... i want a city to open me up and bleed me dry for a bit. and not just little interludes. i want it to take me again, something new, somewhere new, anything, just shifting off again...

orange juice

2010-04-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

it's cheap, nasty orange juice. i am wary of my tea cup; i came to work this morning and there were traces of mold starting to grow on the surface of the tea i'd left there for a few days.

i'm listening to more xiu xiu. i love falling in love with bands who have back catalogues to trawl through and dig into and hide under and wrap around yourself until you are buried. new album presents to myself every other week. i'm trying to not download illegally as much as possible, especially music i love. there's not really a justification, morally for how it can be ok to do this. i can afford it on my Librarian Pay.

my hands are covered in small cuts from a broken light bulb. there's cheese on the floor at home; a candelabra on a Give Way sign on the floor, and a melted wax pile on the carpet in the middle of the room. we've got more side-of-the-road furniture - the house slowly filling with things found, others detritus gathering weight in our living space.

i am losing all sense of perspective. it is hard to see what is close and what is accessible, and what is realistic and what i've imagined now. it could be all impossibilities or i could be sitting on a landmine, or a goldmine... but it does not change, oh no, impossible things, it does not change.

more xiu xiu

2010-04-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

i'm sleepwalking today, loyal reader/s.

and i love the valley oh! and i am tired, and sluggish, and not sure how alive i am today. i am waiting. it's a becoming time, not a being time. i am in the space, filling it a little too small, and a little too sleepy to feel like i am actually there. i feel like i am half somewhere else. far away, and fragmented. i need more coffee.

recycled paper.

2010-04-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

boredom undoes me, on the largest possible bloody scale. i am ripped forth, and would happily invert my own body if it meant i would have some sort of stimulation. i run slow without some sort of energy to butt my mind against, slower and slower, and as it sinks back, something inside of me moves faster and faster, equal and opposite, running away from whatever it is i am trying to do to sustain balance.

one of the earliest dreams i can remember was, as a child, being in a grey room filled with towering people, heads taller than me. i was short, and they were all long and thin, with leathery skin. it was a warehouse, and the air was grey. the thing was though, they were all speaking in my head, in a room of voices that sped up, then slowed down, then sped up again. they raced against each other, and against myself, and i could keep track, but it was uneven and frightening. my whole childhood, my own internal monologue would periodically reflect this, racing up, slowing down to a snail's drawn out pace, then speeding up again.

it was a precursor perhaps to being bipolar.

i don't dislike it. sometimes, i am frustrated at the fact it makes me question what i actually am, or if i actually am. it's the lapse of reality; the psychotic tendencies of the condition making the continuum of reality a little more slippery than it is supposed to be. but my reluctance to accept the labeling of my mind's workings as nothing more than a fallacy, resulting from wrong synapses is fairly solidly linked to being told i was possessed by satan, and my mind again, was not mine, and was just an incorrect set of laws being incorrectly applied. only now, it's not god's plan, but a biochemical one, or something. i think i can judge what i do well. i think i know when i am pushing things just because i'm bored, and frustrated, and wanting something MORE. i think this is clear to me.

what i need, what i crave so much is that communication, that friction of mind against body against words against flesh, that connects on some improper level and makes me feel properly alive. i feel the energy coil inside of me, and i want it to swell out and dissipate and take me on. it's satisfied, partly, in words. words and books and paper and sorting, and the fleshiness of language, and the communication, the movement of the words inside of me. it is satisfied too, with risks. i take risks not because i am masochistic, but because i get bored. there is a vortex inside of me, and it swells out darkly, and hungrily, and i will push risks into it in order to feel it properly.

people suggest that creativity will fill this. i need a few more though. i don't get like this when i have sex. creativity. intimacy. madness. warmth. books. those things stop the push pull run.

and i get fucking tired of being sensible. i chose sensible. i've chosen it so many fucking times. i've resisted urges for drama and madness or even goodness and fun, over a safer, 'smarter' pathway. i am here, in a city i loath, for a job that will take me wonderful places, and here i stay, feet itching, one step after another, trying to keep going, determined as i can be. i need to write more, i know this. i need to exercise more. that helps as well. i need an outlet, a place, a force, a focus. something to occupy the constant jittery feeling under my skin i get from time to time.

and i don't care what is the supposed theory. i don't think it's just chemistry, i don't think it's just the fact that there's something that doesn't quite work properly in my brain. it works differently. but the risks i take are often considered, often curious, often evaluated, and i either push the evaluation away, or i just don't care because i want to see what'll happen. and i just want to let go. i want a space where all these things i hold together can let go. everything is constantly on a tight reign, muzzled like a wild dog, hungry, hungry. i sit here, and i look so calm, and so neutral, but fuck, there's madness just inches away, and i get so tired of keeping it there. day after day i do it. i cook. clean. try and sort out extra clothes. feed pets. cuddle bunnies. go to the pet store to play with the kittens because i worry they don't get enough love while they are waiting for their forever homes. i get coffee. i jump in the leaves by the side of the road. sometimes i go to the park. i look for snails for my lizards to eat, and i let them crawl across my hands. i try not to drink too much. i watch Doctor Who. i keep it going, tightly, tightly. just wanting to let it all go.

sharp teeth

2010-04-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

dig dig dig dig dig it deeper into the flesh, into the flesh.

the city folded away from me, like rumpled sheets shifting off my body crawling out of bed, but i want to go back in there, and dive away the hours, naked and raw. the lights flickered off and the onion layers peeled off the cement towers in the sky that shrank and folded off me as we drove, the lines, the blackness, the shaking hands, the small hands, the heart in throat, the slipperiness.

i can feel, preemptively, teeth marks on my neck. i can feel skin i've not tasted on the edge of my lips, and i can feel my feet slip, and my hands slip, and i can feel the memories rise and fall and my eyes grip on tight, tighter than my knuckles, death grip, white and don't let go now, oh no, this is not the time to let go....

and what i need now are words. i need to make them dance. i need to make them sing, i need to make them so glorious the world falls apart. please. i don't want to let go now. because now, i'm hungry.

fresh fresh easter taste

2010-04-01T21:56:00.000-07:00

oh yes, i wake up, and it's the same as before.
but yes, oh yes, it's shifted in that irrevocable way.

it irritates me that my mind is only ignited, so randomly, like this from moment to moment. sometimes there's weeks of sneaking and sliding. but now, no. this time, i fell. and fell. and over arse over hands, i am gone.

i was at a friend's studio in sydney. it was the most beautiful room i think i've ever been to. i fetishise white. i am a minimalist at heart, i am wet over ryman, and white walls, and the denseness of the gallery white. and this room was clouded, drenched, milked in marble dust on every surface. it coated the floor, footsteps burrowed into the white, and the light that filtered through split into fragments from the airborne stone. i wanted to die in there. i wanted to be buried, and let the soft flower white stone sink into me, into my body, fucked with the white, fucked over and under this emptiness, this negation.

and yes. it happens again like this.

2010-04-01T02:18:00.000-07:00

you cut her name into your heart
you burn his name into your arm
cast out the pig you kiss as love
heaven is closed for now you are alone

this too, this too shall pass away
this too, this too will pass away
listen, Steven is singing to you
the pain of life you wipe away

a reason, that fine gray ash shall
recall these days
inquire
the serpent
to become a rag of a dream
interred
you arrive
and you wave as if she could care
but she can't
nor can you
the relinquishing and a flickering
out of loss

this too, this too shall pass away
this too, this too shall fade away
listen, Steven is singing to us
the pain of life you wipe away

perhaps depraved is who you are
why not?
depraved at least you're not alone
overcome by the truth you face that you can't
get up or look up
at the moon
without throwing up and it
stay the same all the time
lie and wait
it stop again like a bee
it will die
when it stings you once
and its small bee's head will fall off

this too, this too shall pass away
this pain will pass away
listen, Steven is singing to you
the pain of life you wipe away

oh oh oh, it always sneaks up behind you like some dirty black dog, like some silent angry cloud, like some wet sheet on your head, like a dream, like a dream, like a dream...

there's sweat here, it's hot and enclosed and my shirt is sticking to me, and my hair is coiled into ringlets from the heat and i am letting go like i am fucking a stranger drunk, and i am yelling lyrics, and i am jumping my fist in the air, my lungs hurting, my tongue bitten, my thighs light, my arse pressed against bodies against bodies and crawling arms around and over me and under.

impossible feeling

i sat against the glass window pressed face against glass, listening to xiu xiu on the bus. there were more cows than i could count blurring passed me, impossible exchange, impossible exchange.

i will stick to leather, and i will listen, and it feels like my heart is being forced out of my ears. only realising this sneaking up on me as i am there, sticking to leather, and fuck, where did this come from? where the FUCK did this come from?

it's always dug into my heart that first point of contact when things start to fall into place, or away. and this one, elizabeth? this is unusually stupid, even for you.

xiu xiu

2010-03-28T20:40:00.000-07:00

this is making me deliciously happy. i've listened to it on repeat over and over for the last twenty four hours. it's one of those faster moving times where i find music again and it takes me HOME. fast and warm.

i often fall in love with love. and then i draw back to people, and i am back with myself again. that is where i am now, and i can see that, and it's ok, if a little bit sad because i want to drown again. but i'm waiting, biding my time.

off to sydney today - seeing Gogol Bordello - booked tickets to see The Mountain Goats as well. i'm going to do another list in here of bands i have seen - had one in my old outdated blog which needs refreshing. my tummy is bulging out, i don't know if it's additional weight or what. bus leaves at four. the bus smooths me over, i love it, i love it. especially with headphones in, it's going to be such a pleasant trip. i will make a playlist, oh YES> that will be fun. and books. raymond carver, kawabata, maybe some poetry, and iris murdoch? something thick, it's four hours, and i always end up finishing what i buy to read quickly. maybe time to finally get off butt and read '100 years of solitude'? yes. likely. good idea.

...

2010-03-27T05:24:00.000-07:00

... i feel astonishingly isolated right now.

not sure if this is for any substantial reason, or if i just drank too much, or if i am lonely, or if i am overtired, or just stressed with uni. but i feel closed out. not even lonely, that's not the right word, but like i've been trapped inside a cage and put in a box.

it's as though the gray dirt under my nails is crawling deeper below my fingers. and into my arms. and down inside my blood. i am gathering energy, as much as i can, from being around people, but i feel so cut off from myself that it's desperate. i have pmt thought, so it's just chemistry fucking with my head. nothing other than the balance of chemicals in my body are making this happen.

sleepless

2010-03-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

curiouser and curiouser.

i am a sleepy kitten by nature. i doze when i shouldn't, i sleep all day if i can, and it's easy for me to drop off the wire.

and right now, as it's been for EVERY night for the last few weeks, (pretty much since i started the breakfast eating thing), i am awake after one am, functional, clear thoughts, unable to sleep, unable to even get close. not manic energy either. it's just .... awake. blurry, perhaps a little? but it's not asleep, it's not close.

right now, i am walking. each day, when i walk, i focus on the way i put my feet on the ground. this is less obscure than you would think - my feet roll over onto the arch when i walk - they always have. a strange, small part of me has always blamed myself - as though this was happening because i was lazy, and i didn't be bothered walking properly. that's just not true - it's to do with a tendon being too short, bones becoming deformed in my feet, and muscle memory. but now, when i walk, i focus on how my feet fall, on each muscle and movement, and how to make them push into the ground and off the ground, the rolling of bones next to each other, that soreness i always have in my feet that little bit rougher from the tensing of tendons, and stretching and grinding in different ways.

i am not sure if this sort of active walking helps my life in any way. i am restless and draped in that ennui again, waiting waiting for something dramatic to happen. i am sleep walking but awake, so awake, wanting to be dragged feet first out into the street and shown to the world again. here i am waiting, waiting, waiting for something to take me, arms outstretched and head thrown to the sky, waiting. it's blank idealism wanting this, wanting huge emotions to sweep me off my feet. the passions keep getting dimmer, now. i fee softer degrees, more subtle shifts. but i want that madness again. i want to be drunk on passion and lust and love. i want to want to lie in bed memorising someone's face. i am grabbing at this feeling and it slips away before it forms into substance. i need to let go.

