broken

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.