awake

2010-03-24T21:19:00.000-07:00

and alert.
i work in a Very Big library.

i don't mention work on here much. it's a conscious decision - not because i don't love my job - i am a rare person who does - but more due to a desire to keep work separate. i am thinking of starting a blog about issues relevant to the library industry. but i probably won't. i am not obsessive about remaining nameless online, it's not like i say anything here that's compromising, or will have me arrested. but at the same time, it's not important to be attached to me. it's sort of nice that it's not, that i put it out there, quiet, in the space of the great unread of the great unwashed. not that i mind if people do read. but nor do i care if they don't. it's not why i write.

pushing back the book-buying urges. quiet now. i felt myself sliding earlier, somewhere darker and darker as the day ticked passed. but i am stopping, and digging in my heels, and trying to hold my own. i can. i know i can.

don't be angry

2010-03-23T05:57:00.000-07:00

I have to sneak in and put on your clothes
You will know where I’ve been
But I need the protection
Oh what a strange and miraculous thing
Finally recognise what is driving me crazy

All that I want was here now it’s gone
All that I want was here now it’s gone
Don’t be angry
I don’t disagree
It is clear that I left
My clothes on the highway

And I’d like to know
If you ever told
You said if I could have once
Given your life some meaning

All that I want was here now it's gone
All that I want was here now it's gone
All that I want was here now it's gone

Don’t be angry
I will die lonely
Don’t be angry
I will die lonely
Don’t be angry
I will die lonely
Don’t argue
'Cause you will see
That I will die so very lonely
Don’t be angry
Don’t be angry

the organ

2010-03-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

new band.
wonderful new band. repeat listening, falling in love sort of band.

i just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. the movie was solid and difficult, and so was the book. it was beautiful and gray and now i feel along and like i need to hide under blankets and like the gray ash is falling, falling over me, until i cannot breathe, oh god, peel back, peel back, and stop it now....

and i want to fall. i want to lose it. i want to let it all go and fly far far away again, off away away away into another magical place where it is all more real and more alive and i can dive away, dive away and let it take me.

disintegration

2010-03-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

perhaps one way of putting it is when, suddenly, your heart expands. you are just there, breathing, but it feels like your heart is growing wider and wider and swallowing another body into your flesh. your blood beats through to the end of your fingers, but your heart beats over them as well, because, well, because it is enormous what you feel, and you are so so alive in them, and alive in yourself.

sometimes it happens slowly, growing over you gently. and you do not know where it is, or where they are, but only that they are alive in you, and you in them, pieces, pieces, but they are not fragments, they are whole. and it doesn't matter how many people you love like this, there is always space for more, because this feeling is enormous. it is here, and it is on the other side of the country, and it is on the other side of the earth, or maybe sitting next to you, just there, just there.

and other times, you will just be sitting, breathing tight for some reason, almost gasping for air, and suddenly it shudders over you, and you are there, oh god, you are on the edge and it is cascading across you, under you, inside of you, consuming like a hungry ghost, and god, yes, yes, i want it, i want it now, i want it so heavy and badly, and i do not know how this happened. pressed against each other, heartbeats chasing each other like greyhounds, who is beating faster? no race, no stopping, no starting, it just balloons out and takes you down, over and over again, it is always the same. it is always new. it is always the same. it is never like anything else.

erratic

2010-03-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

sleep is erratic
moods are erratic.

yoga slows me down, evens out the pattern a little. but i do not feel all here or there, just scattered, scattered all over the place.

i am awake when i should be asleep and sleeping upside down all day. i am not sure if i feel sick, or if i am just not eating enough. this isn't a depressed post - i'm not unhappy, just erratic. things are shifting under my skin, i forgot how it feels when your skin slips away and that movement below you starts to shudder and you lose touch with the ground and you start to ... fall... i don't know if it is beautiful or terrifying or meaningless. i don't know where it is, and even as i get older, i am still stabbing in the dark.

i'd like to make it all simple again, reduce my life back and back, receed it. was there some point where i started twisting the patterns into more and more detailed, messy loops and i forgot how to draw the lines clearly? i can't even remember when it started. i would have been 14 or so, i guess, maybe that was the marker, or when i fell in love with words and emailed from an invisible face at the other end of the lake. i think that was it, 16 and digging a hole. that was ten years ago. it was ten years ago, now. how did that happen? how the fuck did it happen that i'm 26 in a month or so? i don't understand how all those years folded behind me - my mind is not holding them tight, the moments slip away, faster and faster, and what have i hear? i hold out my hands and i am scared because i still do not know where i am going. i still feel like a child. i still feel blind. do we ever get any sort of footing?

i'm finding meaning in music. it's hazy, yeah, but i feel something clearer coming out of the fog. i'm not strong, i'm not strong. i feel fragile and easily broken, and that's what it is, you know, the reservations are slipping away and i cannot contain this feeling, i cannot contain it, and this, this is not the way i was heading.

but i've got that taste in my mouth again.

settling

2010-03-11T05:13:00.000-08:00

a different sort of settled.

listening to The Mountain Goats now, to the wonderful happiness that is 'The Sunset Tree'.

ok, maybe i'm not settled. maybe that's not quite it. maybe there's a sneaking sort of feeling, a tiny elephant in my room. perhaps there's something there, and i'm not wanting to look at it because i don't know what it'll mean. another piece in the puzzle? another start? are the pieces starting to drop? are the balls slipping down the wire?

i could get used to it.

there are things and times that become monumental, moments in life that simmer and burn deeper into memory into others. they are the ones i pick up and pass around my mind like a beautiful little shiny object, glimmering and precious, that needs to be handled. they make a brightly coloured glitter tube of things i've done, and people i've loved, and places. i think i might be on the edge of some, because things are shifting out and around and the arrangement of my life is becoming something slightly different again.

i always go back to the cliff on bowen tce, in my mind. i imagine myself standing on that cliff, staring out there. i wonder why, sometimes, it's the most vivid way in my mind of summing up brisbane. i took lovers there, yes, but i took lovers in my bed more often. somehow, that place captures a place i was mentally more than any other location. i remember the time H and i got drunk on lust and red wine with J. we ended up in a sexually tense ball around him, and J slept on the floor and H in my bed, and i could feel them both there, my beautiful boys... i broke up with H there, and i cried, cried cried there whenever i was left alone, and emptied. i was there, bitten by mosquitoes before running away to J's place and crashing there, the night we slept together.

i climbed the fence and stood on the cliff face with S once. he was a virtual stranger, but i feel in love with him hard and fast and beautifully, and that was all we needed. not even sex, not even touching, but something else on the cliff's edge, his long lank shoulders...

my friends, my lovers elsewhere, when i think of taking them to brisbane, that's where i take them in my mind. i want to paint them into that place and show them that, because i feel like it holds something essential about myself. i want to take B there, more than anyone in the world. i want to jump the fence with her, and hold her hand, dangling our feet over the edge. the cliff is huge, large enough to kill you if you fell, easily. it doesn't feel dangerous. it feels safe as you look over the river and the bridge and the building and the streets and you are THERE and i am THERE, and i would take her there and we would drink goon from the carton and draw on each other's hands with felt pens.

books and paper and f a l l i n g

2010-03-09T23:55:00.000-08:00

two day book binding course that's excellent.

i miss b.

my floor is unusually clear at the moment, there is a strange amount of carpet available for strolling on, pacing. i think this is what makes me miss b- the last time i had this much carpet, she was here too. sigh.

teen novels, feeling slightly off colour, strangely, wanting to re-arrange books, touching around the edges.

slipping grips on edges, sweeeet oblivion roll over me until i forget my name or where i am or what ever happened or how i got there and all i have is this second; everything else eroded until i am a shadow, i am breathing and shuddering and take me take me take me.... and hold tight, little hands, hold on so tight you can't breathe, because you cannot fall. you cannot fall. there is too much at stake, and you cannot fall. but hand. over. hand. it takes you by surprise sometimes.

but it feels good to be dizzy again.

bus trips

2010-03-06T21:38:00.000-08:00

there's something marvellous about the trip from canberra to sydney via bus. i like road trips, i like sitting and watching the green and blue and space move past me.

i read "the easter parade" by richard yates on the way to sydney. it was... utterly marvellous. despite the fact the content was ... depressing is the wrong word, - it's a fairly relentless book, and not a lot of good things happen to the characters, but the intimacy you gain with the two women and their mother, their memories and regrets and loves and their aging is a tremendous thing.

i have been thinking a lot about aging lately. some morbid, some confused, some frightened. we live in an unsatisfying cult of youth and gratification and purchasing our way to happiness. it's easy to get caught up in it. it's Lazy to get caught up in it.

last night, i felt back breakingly lonely when i was lying in bed. i texted a friend who is sometimes, the wisest person i know. his actions can lie about this, but under the delusion and confusion and the lust that clouds my vision in relation to him, his mind is one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen.

i asked him if he got lonely.
he said:
i get lonely when i compare myself to another person or expectation. i feel immersed and unbound when nouns do not seize control. allow the universe to universe, the pamphlet to pamphlet, and the idiot to idiot; then i pursue my own ignorance in the ecosystem i have chosen. (loneliness often rides w ignorance).

next time i feel lonely, i'm going to remember this. i am going to gather it around me like dirty red sheets and bundle it under me like books and learning, and wrap it under my neck like a cowl. my bunnies will talk to me without nouns, and i'll give all my books to strangers who don't love them, and i'll burn my clothes until all i am left with are leggings for yoga that are hideous but comfortable. this won't make me free, but it will make me move.

little

2010-03-04T03:56:00.000-08:00

bunnies. music. i baked a pie.

at the moment, little bunny has a box in his house. he sits on it, all day long, content, staring at the wall. the lid of his house will be open - he'll jump out, only to run straight back in, back onto the box... sitting there a bit more.

oh little man, scruffy little face and snuffle nose...

the thing i find interesting about so much debate about Tao Lin's poetry is that people keep asking 'is it poetry?' (a post on HTMLgiant ... HERE) - it seems a sort of empty question to me. what is poetry? what is art? what is writing? these are not interesting questions, because the point is not the word. the point is what it is. how does it make you feel? why do you like his writing or dislike it? what do you like or dislike about it? most importantly, if you don't think it is poetry, why not? what makes it not poetry? what would make it poetry? should they be read individually? as a whole? how does this change what is written? or how you read it?

personally, i love them. they are gentle and small, and use gentle small words. they crawl into your mind, and over your body, and all of a sudden, you are thinking about vegan shoplifting hamsters, and you feel enchanted and disenchanted at the same time. i don't know if i enjoy them the most out of all poetry i've read recently - Carol Ann Duffy resonates more, moves me more. but the subtly of the colouring of boredom, solitude, confusion, the breakdown of a relationship, sitting on gmail chat talking shit for hours rather than doing anything, eating vegan food to be moral, and... what i best call ennui, is what he paints so well, and it is when you read a collection of them that they creep up on you.

my monologue after reading maybe 30, 40 pages of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Poetry starts to slow down, and stutter along blank lines. it observes and sinks into my brain. and the words empty out of what you see. it is a day to day observation. it is a step from one foot to the next, point by point. and i like that, and i don't see why that isn't poetry, or why it can't be.

heavy

2010-03-02T03:38:00.000-08:00

sometimes i wonder why i fight it. and then i remember.

but yeah. i spent today in bed, sleeping. when i say that, i don't mean lying around, relaxing. i was asleep until three pm, unbroken. i was in bed by 11pm the previous night. i'm not upset, or mentally fucked at the moment - i feel fragile, and soft, and easily knocked, but i am not depressed, just sore. and tired. and unable to move properly.

books. got huge new pile of wonderful, delicious books. read one so far -

i read it on sunday, and it was soft and gentle and dreamy. a good one. it's a part of my teen same-sex relationship collection. i got six for the collection in my Better World Books order. ASH is a fairy tale, and does the conventions of it well. softly, walking, gentle. i liked it, it did not challenge me.

next though, i'm going to read this:

I've added a link to the publisher on the side. Blake Butler is one of the editors of HTMLgiant, possibly my favourite blog at the moment. the book is one of the most exquisite looking items i've recieved in a long time. the publishers, fuck, are incredible. it's a part of my attempt to try to push my reading into new places, new writers, new publishers and see what people are doing. i am hungry to read it, but holding off a little because i am so excited by it. the first chapter, i read on the bus, out past belconnen. there was a huge family behind me, and a man who stank sitting near by. bunny was on my lap, struggling in his bag. it was all too much so i put it aside. soon. tonight.

sleep too. and flaxseed oil, and oh fuck, i need to get weetbix. and more books. no. no more books until i have finished the ones i have. saving. saving. uni work. ah. the list of shit i need to get done is drowning me.

rapture

2010-02-25T04:18:00.000-08:00

i am reading it again. oh lordy, oh lordy.

it is spectacular. it is huge and takes me far away, in small words. carol ann duffy, my god, breathless.

the darkness clears a little. heavy depression for last two days, clouding the day until 3 or 4, when i can get up and my joints can move again. it is slow and uncomfortable until then, and sad and dark, but i can move then, in the afternoon, the shade is comfortable and comforting and it is ok again.

i hope tomorrow i can rise up a little better with sunrise and not the afternoon. i have a parcel on my desk at work, and i am sick of sleeping all day in order to survive.

i have a 40% voucher at borders. i have a bad feeling i need to spend this tomorrow as a reward for going to work. self-bribing.

head above water. i feel like i am the last priority, the least important, the most invisible. the most superfluous and meaningless, like slip away, slip away, and ouch, it never hurts less, does it? it always hurts.

treading

2010-02-24T03:21:00.000-08:00

this will be fractured.

just finished reading this. thus begins moving to veganism.

it's been something i've been thinking about for awhile. is the benefit i gain from eating meat something i am comfortable with in the context of the harm it causes? it no longer is. and, tying into eating meat is dairy, and eggs, and leather, and other animal products. is the production, and consumption of these items worth the many issues involved? is it too much of a cost for me to forgo them? it no longer is.

fractured.

it's also an excellent book. measured in its approach, non emotive, respectful of all the individuals, from those factory farmers, and those consuming factory farmed goods, to strict vegans. at no time does it feel at though Singer is taking the moral high ground - at no point does it feel as though his mind is made up. it comes across that the ideology behind meat and animal products is being evaluated every step of the way, considered, and kindly so. it is easy to read, it does not hold back in evaluating the problems, but at the same time, does not go for shock value. it allows the reader to come away from the book with a reasoned approach, and a reasoned understanding of the issues.

i want another bookshelf.more.more.more.more.

i ate too soon to do yoga, and now i am exhausted. it's 10 pm, and i have only been awake since 6pm. four hours. too much to be awake. mind is foggy, foggy, too heavy, too heavy. it is lagging behind me, i walk too slow. i need to sleep. if i don't, it drives things underground. sleep heals me.

fire

2010-02-17T01:57:00.000-08:00

i am tired. at the moment, the air conditioning at work is infuriating me - it just doesn't work in my area. small thing, but it's uncomfortably warm, and not good for collection items. so this makes me crankier, and crankier, and more irritated than i would normally be.

and i am irritated on top of that, and sad and hurt and lonely.

so. i am making a list of things i like. making lists is one of the things i like, and it stops me sounding cranky all the time. see, i mainly use blogs to vent, not anything else, well, vent and write about books i've read. it's not representative. there are good things, an infinite number of them in my hands like sand, so i pull some out here, and show them to the light. show and tell.

Yoga. it makes me feel fuller, and more real than anything has in ages. it makes me feel happy and like my feet move more consciously and like my steps make me move.

the fact that Bee is safe.

this curry i made. it was so delicious, my lips are pursed and humming from the heat of it. and it's about a week's worth of food. good work, there.

my conference paper draft i am doing with J.at work. it's going super. we are getting step-by-step closer to having it in a conference, and i am really proud of myself, and j, for making it this far. and yeah, it feels like no one understands how important this it to me, but i called L, and mum, and a. at work, and lark, and i know they'll all be excited for us. and j and i are pleased with each other. this is good. i am working hard on my career.

cutting back my drinking.

my pets. big warm heart.

walking to work every so often, the way the air here smells before ten am, oh lord, it's beautiful. i may hate living here, but there are a lot of beautiful things about this repulsive city and the smell of the air is definitely one of them.

my tummy.

the poster i have on my wall above my bed. it has stars and trees and hands and the trees grow out of the hands.

sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed.

approaching autumn.

distance from past, and the forgetting it brings.

learning more about the area i am in at work, and getting better at my job.

looking (sort of) forward to study. the fact i am trying really hard to be gentle on myself, and remind myself that i can apply myself. i can do well. i can work hard. and i will.

babysitters club femme-slash

buddy, (my sister's cat) being ok.

pictures on my wall.

books. my cave of them. let them fall down on my body.

not sitting back and letting people say shit that bothers me. starting to assert myself and not feel like i need to be trod on anymore. getting something back of myself, again. stop throwing it out, lady. it's valuable.

not enough

2010-02-15T00:02:00.000-08:00

i read my wonderful beee's journal, and oh god, i smell dry air and sweat and somewhere far away. and god, i long for something to happen. i feel silent here. this place, this way of living, it seems to negate humanity, that rare, raw, beautiful, flesh ripping struggle, and sinks down into ennui. ennui is the perfect, perfect description for this revolting town. in summer, it hovers in the huge blue sky, in the perfect streets with seventies architecture and organised garbage bins. it infuses all of us, from one body sprawled on a couch to another, one set of minds all vacant, moving from one mildly amusing you tube clip to another.

we are hungry, but all we eat is rice. we are rich, so so so rich and yet, we pour out our spare change and look at it, desperate and frustrated after spending every cent on shit we don't want. the big leaves on the lines of maple trees, eurocentric invaders, are still green, and heavy, and everything moves slow. when it rains, people pull faces at the inconvenience. my shoes i bought cheap leaked walking to yoga, and there were little ponds in there, and there was something wonderful about how cold and wrinkly my toes were. but that was about as alive as i felt, cold rain on my calf muscle as the rest of me is under an umbrella and i rush towards the shops, towards the things-i-do-not-need.

i go, shop to shop, pausing over more books more books more more, you don't understand, i need them all i need to consume them i need them like a second skin, because THEY are the only things that make me feel alive, that and fucking, and my pets, and that occasional moment of awareness i get. i tie my hands behind my back, and buy too much food, and plan meals instead, because it stops me buying to ease the ennui. i pause and lightly finger stores, items, the ground, an icecream that will make me feel slightly sick. i walk, my shoes squelching, my skin on my feet folding in.

when i wake up, i feel like my dreams were more real than this automation is. there is no strong pungent odour that makes me feel something real, and there is no drive under my skin making me catch my breath with the beauty of it all. there is just one step after another. it's not calm, or dramatic, or anything at all. it's not a peaceful sort of quietness, it's just that pause before something happens. only, only nothing actually does.

day

2010-02-13T21:37:00.000-08:00

along with what seems to be many people, i dislike valentines day. not with a passion; i am fairly indifferent to it, actually. it just strikes me as stupid, and false, and not a genuine way of one human being expressing to another that they care, for any other reason than it is A Day where this is What We Do. it's not special or lovely, just dull and, well. silly.

last valentines day, i was given a home made card.
a few weeks later, i broke up with him for being a child.
he told me we could make it work, so i tried, but one week later, he changed his mind, broke up with me, started dating someone else that evening, and
a month or so later, they were engaged, and she was pregnant.

ha. so, forgive me if my faith in love is far from devout. he is just a bad taste in my mouth now, a massive, ugly, old mistake i never should have made. but i do not trust Declarations of HUGE Epic Devotion, or of the Passion and Love and Fullness of Adoration. i find them wanting, and as though they hide something else. the more words you need to use to tell me something, the more likely it's not being communicated properly, or you don't really mean it.

i would rather nothing was said than a lie, and i would rather be alone than be with someone just because they felt romance and passion was beautiful, irrespective of the situation, or because they were too scared to be alone.

i can see Creepy Man, (my neighbour) in a pair of shorts and nothing else, sitting on his computer. he keeps leering across the courtyard in my direction and it unsettles me.
morning yoga was brilliant, left me feeling more alive and awake than i did before. finally finding exercise i enjoy has been a long painful process. i am glad i have.

rocking chair

2010-02-12T18:36:00.000-08:00

this is my new chair.

bunny seems to approve of it.

Recent book acquisitions :

I've been meaning to buy a copy ever since i read about it on Jeanette Winterson's website. so far, it is incredibly. utterly, breathtakingly incredible. it makes me wish impossible things, and makes me hungry. it makes me sit in the rain and feel like the tears are not salty. oh oh oh. it is beautiful.

and this one, i just found randomly in a bookstore. series of short stories, (yes, one by Jeanette Winterson... theme much?) for a really amazingly cheap price. collect em all, i say. i love short stories though. they are a beautiful place to play in language, and form, and deliciousness.

i'm thinking about trying my hand/fingertips at poetry again some time. it likely won't see the light of day... i feel self concious about whatever i write, poetrywise, and i doubt it'd be of much literarrrrrry worth, whatever i splutter out. i haven't found the voice yet, my voice, any voice. minimal words, sketching shapes with a few lines and letting our hearts fill in the rest? i just don't know, i really don't.

nor am i sure what i am trying to say.

and that is ok.

long day

2010-02-10T04:53:00.000-08:00

with too much movement.

i got home, and went to get out of the car i was driven home in. across the road from my apartment complex, there used to be an emergency centre for animals - it's recently moved across town, but with very little publicity, and without changing the directory online. i saw a couple, one in the car, and the other with something wrapped in a blanket buzzing the door and pacing.

i ran over to them, and called my housemate who could check the new location online for me. a little dog was in the man's arms, wrapped in a gray blanket, his nose poking out, his face wet and his terrier hair sticking up. he was crying, wailing, so high pitched and heartbroken that i wanted to cry with him. it hurt to hear it, to see these tiny little toes poking out of the blanket, hearing him cry. they got in the car, drove off with the address, clearly panicked and heartbroken and distressed beyond belief. their baby, their little one, oh god, oh god.

too much drama, too much pace and fury and temperaments and speed and abject. it is too much, i want to slow down to vegan cupcakes and hair cuts and cuddles and rabbits.

expectations

2010-02-09T05:13:00.000-08:00

there are times when you know things may, no, likely will happen. and then they do, and you understand then that you could not actually be prepared for how you feel.

one of the people who i consider a soul - mate - a friend who has changed my life and saved my life in more ways than i can count - had a very close call. vague vague, yes yes, because her battle is not for the little-ness of my blog, my tiny sand pit where i put words into buckets and prop them up until they fall... she is much greater and bigger than that.

but she is breathtaking. she is strong, and wise, and i would die for her. she is brave, and incredible, and full of life and fire and energy, and if a single person tries to hurt what she is doing, i'll stop at nothing to bring that down as fast as i can, with peace, yes, but i will.

i first saw her outside a cafe. it was under a year ago, oh yes. she was tiny, this beautiful tiny punk angel with a skateboard and a beautiful shy grin, and a wild mane of black hair and with studs in her cheeks - cigarette from her fingers. she loved the bunnies straight away. she walked into my sloppy, disorganised house, and just took to it, and was excited by my nest of a room, its strange smells, my own eccentricities and the fact i am a pain in the arse to live with. she took all this, all the dullness and the confusion i was feeling, the blank walls and my blank and cold and heaving sobbing lonely heart (i'd just had the worst break up i've experienced) and made everything beautiful again.

i spoke to her today for the first time since she went away. hearing her voice again made me almost cry. i cannot say how much i love this girl, how wonderful and magical she is. and she's safe for now, and i will fight for her in my tiny tiny snuffle nosed bunny, far away city sort of way, however i can. because she is Something Else. she touches things and makes them magical. this city is colder and uglier without her, in more ways than i can say. this country is.

when someone you love like that is in danger, it changes everything. your body seizes up, muscles under your skull frozen into place. your fingers cannot move right. your heart cannot move right. NOTHING moves right. because you want to run to them and save them, faster than light, but there's nothing you can really do. and you realise this just collapses over and over itself for so many people all around the world.

she loved autumn, and owls, and soy milk poured over blueberries. she is a vegan, with the most amazing hair on earth, and adorable denim skirts with leopard print and cheetah patches. she is compassionate and fiery and intelligent and sharp, SO sharp, but the kindest, most gentle soul on earth. we watched the bunnies in the apartment, drinking goon from the bag, saying 'hoppity hoppity hop!' and photocopying random items in the apartment on the printer.

love.

shiver

2010-02-07T02:12:00.000-08:00

a teen novel that i enjoyed, but loathed the end of.
Shiver
was going fine, slow and lazy and not too much to worry about, only the cold and days getting shorter, until a stupid conflict got shoved in the end. it sped it up far too much, and made me feel uncomfortable. a shame, the book was otherwise wonderful.

i'm now trawling my blogs for interesting sounding new fiction, and trying to collect old stuff that's decent and i've somehow missed. i feel i should read some Richard Yeats, just because Tao Lin's named his new book after him. i also want to read The Old Man and The Sea
because, not only is it something i am Supposed To Read, it actually sounds interesting.

i had Yoga today. i am surprised how wonderful i feel after it. i think this is going to be very, very good for me - the monkey mind is stiller, slower, better.

operation Being A More Constructive Human is going ok. less drinking, tick. exercise, tick. cooked dinner, packed lunches, tick. and a decent enough amount of groceries for this week too. once spending is controlled better, things will be swimming.

purple

2010-02-05T19:42:00.000-08:00

hair dye afternoon itchy fingers. my lizards are eating. they are happy with this, tasty crumbs on their little faces, running their faces inside a plastic dish for more. emma gave the rats a fig. she is visiting from sydney and i adore her, bright orange hair like a brilliant gorgeous pumpkin.

i miss my b. she's far away, faraway secret pathways, off, off saving the world, and she saved mine, you know, when i found her on facebook. i miss her each day. me and the boy posted a photo of the Palestine tent at the multicultural festival today. the boy didn't buy lemonade from the israaeli tent. it's our way of protesting. ha.

i feel sensible today, clear headed and real again. i need hard carnality to function. it's like hunger, or exhaustion for me - when i don't have intense physical intimacy, a part of me erodes and i start to go cardboard box inside out, fill me, fill me, FILL ME, until each cell in my body is screaming hollering begging pleading fighting tearing to be fucked. and then i am, and the storm is over the air smells fresh and i breathe again.

i've got a swag of books on order. i want more. another Tao Lin, 'scorched atlas' 'The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis (Little House on the Bowery)' a stack of stuff for uni... now i am hungry for more more more to stretch my reading out like a hungry ghost....

the baby sitters club

2010-02-04T21:00:00.000-08:00

i used to write poems about the baby-sitters club.

i want to photoshop bauldrillard's face onto the cover of 'boy crazy stacey'. i like the idea of Toby the cute lifeguard, being bauldrillard's alter-ego.

i wished i could have been claudia, the hot artist, japanese-american one. but at heart, i think i was just mary-anne, the nerd who cried a lot. i think she's bisexual. i have nothing, however, to base this on.

long week. skin crawling. my kitchen smells so bad that is has become kind of interesting, and i don't want to clean it.

there is only one thing on my mind and it is driving everything else out.

road and things

2010-02-02T22:13:00.000-08:00

i think the mood that hung over me is mainly a result of seeing "the road". i knew it would be utterly brutal, and make me feel like a skinned animal. however, knowing that was how i would feel was utterly different to actually feeling like that.

not that i would dissuade people from seeing it - however - fuck. it was intense. i'm not in a hurry to see it again.

i start yoga this weekend. should be good. planning Papers and Writing and Things, as well as Uni and Work. the hive of activity tends to drag me out of the dull, quiet boredom that lays over me. movement. it's good. my reading however, is not going so well. not as much as i would like to be doing. cutting out drinking will help this, i think. not sure how. it might though.

blergh

2010-02-01T01:37:00.000-08:00

feeling slightly less horrified by the world now. a lot of sleeping.

a lot.

back to an old home at work - the wonders of Manuscripts. it makes me happy, all these little pages, all these little fragments, you will never know what you find. and my productivity and planning is paying off. i am enrolled in uni. i have Ideas For Conferences. i have direction, and structure, and that's actually keeping me from falling into the big fat gaping hole i normally would about now. it's a little net. it's good, it's showing me another thing i can do to keep sane.

structure is actually what i need, very desperately. structure and discipline, rules that i arbitrarily set up and force myself to follow. it makes life simpler for me, and clearer. i can follow, i can walk, one foot, another, another, and follow the line on the footpath. i force myself into things, and i am fine. i swim. because i can swim. it is ok. one step. after. the other.

broken

2010-01-31T02:57:00.000-08:00

i honest to god hate myself sometimes. i hate my stupid cowardice, and how much i drink, of how afraid i am of losing people and things, of my filth and my casual way of standing, i hate how smart i am, but how FUCKING STUPID i am, how lost i feel, how i forget what i am doing or why i am doing it, or where i am.

upswing

2010-01-28T23:34:00.000-08:00

yes. give me plans, and then things pull back together rapidly.

Masters - enrolled in, paper work done, ready to post

Paperwork to get funding for ALIA2010 - submitted to work

Projects i was doing - Finished and ready to go to a different area on monday

Amazing conference - planning stages, time to submit two proposals

teen lesbian novels - collecting the missing ones

offfff and running. yes. intellectual stimulation fires something in my brain and makes me feel human again. i can dig my teeth into STUFF again. i have something there, in my mouth, to taste and hold. it is sweet.

care to?

2010-01-27T22:52:00.000-08:00

afternoon heat, post work, sitting on my bed with my shoes still on. i'm feeling slightly too full after eating too much at a work afternoon tea.

the last few days have been eaten. i find the internet eats my time all too much - i just sit here and all of a sudden it's been absorbed like pouring water into a bucket of milk. i can't see it anymore. i can't see my face. and i am hungry.

and i am edgy at the moment - starting to feel itchy under the fingers again, it's sliding under my flesh and under my breath and under my time, feeling this need to move, to do, to go, to find, to ... dig holes in things just so they leak. it's an uncomfortable feeling, ants in the brain? ants on my mind. little black crawling dots moving very fast, purposefully, but i don't know where or why. i just know, i need to move. but i don't know what to do. it's frustration; this odd static feeling that grows in this repulsive town and spreads out under me and i lie on it and galllommmphf it takes me up and down.

i guess if i read, it might slow things down. it might give me something resembling discipline. i'm waiting for my enrollment kit from csu; i'm finishing my masters in order to make myself employable in a Real City, like melbourne. somewhere that, when i wonder what to do on a thursday night, i run through the one cinema, the few generic houses i could be in, and flat screens where i watch other people do things. and i'm tired of that. i don't like the screens.

right now, i'm drawing bunnies. i don't care if my 'art practice' (and that's an inaccurate description, i feel, it's giving it too much credit) consists of drawing bunnies. it's something. i'm drawing, at least. kind of.

honour

2010-01-25T23:43:00.000-08:00

Some honoured me by giving me
the secret of their works
[32]

sappho

a friend sent me a text message that was a poem. it made me profoundly happy. it just said:

condense the space tomorrow nigh/ for face & orbit do silence defy
i'll interpret this as 'call me tomorrow.'

this month, i am trying to drink less. this is because drinking is all i can think about come afternoon. and yet, it doesn't make me happy.

i guess it's systemic, booze, in everyone i know. we are bored. we are just wanting to push our minds out a little and make them wobble. but i'd rather wobble less.

you were made for poetry

2010-01-25T19:52:00.000-08:00

i just binged something ugly. three books. on top of the four on saturday. on top of the four i ordered last month. on top of the fact i now want Tao Lin's back catalogue, because now i am sitting with Shoplifting, it's digging a bigger hole/whole in me, and i want more. not because i could ever, or would ever, want to write like that. but simply because i don't. and i like that distance.

two volumes of poetry. Anne Carson, and Carol Ann Duffy. and a penguin classic. i feel i should have read more of them. i've read a significant number, but really, not that many. it needs work.

Magazines I Like

lip - a canberra based teen magazine for girls, with lots of feminism and no bullshit thinking for them. it's about travel, and history, books, logic, fashion. it's not a simple, dumb magazine, but a wonderful, rich, and interesting magazine that talks to girls, and WOMEN, on their level.

frankie - australian magazine with beautiful layout, occasionally wonderful but consistently quite good and funny articles, and interesting drawings. and craft. lots of stunning craft. there is one regular writer who is painfully fatist, and it makes me angry though. i think i might write and tell them that.

bitch - a feminist view of pop culture. that really says it all. i subscribed for years, and recently, when the dollar was up, re-subscribed. now i need to go and fill in the back issues i am missing. it's a glorious magazine to read, and re-read.

the lifted brow - more a journal than a magazine, it is a collection of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism and comics, based out of brisbane and melbourne, with a CD of fantastic music you should listen to.

this year, i am subscribing to mcsweenies, i think, and picking up a few back issues.

Reading Teen Novels in Borders

this is one of my hobbies. i go in for a few hours, curl up on their comfortable couches and read teen novels. i read one today, "Outside In" which was a wonderful novella about a group of teenagers. it was humble and undramatic, which is something i enjoy in teen novels, and the writing rarely overbalanced into melodrama. the movement between the characters is what made it strong. i feel glad i looked at that cover and picked it up. it was a good random choice.

light

2010-01-25T03:19:00.001-08:00

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin, book three for the year...

i didn't find it depressing, nor bleak in that ugly sort of way that grunge novels are. it was touching - detached but not unemotional - it was that disconnected replaying of events in a small, moment by moment, and spacious sort of way. i like Tao Lin's poetry a little bit more, and his shorter, surreal stories more too... they are gentler still and rougher edged. this was slow, and boring, but in a wonderful way. in a strangely joyous way. i don't know if that was intended. i found it hopeful. it wasn't that the characters were unpleasant, or unemotional - the writing was distant, but not without being touching. it was that lack of assurance of how anyone is supposed to feel, or how you are supposed to manage your feelings or understand your feelings or move within your feelings.

i liked it a lot.

it was especially interesting given that i'd just read Slaughterhouse Five. it was a strange feeling to be placing something as monumental as war next to the monumental ennui of that quiet despair of inner city suburban apathy, where you are everywhere and going nowhere all at once. you see madness and strength and vivid colours in Slaughterhouse Five, while Shoplifting fades from one space to another, like sap down a tree.

if i could marry the guardian, i would.

2010-01-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

for serious. how AWESOME is this?

The Romantic Poets

they are publishing a series of pamphlets on the Romantics. i want them desperately and am trying to find someone who'll send them to me from the UK. lamentably, this is not as easy as one would hope. we'll see. hopefully.

LITTLE PAMPHLETS!

i like pamphlets. in other news, i am still having metadata issues at work. i am dizzy. i am more than a little cranky. and i am tired. and i want to read the stuff on the guardian's website.

small press publishers

2010-01-23T22:59:00.000-08:00

this is a new interest of mine - looking into intriguing small press publishers, and small literary magazines around the world.

see, i want to write again. i don't know where to start - that's mainly why i am using the blog a lot. i don't tag it enough, nor do i have a lot of readers at the moment - no publicity, not that actively involved online, all those sorts of things... but where it comes to writing and publishing, i don't know where to start. i don't know what to say, or how to say it, or who to say it to. and sadly, i am fairly reluctant to publicise my blog too much, due to the presence of an angry, unhinged ex boyfriend from six years ago who's emailed me about offhanded comments i've made in it. that bothers me deeply, and i don't want to encourage that sort of madness.
i guess i just need to Do It. you know. play with words. read. be alone. sit. exist. think. do. not so much apathy, and letting things happen. i need words like this, i need words and i need to be in them. i need my time with them. and unfortunately, it's practice and time and repetition that improves. and feedback and audience. blogs/diaries are good because they get you used to communicating in written words, and get you used to your own rhythms of writing and the way to pull the words together. but i need more than that, i need to write stories, and poetry, and .. and things.

i need to push my reading too - into MORE and Different. what i'm thinking of is investing in McSweeney's for the year, as well as a few choice back issues, and Wave Books yearly subscription - all their published material for a year, for $75.

and i need to write.

Today's Lizard Photo -- Dr Cuddles and Splodgy spooning. adorable.

flesh

2010-01-22T23:39:00.000-08:00

specifically cooking, stinking, charred, heavy scented flesh.

i am a terrible vegetarian. i struggle at it endlessly, fighting between morality and my desire to eat it. i have no moral reason to eat meat, and plenty of moral reasons not to eat meat. whenever i think about it, i feel ill to the bone at what happens - the violence perpetrated against non-human animals, the body of suffering by creatures that, were i to know on an individual level, i would like. it's not about Eating Meat Being Natural. it's about - is it moral? is it right? is it something i am comfortable doing? and it is not. though it's a lot harder when you are surrounded by people eating meat.

on a brighter note, i went to Bowral today. this is a town in the southern highlands of NSW full of bookstores. and some cute little cafes, and pretty things, and trees and hills and soft grass. and bookstores. i restrained myself, considerably, and walked away, buying only four books. that's quite amazing for me. one was an early 20th century collection of shelley's pamphlets which looks lovely - beautiful soft binding.... and other things i've been after for awhile...

excitingly, my copy of the wonderful Sexy Bodies - The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

edited by the wonderful Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn - had included in the back a magazine clipping of a recipe for gingerbread cookies, and icing, and ideas for a family Easter. pretty brilliant.

it's re-ignited the desire for academia, looking at my collection of divine books on gender and culture and semiotics. i feel hungry for study, i feel hungry for writing and learning. this year, if it is the only thing i achieve, i am going to resolve the gutwrenching anxiety university study makes me feel, so i can go on, and write and write and study and say what i need to say. however i need to say it.

in other news, Librarything now has all these extra awesome features. this is not good. all i want to do tonight is go through, editing it and tiding records, scanning covers and doing those sorts of fun things with my saturday night. Because. I. Am. Awesome. i sadly am... wary of linking from there to here, just due to the fact that my librarything has proximity to others.

The Archive or the Trace: Cultural Permanence and the Fugitive Text

2010-01-20T20:42:00.001-08:00

The Archive or the Trace: Cultural Permanence and the Fugitive Text

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screen

2010-01-18T23:15:00.000-08:00

i am watching Stephen Fry's documentary on bipolar at the moment.
it is wonderful, but actually quite confronting. the symptoms with me onset around... 22, 23? before that, i had pretty much, simple, uni-polar depression. i'd have less depressed times, times of elevated mood, but never anything vaguely manic. but, the older i've gotten the more pronounced it has become. not so much so that i run off rails, or have delusions of grandeur - the psychosis tends to be flickering around the edges of my mind rather than all consuming. but it's there.

seeing it being talked about so openly, by so many people, in such a compassionate way, is enlightening. i recommend it to anyone who is, or who has a loved one with bipolar.

my blogs are the best evidence of my disordered thinking. if you follow them through from 2006 or so, you can see the mood moving up and down, here and back again, in a rough, curious cycle. sometimes stress pushes it forward - either the depressive or the manic. but it's clear. when i was first diagnosed by a psychiatrist after a few days of feeling so suicidal i could not move then jittery and excitable the next week, during a time of extreme stress, i told my best friend. he said 'oh god, now you say it, it is SO obvious.' and it is. anyone who has known me for large periods of time can see it - anyone who has been very close to me, or lived with me, knows exactly how it looks and how it gives and takes from me.

and i can manage it largely, and i know when i cannot. i can watch the line, and if i cross it, draw back. as one of the men say, basically (paraphrased) 'it's all worth it, when you have walked with angels'... and mania is more vivid and beautiful and rich and delicious than any drug i've taken.

it floods you and you suck it in, deeper and deeper, like every colour is swimming out of you. but there is not the detachment that comes with acid. it's so real, it is so inside of you, pouring out and in. it is more alert and organised than amphetamines. it is more loving and tactile than ecstasy and it is so much more wild than alcohol. it is more embracing and softer than mushrooms, it is harder than cocaine rush. it is like nothing else i have felt or been through or been to, and i would not wish away those moments, where the sky parts and the world is so real. so breathtakingly, exquisitely real, that you cannot force enough into you.

i lapse back though, into the normality. the depression is a lot easier to manage with mindfulness based therapy - it slows it from descending out of reach. i guess the pills might take the edge of it, but honestly, i don't think they do a thing anymore. they sure as hell don't stop the depression coming, thief in the night, taking everything it can fit in a big black sack.

i can rest it back, and calm it down now. i try not to let it take me completely, against my better desire, because i know if it does, there is no return. i'd like to have it take me, the ocean out to sea, out to sea we go.... the moods can hit sharp and fast, or last for a week or so. it's not really clear what it is, or what happens with me. i sure as hell don't get it.

but i just need to read, and write, and paint, and work and eat, and breathe my way through it and i keep walking

2010-01-17T20:39:00.001-08:00

it's my fault, in the sense that i end up convinced that i am being a total idiot for caring about shit and that i should harden the fuck up and not make such a big deal about little things until i get really upset and really sad and really mental because rather than just saying something i ended up all neurotic and demented and stupid and convinced that if i say something i'm going to upset them uselessly for something i should have worked out because it was my own damn issue in the first fucking place.

i just get tied up and not sure if it does matter or if it doesn't matter or if it's something i can fix without asking the other party to change or if it's something that can be changed or if i am being a dickhead or if i am going to hurt someone or if i should shut up or if i should just give up on trying to relate with people at all on any level and run off to japan and join a fucking nunnery or something. i hate my brain. this is what comes of NOT having relationships as a teenager because i swear to god that is where people work shit out.

simple

2010-01-17T04:11:00.000-08:00

why is it that something so simple seems to allude me so completely?

there are not a lot of things in life that i really, really want. it's very simple, really. i want a job that i enjoy. i want friends that i love. i want little animals around me. i want to be able to live with myself. i want a partner who loves me, who i love, who wants me, and who i want. i want to sleep well at night, and be awake in the day. i want, one day, to share a house with someone who loves me, and who i love, someone who wants me, and who i want. i want some plants that i don't kill, music i like, words that i can make into sentences, and books i can read. i want someone who wants to talk about books with me, whose eyes light up just knowing i am alive.

i want to not feel so frightened and insecure and lost and a l o n e. i want to not feel like all i do is fuck up and fuck up the one thing that really, is more important to me than anything else. why the fuck am i such a pathetic, useless failure at this? why does it have to hurt so much, so very much of the time? why can i not just get my fucking shit together? why am i such an unattractive, undesirable creature? why does it feel like years since someone's wanted to rip my clothes off with desire and passion and love and ... that sense of wanting someone else?

what am i fucking missing? what am i doing so very, very wrong? i am so tired. really. of not having this. and it hurts. i see the monster who snapped me into countless pieces - promised me the world and then essentially told me i was not enough for him anymore, i see he has all this, and i am jealous beyond comprehension. not of his new partner - i do not want to be with him - but of HIM. i am jealous that he, this ... this... beast who made me feel like nothing, who drove my sense of worth into the ground, now he has a partner, a house, a baby - someone who wants to sleep with them every night, and build a life with them. and i? i feel sometimes like the person i am seeing is happy to not see me for a week or two, or more. that once or twice a week, a few hours, watching tv, not saying a word, is all he wants of me, and i am just not enough at all. not pretty or nice or sweet or good enough at all. i feel like nothing. i feel too big and too small and too smart and too dumb and too ... too... arghtghghg.

in months, he's stayed at my house once. once. i do not know why this hurts so much, but it does. i am crying myself to sleep again. it's been a long time. but it's hurting so much, and i feel so ugly and small and like i have nothing to say of interest anymore, and nothing beautiful, and nothing magical, and nothing hidden, and nothing nothing nothing and i am disappearing and it doesn't even Matter now.

and i don't know what i am supposed to do.

rain

2010-01-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

... storm rain, coming in my window. just a spray of it.

i quote the effie dee here, when i say 'something in me broke last night' though for me, it was different. it was past a place of sadness and monsters in the dark, and shadows under the bed. treading water lightly next to me, just under the surface, they lurk. and then they swoop the second i am quiet. it covers me, and it is dark and i am broken.

but i was not scared.

i can't say how amazing that is. i feel broken. the sticky gum is falling. i am not depressed though, i am not terrified, and i am not alone. i just feel fractured and broken and very very fragile. i walk softly and gently, and carefully over the glass i've left behind. there is nothing solid about me. there is nothing solid around me. it is all made of shadows and smoke and mirrors and it can, with a gust of wind, reform into new shapes at any moment in time.

i don't know if i can fix this, or how i could, or if i even will. i don't know if it needs to be fixed. there is something wholly broken about me though. it doesn't mean i cannot function, it doesn't mean i am useless. it just means something doesn't quite work right.

the air smells soft now. not like anything i can put into words, or analogize or mock into phrases. it smells good, and wet and sharp. it smells very different from brisbane rain. canberra winter, the smell out in the open, in winter time, is one of the most beautiful things i've ever experienced.

i need to sleep more. i need my room, and my walls, and my nest, and my bunnies.

PICK THE SCAB~

2010-01-15T00:09:00.001-08:00

why do i do it? why do i? why dig up corpses and then act all shocked when they are rotting and filled with maggots and make you gag and feel ill?

i can't help it. i cannot help it. it's some pathetic compulsion, watching the blood gather the tides under my skin after i pull off a half healed chunk of tissue. it's itching, god! that's because it's healing, i know, but FUCK IT, i want to just.. get, owch! get it off, oh fuck, it's bleeding again....

why do i want it? it's the same as wanting to model naked.

though my flesh exposes me so much less than my handwriting. that, to me, is a greater intimacy than my body, because it comes from somewhere deeper than my breasts. it's stronger than that, and much more terrifying. if i ever give you something i made with my hands, marked with my writing, or my drawings, or some sort of intimacy, that is so much more real to me than nudity or sex. it is then that i trust you. it is then that i love you. the last time i did that, it was origami.

i haven't done origami since then. the site of the paper, well, it's buried in a drawer, and i pretend it isn't there. oh, no. i did a mental health training course and spent the whole time shaking, making tiny tiny paper cranes out of the sheet of note paper, and the back end of the name tag the gave us, the glossy side of a sticker. i divided it up as small as i could, to make as many tiny birds as possible. i made a tiny chinese vase, and i was going to make a box to hold them all, but i could not make my fingers form it.

i threw them all out at the end of the day because they, like my handwriting and folded sheets of paper, mean nothing all that important anymore.

i read a teen novel

2010-01-14T00:21:00.000-08:00

and it left me feeling miserable.

it's this nostalgia i have for an idea of adolescence that does not exist, and this idea of 'life' that you hold when you are 16 and your life is ahead of you, and your teenage years are behind, and these Experiences you are supposed to have had, well they didn't happen like that. and then you keep going, you walk forward, one day at a time, breathing slowly and deeply to stave off the anxiety. you walk and you walk, and you get older, and slowly, things do happen, your life happens around you, and all of a sudden, you realise the life that you see, and you read, and you dreamed of, well, it never did happen and it never could have.

i read these books, about teenagers who have boyfriends or girlfriends and their lives are swept up in the majesty of the drama. it is breathtaking, how much stronger things feel then, or how we remember them as feeling so much stronger than they really were, or how we lack the capacity to put things in context. then all of a sudden, you are there. you're older now, and you're a clever swine, and those dreams, they are the only things that ever stood by you.

and it never did happen like that. you end up looking back at the two marriages you destroyed before your 25 birthday. you look back, and there's no person there now whose eyes light up just knowing you exist - you'd had that, oh yes, but always fucked it up, time and time and time again, and time is against you now. because you are slipping away. it's only 25, but the clock is ticking, and old men love you for some reason, and you can sense that it's growing, whatever draws them in like a moth to a flame, you know you aren't there yet, but it'll ebb and flow and you'll fade away, like everything dead in bad poetry and songs. it's all going behind you. not the best part of life, or the worst. just time.

there's no little cottage. there's no one dying to fall asleep beside you every night, no one who would die for you, no one who wants nothing more than to have a little person with you, no one who just wants to cook dinner and curl up on the couch, backs resting against each other, as you both read yourselves to sleep. that's a stupid dream, elizabeth. it'll never happen, you overinflated intellectual intimidator. every lover you've had in years is scared of your room, and your space, and your scent, and your very being. you are too much. be less. be less. subside. take it back until you are small enough to fit where you belong because you just scare them, and it leaves you with nothing.

and god, i am trying. i am whispering so softly i cannot hear what i am saying. i'm trying to be good, i'm trying to be as small as my body. i'm not even singing along to the smiths now.

but still.

there's more to life than books you know, but not much more.
there's more to life than books, you know, but not much more.

it's on my thigh. it bled when i got the tattoo done, little beads of blood forming as the needle dug in, higher and higher, me cringing more as it rose up. it is a part of me now, and no one will take that away. no one will take my words away, even when i am left with nothing, sitting on dirty red sheets, up to my elbows in tattered half-read books of poetry, unable to sleep again.

summer

2010-01-11T04:09:00.000-08:00

it's very warm at the moment. not steaming, it is dry, like the heat when you first open an oven and stand in front of it. it's pushing all around you, touching in every part, until your hair hangs lank on your neck, damp from sweat, and you wake again, near sleepless nights.

i'm not sleeping at the moment. by which i mean, i asleep for a relatively normal 7,8 hours a night. i'm both working on doing this, intentionally, and finding myself less tired. i am trying to push past ten thirty every night - cooking helps, writing does too, reading, talking to people on the phone... moving pictures on the screen just make me doze. television makes me limp inside - i mean, yeah, one or two episodes of something, once a week, i am fine with. but any more tv than that saps out my will to move, or live, or create. it makes me feel so old inside, and slow and dull.

my kitten called, purring at a book exchange at me. we're planning a possible meeting in a tiny country town filled with books. i am going to try and bully the kitten into going to alice springs with me. there will be bouncing.

i finished 'the brief wonderous life of oscar wao', which was... i don't know. i felt no emotions for the characters more than a bit of a slight sympathetic touch. not a poignant twist when things happened to destroy or enlighten them, just.. well, a detachment. the writing, also, was nothing new, or spectacular, or anything old and particularly grand. it was fun, don't get me wrong, and i finished it - i don't bother finishing books that i get nothing from - but i don't feel like i'm taking anything deep from it. not that it's easy to say, i'll need to give it time. reflection is proving that it created the atmosphere wonderfully - there were moments of real evocation where you could smell it. but the detachment was there, when i felt it needed intimacy. still.

strangely, 'the sea, the sea,' despite the fact it was boring me, has dug in quite deep, and my mind reflects in that iris scented ocean often.

i'll go back there, soon, i think.

and now, for more order and organisation, and places. my brain fascinates me, this ebb and flow and desire for sense that floods me, from time to time.

This Year's books

2010-01-10T04:21:00.000-08:00

bThis list is just fiction and non-fiction novels. i don't include poets that i am reading in here because i do not read poetry anthologies beginning to end. when i feel i've become intimate with a book of poetry, or the work of a poet, i'll include it in here under a separate heading

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Diaz 10/01/10

Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut 24/01/10

Shoplifting from American Apparel Tao Lin 25/01/10

Outside In Chrissie Keighery 26/01/10

Shiver Maggie Stiefvater 7/02/10

The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter Peter Singer, Jim Mason 24/2/10

Ash Malinda Lo 28/02/10

The Easter Parade: A Novel Richard Yates 5/03/10

Hello Groin Beth Goobie 9/03/10

Crush (Orca Soundings) Carrie Mac 11/03/10

Gravity (Young Adult Novels) Leanne Lieberman 13/03/10

The Road Cormac McCarthy 23/03/10

The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis (Little House on the Bowery) Mark Gluth 8/4/10

Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (SB-The French List) Jean Baudrillard 20/5/10

About a girl Joanne Horniman 28/5/10

The Family Law Benjamin Law 30/5/10

Bed Tao Lin 3/6/10

Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan Mark Simpson 10/7/10

Hotel Iris: A Novel Yoko Ogawa 16/7/10

Liar Justine Larbalestier 19/7/10

Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)Truman Capote 8/8/10

furious oysters

2010-01-10T03:14:00.000-08:00

smiths related acquisition was merely $30. ftw!

in other news, remind me world, not to pick scabs. because sleepwalkers and insomniacs alike know what this looks like. and it's ugly and old and just breaks me. so go. just. go.

doing better than expected

2010-01-10T02:44:00.000-08:00

at Goals, already. savings going well. less conspicuous consumption, this is helped enormously by cooking, which i'm aiming to do every night, with a maximum of two nights Purchased food, but aiming for one or less... only one brunch, two coffee's per day, treats from home, lunch from home. so far...? so good.

i went swimming with dogs yesterday. a pudgy, lovable staffy pup crawled into my lap and licked my face enthusiastically. he had been paddling, all wet and soft, all paws and little nose, and he curled up on my lap like it was an island. a little girl was dragging him around lovingly, playing like two little creatures with nothing else but water and sand.

my skin is brisk, red, sore. my heart is brisk, red, sore, but for other reasons.

i'm not used to any sort of space where the time spent apart seems to be .. the preference to seeing me or touching me or having me around. i feel ugly and unwanted and over the top and dumb. and i don't think i am being needy. i just want to feel wanted, which shouldn't be too much to ask, but is a very difficult thing to ask when you don't have it.

i am starting to take pleasure in cooking, and fantasising about homewares and bookshelves for when i get My Little House. my little animals make me so happy, the way the lizards cut triangles into bananas, the way the bunnies just look at me, and snuggle in my lap sometimes, or leap around, aerobatic and slightly lopsided, and altogether silly. such joy. i cannot imagine life without animals. well, no, i can. i grew up without them, with the exception of a slow little budgy named buttercup, and my mnemeth, a lizard i had for two years in my teens. they punctuate that time with love. mnemey and i would watch tv - he'd sit on my arm beside me, little lizard snuggles, or curl up on a magazine rack. he lived in my room until he outgrew the tank in there, moving into a large glass tank out the back. he died after not eating for a long time, fussiness or sickness, it's hard to say. it hurts.

Little Words

2010-01-06T01:59:00.000-08:00

this year, it will be different. not a resolution, just a simple statement of fact. i am trying to form better habits - eating habits, sleeping habits, behavioural habits, exercise habits - and general wellness.

Yoga & pole dancing. book journal. money journal for saving. cooking MOST of the time. having healthy, quick dinner options available (cous-cous, anyone?). taking lunch to work. this is what i am working on. these small changes will actually start making a big difference.

BUDGET. BUDGET.

that's also important.

less drinking is a huge one. i'm going back to buying one beer when i want a drink, on the way home from work, rather than six packs. there is far too much booze going through this little body, and it needs to calm down.

i want to get my craft back on. when it's cooled down a little, i'm going back to finishing work on my spinning wheel. and then KNITTING come winter. the heat here just makes it too hard to knit, too sweaty on the palms.

Reading Goals for the Year

2010-01-04T22:45:00.000-08:00

Novels

Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie (own)
100 Years of Solitude G G Marquez (own)
A Void Georges Perec (own)
Life - A User's Manual Georges Perec (own)
The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch (own) (started)
The Old Capital Yasunari Kawabata (own)
UFO in her eyes Xiaolu Guo (own)
Collected Fictions Jorge Luis Borges (own)
Death At Intervals Jose Saramago (own)
The Double Jose Saramago (own)
Iceland's Bell Halldor Laxness (own)
Paradise Reclaimed Halldor Laxness (own)
The Tin Drum Gunter Grass (own)
Philosophers of Nothingness James Heisig (own)
The Mind of God Paul Davies (own)
Travels in Hyperreality Umberto Eco (own)

The Infinity of Lists Umberto Eco (don't own)

Authors i want to read more works of, but don't know what yet

Carol Shields

Poetry

Byron (re-read)
Shelley (re-read)
Keats (try again...)
Coleridge (try again)
Anne Sexton
Carol Ann Duffy
Adrienne Rich
Anne Carson
Philip Larkin

Professional Development books

Revolting Librarians (own)(started)
Revolting Librarians Redux (own)(started)
The Library At Night (own)

constructive

2010-01-03T03:02:00.000-08:00

turned non-constructive : idiotic argument with Mother over something trivial. frustrating. unfortunately, we both struggle to listen to each other, because we've said the same things over and over again. i am sure there is more to it than that, but it is head butting rams, over and over again.

today: rabbits and guinea pigs in petstore. we named them and watched them play. housecleaning. smell of orange. dinner. hair. bunnies. sleeping, always sleeping.

marking time. waiting for something to happen. reading. bitsy reading, nothing really grabbing me right now, unfortunately. the sea, the sea is leaving me dry.

fabulous short stories in 'the lifted brow, 5'

etc. etc. one of those weekends that is productive but leaves me feel that sort of waiting moments.

i thought about the things i've gained from each lover. it's something i try and focus on - the things that they gave me, or enriched in me:

1. shelley & byron. opened the library in my heart. Kawabata, and japanese literature. experimental thought- feminism/marxism. fucking. kafka. baudelaire.

2. the world. art. bourges, artaud, so much music i cannot start listing, more books, more things.... a lot of what we read, we took on together. it was an exchange. so the items matter less than the way of learning. removing a lot of what i had built up. the world.

3. opening another way of seeing. beirut. sufjan stevens.

4. holding my hand as i looked into an abyss. rich, juicy conversation. bauldrillard, zen buddhism, as viewed, as interrogated in different eyes. Perec. bachelard, camus. and on. and on. the ability to say when someone's behaviour is shit. the ability to accept difference, accept what isn't and appreciate what is, for what it is. growing with someone, watching them grow from up close, and afar. depth. time. space. it's hard to articulate the vantage with this in words, though i could, possibly, through interpretative dance.

5. comics. potato balls. larkin and auden. contemporary poetry. resilience from being shat on.

it's best to only look through them retrospectively. it's not exhaustive, in fact, it's barely more than tiny fragments of what i have from these people. it's a start though, gratitude for what i gained from each of these five individuals, more so than what the first and the last took away.

moments

2010-01-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

from time to time, instances seem to capture me as though i am seeing my own life for the first time. these are vague, disconnected feelings, that slip out of nowhere. i liken them to the buddhist description of enlightenment - being as though, for a moment you see past the clouds and glimpse the sky.

this one, i was at my lover's house. he was elsewhere, off getting ingredients to make soup for dinner. i was on the couch, reading a magazine; his housemates sat in front of the large screen television playing donkey kong. i am lying back, resting awkwardly as i try and read, the stuff i have bought with me is under the couch. it is hot, post new year, lazy - none of us have anywhere to go, and none of us are going anywhere, really. i am older than the rest of them by a couple of years, as least- between 2 and 5. i don't feel wiser. i am reading poetry.

the vision pans out, and i see it. i see it, these moments, this touch, my mind softly but firmly pushing past, and i feel it. i feel it wonderously, that boring simplicity of new years day, sitting on the couch, that ennui for once relatively comforting, that existence of slowness, of normal things like television and video games and soup for dinner and reading a magazine, and languorous afternoon heat, and the crab apples in the slightly abandoned looking front yard, and their housemates lovingly kept plants, and my lover's collection of guitars, of the bitemarks on my body, on the memory of sex, of the chocolate i am eating, of everything, just becomes so clear.

there's no way to properly articulate it, because it is simple. it is a slow pan around a room in a movie, monumentally basic, only punctuated with appropriate music, and made monumental by size. all of our quiet, insignificant lives, we are acting them out, we are taking photos of our day to day movement, we are updating our facebooks, we are sneaking upstairs for quick shags, we are dozing on the couch, we are moving, we are moving. there are few plans, quiet dreams, little disappointments, little earthquakes, and we keep going. and by god, it is beautiful.

i fall in love with the world in these moments. a part of me needs to break to become bigger, to fit all this feeling inside of it. oh yes, it breaks. oh yes, it grows. and yet, nothing is really happening.

because, really, nothing really happens.

and one for the end of year

2009-12-30T18:31:00.001-08:00

not sure if it is the best image of me out there, but it is a beautiful photograph.

this year, this godforsaken year is over. almost. counting down. under 12 hours. it's relatively empty symbolism, we are just marking time off, it doesn't MEAN things, it doesn't MEAN life will change. but i feel it, moving on.

i can. and it didn't.

2009-12-30T18:25:00.000-08:00

being

2009-12-27T05:16:00.000-08:00

being with some people is like pushing two ripe pieces of fruit together. the skin bruises across the points of contact. the flesh opens, splits. the juice runs out, and you lick it off your fingers and you taste it.

i am wearing a shirt with little tiny bunnies on it. they are upside down and i can see them clearly like that.

one day, i want to have a child. and i think that's ok. that day, however, is not today. that place is not here. it is in no way aligned with the life i am living, the place that i am, the person that i am. i am ok with this.

christmas usually makes me deeply sad. there is something about it that hovers over me, ominous and dark and ugly and i wait for it to pass. this year, it moved quietly over me, and now, it's another year until the next. this makes me happy.

i am staring down the barrel of the end of this year. i cannot articulate how happy this makes me, that this year is almost done; that i survived it, that i made my way out the other end, that i am still human, all too human, that the carnage is relative to the growth, that i have learned from my mistakes (a bit, i guess). the solidity of my thoughts, my self, my being, and my ... understanding? has grown. it's a long way from wise, but i feel that it's progress. and this year, over, moves me that little bit further away from the tentacles that wrapped around me.

bob dylan and sex

2009-12-22T23:12:00.000-08:00

i just finished 'affection' by krissy kneen. sometimes books are very close, and it is hard to write clearly about what you think. it is hard to understand how close it stands to you.

it is brisbane, and sex and the humidity, the streets and the darkness, the bridge and the river, the footsteps.

it has the madness and softness, and god. it's too close for me to articulate it clearly right now. it makes me want to whip a part of myself out and become alive again. it makes me want to reflect across my own life, my own sex, my own intimacies, and the meaning spun between them. it might only add up to 25 years, but there's enough there. there is enough.

i'm whipping myself around it, right now. 'like a rolling stone' - this song is j. b. and i, before b. went to palistine, while j was here, fleetingly, and we listened to it, and we drank, cloudy cigarette tinged apartment, the laziness and the tepid boredom of canberra there, floating with the smoke.

softly.

bunnies

2009-12-22T00:37:00.000-08:00

we had a picnic with bunnies in the park, soft gray and velvet black, expansive green around, rolling in the fields, breathing.

today is a hard one.

today is a slow one. a twitchy, trickling darkness of full, ugly regrets and something i'm unable to put into words.

not even regret. it's a dislocation i have. it is a misplaced piece of a puzzle that i couldn't ever finish.

let's all forget it ever happened now, sweetness. i'll lie here, warm and safe in the collapsing tower of books, falling around me, rough under my back, and we'll pretend it away, we'll touch each other until we forget, and my skin sinks out of memory and into you. take me there. take me there.

the sea

2009-12-19T02:56:00.000-08:00

now, it is Iris Murdoch time. 'the sea, the sea'. there have been very few booker prize winner's works i've enjoyed, to be honest. so i am very curious to see how i feel about this. it's started well. so far. there's something i'm not sure of... a roughness, a speed to it, the pace, that i'm still getting used to - it is jittery in a way i don't know if i like.

also got a copy of an awesome anthology 'revolting librarians' - have also ordered copy of 'revolting librarians redux.' i've developed something of an obsession with subject headings.... there's a paper in that's around the corner.

i'm working through two main work related areas of interest - LC subject headings, and cataloging in general, and the 'aftermath' for people working with deeply disturbing material. mulling them over a lot, and i think something will grow out of both of these.

see, i don't catalogue. i'm in reference, or special collections, or... i've been in a few areas, really. work wise, my skills are broader, but i do have good attention to detail... but my better skill is in project work - i excel there. it's definitely my strength; strategy, application of strategy... my 'professional' networking needs some work - my 'professional persona' in general is still unpolished - i am too immature, too reckless, have taken personal risks reflecting back into my professional life that i deeply regret. i get distracted easily, bored easily. but i am stubborn. if i decide i want to do a good job on something, i'll not rest until i have.

but subject headings. that's less of a professional interest, and more of a research issue i hold. and i know, it's huge. the revision and application of 'proper' subject headings to a collection of over three million, Three Million titles, is not feasible. but. but. hm. ponder.

i have, i think anyway, sunstroke. i got severely burnt on my back, while sitting in the shade. it hurts. a lot. it didn't at first, i didn't notice until i turned and saw a shoulder, glowing red, and then my back, an even deeper shade... on arriving home, i found myself woozy, and slow. and hot. and then... the pain. it's painful, digging, bloody. not nice.

oblivion

2009-12-17T21:48:00.000-08:00

“I HEAR YOU BUT I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU”

Father, where’s my gun
Now that the war has begun
Let me go it alone
I need no one
I said I need no one

But oh god now here it comes
And it’s too dark to aim this gun
And now faster, faster, faster
Once again I’m on the run
And I hear you say

“O’ my stubborn son
I know that you said
You need no one
But don’t you see
Danger, danger, danger
Headed to oblivion…”

I followed the hunt
Far as I could…
Through desert weathers
Petrified wood
And I took one shot
In the dark
Back fired the bullet
Silver to heart

And oh god now here it comes
And it’s too dark to aim this gun
And now faster, faster, faster
Once again I’m on the run
And I hear you say

“O’ my stubborn son
I know that you said
You need no one
But don’t you see
Danger, danger, danger
Headed to oblivion…”

“WAIT A SECOND….

HAVE YOU COME SO FAR

FOR IT TO END LIKE THIS?

THIS IS THE CHALLENGE

I DARE YOU

TO TAKE A HOLD OF THAT

DARKNESS

FROM DEEP DOWN IN YOU

GET BACK UP

WHAT ARE YOU SO AFRAID OF”

Ok.
Show your face to me
Show your face to me
Be you my friend or enemy
Show your face
Face to me

I do not fear oblivion

Father… where’s my gun?
pwolf <3

stone diaries

2009-12-15T02:38:00.001-08:00

carol shields is one of the most tragically underrated writers of the last 50 years. she brings out, micro-incident at a time, the profound, epic heaviness of the average life - the monumental nature of simply being.

her characters don't live lives of epic monsterous proportions. they simply live. their dramas are human, and no less dramatic or lacking in complexity for their humility. their lives are not peaceful or perfect, the families and relationships are all so ... so fleshy and alive, and real. Real. she writes from a heart of reality better than any other writer i can think of.

the stone diaries traces through a woman's life. she is born. she marries. her first husband passes away on their honeymoon. she remarries in her thirties, and has three children. she grows old, as do the children. and she eventually passes away. she has a period of deep depression after losing a job. her close friends pass away before her, but she forms more friendships later in life. she loves her husband; she mourns his death, but celebrates his life. it does not break her. she is strong. her mother died when she was born. her father is a wonderful character streaming through.

there is rock. they are all stone. we are all stone.

it is amazing, and i will carry little pieces of the stone with me for a long time. the gentle, beautiful heaviness of Shield's words will not leave me for some time.

goals

2009-12-15T02:24:00.001-08:00

sometimes articulating direction helps me. i realise there are things i do, and things i don't, that i should. I won't set these as definates. but goals, suggestions, hopes.

1. read more. novels. poetry. nonfiction. i feel more solid with a book in the background. even just a few pages. even just at lunch. read. read.

2. write more. be it blog, or quietly, or work related librarythings, or shitty poetry, or rambles, or letters to friends, whatever. words. words. make them. make it. solidify.

3. Yoga. take classes, try and find someone willing to do them with me.

4. meditation on sundays. i feel soulless right now.

5. more music.

6. more time with animals.

7. stop watching any television.

8. dramatically reduce internet time. it is for communication. not this bland zoning out i do on it.

9. see more movies in the cinema.

10. continue therapy. keep fighting. keep. fucking. fighting. do not give in.

11. work on friendships and relationships. be a better friend ; listen more ; be kinder ; more giving of time, of self ; fear not.

12. address health issues much more seriously. start investigating what i can do to stay awake a more reasonable number of hours.

13. food. eat better. Much better. MUCH MUCH better. take lunch to work. two coffee maximum.

14. gentle and kind. gentle and kind. gentle and kind.

15. seize myself as a sexual creature, and stop feeling ashamed of that. if i want to be sexy with a lover, stop being so scared. trust. and if that trust is betrayed, realise that the learning was worth the hurt - and the loss is thus the gain.

16. dream more. peace. softness.

17. podcasts to sleep with. open open. open.

18. save money. responsibility.

this is a time i need to build. build. this is the feeling. it's not a time to make, or create, or grow, but build on what is there, and make that stronger. foundations for growth. i'll have a much clearer list of this, i'll work on that. more details on what to read, more details on how to reduce internet time, to eat better, to save money.... little steps. kind to self. i can get there. i will.

space

2009-12-14T03:26:00.000-08:00

the thing that defines me to you, you little wonderland, is the spaces. it is the things unsaid, undone, not felt, not able to happen, and what is not.

that makes it no less wonderful, and you no less wise.

......

i just watched 'where the wild things are' - it strikes me as the sort of movie which everyone takes something significantly different away from it with them.

visually, it is beautiful. the acting is just wonderful - the costumes, the sets, the movement, the light - they capture the darkness and the thrills and the complexity of childhood incredibly. childhood is not some halcyon of joy and innocence - it is full of things you do not understand, things you cannot control, the possibility of loss and horror, and all you understand is what you need. and when you are lonely and sad? it is miserable.

children can be depressed, just as they can be angry and scared and alone or joyous and excited. just because they are newer to the world does not make their experience of it any less valid.

for me, it was incredibly moving. it was an amazing illustration of the terror and sadness and often the darkness of childhood. that lack of control, that lack of context, that lack of understanding all these horrible tiny things - that inability to be heard, that feeling that everyone else is too busy, too occupied - and that you are naughty and wrong, and you don't know how to make it better. children can be terrors. they cannot communicate with words, so they wreck things. it is the anger of some sort of horrid, scary impotence.

it also flickered at how hard it always is. even when we kind of start to understand what other people want, and we get a better perspective, it's still scary. it's still Really hard to get along with other people, or help other people.

it is difficult to be selfless and kind, to be soft and not hard, to trust, to let people in, to let go. it is amazingly difficult. it is so hard to hear what other people say sometimes.

it wasn't hopeful, it didn't tell the audience that things get better or easier, or that there is any solution - just that if you love people, and if you listen to people, you might get there. it helps. it doesn't make it perfect, and sometimes, it doesn't make it ok. it doesn't stop the world being terrifying. but if you are honest, and open, and take risks, and let the people who love you in, then things are a bit better. then, you are not alone.

right now? i feel really alone. i feel like someone i care about is not able to let me any closer in, and i feel selfish for trying, because until other things are sorted out, there's nothing i can do, or ask of them, or... yeah. it hurts.

here and back again

2009-12-13T22:31:00.000-08:00

humidity is most noticed between fingers, i think, in swollen hands, in the way clothing peels off like rough sticky oranges...

wine, wine, beer, dripping slowly, heat off the road. even when it's not hot, the damp is thick. little pieces of the few days slip out as they pass, squeezed out from the heat and the damp.

there was the gallery, and there were glass beads coating a taxidermy deer, solid dew.

i don't have a christmas tree, and i am not waiting for jesu, small whelping infant, moving fingers, small tiny fingers, grasping.

but i remember back, and i part the fog of the last year, and i go into my gut under sinew and confusing moments. i saw an old friend in brisbane, and she is 8 months pregnant, a small separate human being inside of her, pushing at her skin, and god, i remember that one realization that one day, i want that too. not just that though, the connected fibers. the co-parent, the partner. the stability, the house. the place that is home. the person that is yours. these things? i want them. and i should not feel compromised for wanting them, as though i should wish for something less fleshy and basic.

and then, i hear stories of people who regret it. they say it whisperingly, so deeply ashamed of it, but they want to wish away their children. what if i am misguided, and mislead by this biological fluctuation? what am i looking for really, other than home, and someone to be alone with, and at home with?

i want that, and i have no idea where to look.

there might be something mismade about me that causes this to keep slipping away. the closer i get, the further it moves away.

drifting

2009-12-08T00:27:00.000-08:00

i have slept all day again. this time, due to stomach cramps so severe this morning that i passed out on the floor a few times. i thought better than to go to work.

i had uncomfortably vivid dreams all day, maybe it was the heat, maybe not.

one thing i am finding with my poetry reading, is that the more i re-read the poems, the more time i spend with them, the greater the intimacy and understanding and feeling with them becomes. it's more like listening to music than reading a novel.

Desire

Nor
desire
but together
a flower
desire
I was happy

Sappho

i like to re-read them so i can see them better, feel them better, know them better.

it is very different to narrative.

in other news - i desperately want to reorganise my bookselves. only i don't have the space to move things like i want to. this is problematic. problematic indeed.

pleasure

2009-12-06T23:42:00.000-08:00

On a soft pillow
I will lay down my limbs

Sappho

i am having a crisis of faith, which is hard when you believe in very few things.

it is not a crisis i can verbalise, or pin down. because maybe you cannot let something in when it won't stop moving.

i am tired, and i want to lie down for a long, long time, until moss grows and bones soften. and then, i will wake up. and then, i will feel alive again.

my voice will catch in the back of my throat when i finally go to sit up and then, and then, i will lay down my limbs, and they will soften.

my vision is soft around the edges at the moment. things are starting to ghost up and coil in on themselves; our skin flaking off like bark each day, scales from our skin cells, dusty snow. and things turn around, and live come out of it, and meaning comes out of nothing, and we see something, sometimes, that makes it worthwhile. and it is close enough to grasp, almost, but too far away to hold. just that tiny inch too far away to hold properly.

i get a nasty itch sometimes for something... something tangible to consume me and take me away. some sort of visceral madness to overcome the flesh, and run away with me. life with this cinematic glow from moment to moment, glistening, jittering, present. sometimes, some things, some places, and it clicks into place. and then i move slightly, and it all slips away, and the cards slip out of my hand onto the floor and i let go, and i drop them, they fall face down, card after card, and i just don't know if this is the last time i will pick them up now.

the streets are so clean here. the trees are articulate in a way, down the streets, soviet. and they don't take me away. they don't drag me down, bury me alive, and make me forget how to remember how to forget.

visual

2009-12-06T02:29:00.001-08:00

seroquel nights

2009-12-06T01:52:00.000-08:00

disintegration

Time running beneath the pillow wakes
Lovers entrained who in the name of love
Were promised the steeples and fanlights of a dream;
Joins the renters of each single room
Across the table to observe a life
Dissolving in the acid of their sex;

Time that scatters hair upon a head
Spreads the ice sheet on the shaven lawn;
Signing an annual permit for the frost
Ploughs the stubble in the land at last
To introduce the unknown to the known
And only by politeness make them breed;

Time over the roofs of what has hearly been
Circling, a migratory, static bird,
Predicts no change in future's lancing shape,
And daylight shows the streets still tangled up;
Time points the simian camera in the head
Upon confusion to be seen and seen.

philip larkin

------------------------------

music night dark sleepless or sleepy i am not sure. nil by mouth, stinging sharpness in finger tips you remind me of slipping, and depth and sharp movements oh how i forget you. am i hungry? i've forgotten again.

pages.

wind. not agressive wind, but that quiet movement.

one kilo of cherries from the markets. snacks for a week or so.

i don't want to be here right now. and call it weak or whatever you want, but if i can wipe the next 10 or so hours out of my mind with legally prescribed drugs, then well, those hours are going.

and what are the use of these little words? i feel like i'm slipping back again, slipping away, further back, further back again, and you don't think i'm pretty do you? i guess, i guess my face is strangely shaped, and if you don't like clever, there's not much left.

i don't like feeling like this. i don't like knowing why i feel like this. i don't like having to do what i need to, to stop feeling like this.

oh larkin.

lower back.

i think the bunnies are fighting

2009-12-04T02:12:00.000-08:00

i can hear them ... disgruntled little rabbit is standing at attention next to big rabbit's house. there are irritated sounds coming from their direction.

for once, it seems likely to be the little one's fault. fussy little bugger, should leave big rabbit alone!

i am tired. deeply, achingly tired.

the coast.
sometimes, in Past Times, weekends are almost monumental. those times where life, and movement, it becomes so strong and dramatic that each scene forms against the next, cinematic, hyperreal.

there was a softness at the coast though. at moments, it was like the lens was twisted slightly and it focused, like lying on the beach at night, music blaring, toxins flowing in bloodlines between us, snow angels in sand, the moon clouds chance touches arms around me oh yes, people moving shadily sitting in circle quiet now, music music, smell the beach the sand, that grit, bury your fingers deep in the sand, that's all you can feel that softness. breathe.

then focus out again.

i slept mostly. more hours than i was awake.

i read some larkin. i like him more than auden, or coleridge, who i took along as well. coleridge is turgid.

today, i got a camera. this is celebrating being an officially qualified librarian. my sentences are slowing down underhand, and i am moving towards... away from. ayh. sleep.

coastal

2009-11-26T21:16:00.000-08:00

to the beach, good folk. i am going on holiday by accident, in a house of people, room to room, too much booze is likely - i am taking books. tempted to remove some software from the Boy's iPhone to keep him of the interwebs for a few days. but i like him, so i won't.

sand, and little rock pools, salty water and that itchy under-the-skin feeling from the ocean. sleeping somewhere different, with people i don't know well, sand walk dark beach times, rolling over and over.

poetry. auden, larkin, borges, sexton, sappho - am taking them with me for the holiday.

quiet and distance from this repulsive town.

these are the things that Kill Me....

i am taking monday off work. monday will be a break in something for me, and i am glad that i won't be here. and i'll be celebrating on tuesday. it's the little things, the ones we are waiting for, that are not quite victories, but spaces, and places where we can again feel free again.

waiting

2009-11-24T22:54:00.000-08:00

i get tired of this waiting feeling i have right now. it's an edginess, as though i am... waiting for something silent, something big? something small? something new? something repetitive? i can't put my finger on it.

am i waiting to feel acknowledged, or real, or visible, or desired? to be wanted and taken and consumed and hand over hand falling until i forget my name, forget how to breathe, there is nothing oh god, nothing just this tunnel, this place, this small space created between me and you .... ? that sort of rush feeling that now, i feel is probably the last thing i need ever again?

because i am waiting.

checking my phone, anticipation. i cook dinner eagerly wanting this to come. is this... thing... going to validate my existence somehow? if you reach out and touch me and i feel like you feel me and i feel you and there is some sort of sublime dreamy overarching transfiguration through that eee f l reorganized, will i be there? or you here? is there anybody there? i can't articulate it, i can't find it. i can't name it.

Alone

2009-11-24T04:48:00.000-08:00

[168b]

The moon has set and
the Pleiades. Middle
of the night, time spins
away and i lie alone.

[130]

Eros loosener of limbs once again trembles me,
a sweetbitter beast irrepressibly creeping in.

..............

the detritus of her body of work, these little quiet fragments break through more than entire bodies of works do, than entire lives. sappho, to take your words, 'you burn us'
it has fallen, it is just in pieces, and oh God, the spaces, the spaces. i adore spaces, i adore the spaciousness of her works. i adore the lost, the fragmented, the disintegration, the crumbles, the taste in the back of our mouths that is all that is left of her.

Female Poets Reading-time!

2009-11-23T17:16:00.000-08:00

ok. i'm starting on a list of different female poets to look at, and trying to work out what sort of form a 'group' of people discussing them could take. i tend to think a communal blog might go well, but that's my own bias towards blogs as an internet mechanism of communication.

so far we have:

sappho
christina rosetti
emily dickenson
patti smith
sylvia plath
judith wright
annie sprinkle
gabrielle everall
kimberley mann
anne sexton
carol anne duffy
adrienne rich
alice oswald
penelope shuttle
zoë skoulding
marianne moore

honestly, i'm shit at organising 'stuff' - pretty much anything. it's hard enough to organise Waking Up, Getting To Work, Feeding Self, Feeding Animals, Money, and other adult things that should be a lot easier than they seem to me.

pondering what sort of form ... all read same writer at the same time? just reflect on whatever one you choose, and then others write about it as well? i tend to like that, so other people can respond if it interests them, or not... ghgmmmm... Nutting Stuff Out.

ETA - The Guardian never fails to be Amazing. here's a link to their Excellent Poem of the Week blog - Poem Of the Week

dinosaurs + bunnies

touching showed.

more tattoos

Radiohead - Codex

words again

books read in 2011

grubby metaphores

more reading. go team

Book Time! 'one dimensional woman'

open

Bands i have seen

purpose

i should start writing again

space

upper spine

neglected

oh how we are hungry

pottering

uni vers ity end god please

extra-ordinary frustration

storytime

cold

dry

study

winter

orange juice

more xiu xiu

recycled paper.

sharp teeth

fresh fresh easter taste

and yes. it happens again like this.

xiu xiu

...

sleepless

awake

don't be angry

the organ

disintegration

erratic

settling

books and paper and f a l l i n g

bus trips

little

heavy

rapture

treading

fire

not enough

day

rocking chair

long day

expectations

shiver

purple

the baby sitters club

road and things

blergh

broken

upswing

care to?

honour

you were made for poetry

light

if i could marry the guardian, i would.

small press publishers

flesh

The Archive or the Trace: Cultural Permanence and the Fugitive Text

screen

simple

rain

PICK THE SCAB~

i read a teen novel

summer

This Year's books

furious oysters

doing better than expected

Little Words

Reading Goals for the Year

constructive

moments