tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-106119882024-03-08T05:37:22.331+11:00Sorrow at Sills Bendlucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.comBlogger1081125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-10632259717094410032023-05-07T12:15:00.002+10:002023-05-07T12:15:26.104+10:00Nick Cave loves the royal family<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Uninterestingly there doesn't seem to be a function in Blogger for rotating images. It makes sense, keeps overheads down here in the AI training dataset generator which is Sorrow at Sills Bend!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin5vkbnDGyk8Oj652rcP0ypcw_N03Bvv5Zp1O96QVtnojyw9ovwc9-Oj1KrQHQobuzngtMjxiBl4LwvNWLcdW-sJEBzZxkU2PAoCQy80Cr_xxAwkJMd752HFC27IVHz21KlQlbF8I4IAiimVPmpjKkuQMwhV-cATIzg8Vjn-Jb9fk48W81aaI/s4032/1E6D3DB0-5877-43E4-B4A0-1A7BC4E268C0.heic" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin5vkbnDGyk8Oj652rcP0ypcw_N03Bvv5Zp1O96QVtnojyw9ovwc9-Oj1KrQHQobuzngtMjxiBl4LwvNWLcdW-sJEBzZxkU2PAoCQy80Cr_xxAwkJMd752HFC27IVHz21KlQlbF8I4IAiimVPmpjKkuQMwhV-cATIzg8Vjn-Jb9fk48W81aaI/w300-h400/1E6D3DB0-5877-43E4-B4A0-1A7BC4E268C0.heic" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCSfpo9XeoOwwKoUtR7D4j3zLAPBvVUZPIbaVKb9tVLDwgLNqAVckCOHforej7RAxmwnLk8iy-7nAVPitvhdz5ar2riYfSoXgEzmWDm7m0Gg4FQHkYd_BExuxiGHbvEP1ksfQFPbnwqRnEoNCKPu4aRCivf0LRfUxMg43u-JRmmIJqOuFHqHI/s4032/7ABE68F5-1423-4626-979C-6B05233C86E9.heic" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCSfpo9XeoOwwKoUtR7D4j3zLAPBvVUZPIbaVKb9tVLDwgLNqAVckCOHforej7RAxmwnLk8iy-7nAVPitvhdz5ar2riYfSoXgEzmWDm7m0Gg4FQHkYd_BExuxiGHbvEP1ksfQFPbnwqRnEoNCKPu4aRCivf0LRfUxMg43u-JRmmIJqOuFHqHI/w300-h400/7ABE68F5-1423-4626-979C-6B05233C86E9.heic" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The last six weeks have been fantastic. The downside, and it's significant, is the major internal disturbance I'm now subject to about the prospect of returning to work tomorrow. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Since therapy I regularly recognise and name (to myself) my emotions and subconscious thoughts. I think some people develop as beings for whom this is a natural capacity, for others, it has to be learned - if it's ever acquired. I stood up a minute ago to turn over a record and I heard myself thinking that the reason I don't want to go to work tomorrow is I'm afraid I'll be attacked. And it's true, I am afraid of that. I think it won't happen, I think I probably won't even feel particularly inadequate and I may even be welcomed back by some colleagues, and I may find that I easily remember what my job is and what I need to be doing. All of that is possible. But I know myself well enough to know that I will be in a right and escalating state until I settle down into something work-like tomorrow, around mind-morning. It's in my head but it still feels real.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'll try to get there early enough that nobody sees me coming in, but beyond that, no pandering to worries and anxieties.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In the slightly longer term, going back to work means stepping out of the dream and wish fulfilment state of the last month and a half - epic amounts of time to make things. Not unlimited time, which made it feel precious, but so much that I have been completely free of the dismal irritated feeling of deprivation of time to be and express myself which has taken up so much psychological bandwidth in my life for so many years. The return of that emotion is going to be the big downside of the excellent time I've had. I'll try to get very deeply absorbed in some reasonably interesting work thing as fast as I can manage, and that will help me settle down.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I wanted to get more pages done than I have, mainly so I wouldn't feel regret at having wasted this precious, precious time. I had 42 days leave and aimed for 42 completed pages. I have completed 32 pages while on leave, a lot less than my goal but they are very good pages, so it's not a situation where I'm going to be tormented by regrets that I could have spent the time better.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I also did these things:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>parented for three of the six weeks</li><li>celebrated David's and Leonard's birthdays</li><li>connected with some friends, not many but some, and it was great</li><li>did a bunch of annoying, deferrable household maintenance tasks, and it's great to get those off the mental load-list</li><li>did some field and archival research, some detective work, and engaged with people whose involvement and approval is needed for parts of the project</li><li>slept in pretty frequently, stayed up late pretty frequently, drank about three hundred cups of herbal tea, talked a lot to my pets</li><li>listened to hundreds of episodes of podcasts: In Our Time, Deep State Radio, Thinking Allowed, WTF, Nuremberg, Tinfoil Tales, 1001 Album Club, Oh God, What Now? Frontier War Stories, Shite Talk, The Political Scene, MPavilion Talks, You're Dead To Me, plus all my staple auspol programs: The Party Room, Democracy Sausage, Guardian Australian Politics, Radical Australia, 7AM, Please Explain, The Full Story</li></ul><div>I'm planning to spend much of the rest of the day drinking tea and listening to Weyes Blood and Harry Nilsson records.</div></div><br /><br /> <p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-14333313565306766642023-04-20T22:43:00.000+10:002023-04-20T22:43:03.291+10:00The Queen died<p>Yesterday I had to go to the dentist. I had made an appointment at the Melbourne University Dental School - instead of at the clinic in Carlton where I last went, three years ago - in the interests of dentistry costing less money (I got a mortgage in September last year and monthly interest has doubled since then) but I should have thought it through just a tiny bit - they did a whole lot of xrays and so on which the other dentist had already done. Just in case you don't think you want to read the whole story, the important thing is this: it turns out that there wasn't that much wrong with my teeth so dentistry is not going to be very expensive not just yet. Well, before all that became clear I still had to go through the whole process of going to the dentist.</p><p>I'm on six weeks of long service leave, and spending it working on my book, it's a graphic novel! it's about the Shrine. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0o3iTBmEqXA4lKbERzC9asu3Y9LIsxy22fm2MOUJRHXsGV8x2U4o8L3vP4Lpku_55CGaO9KDVqYDp-RrN7gli3rxW0rQoleXHurMS-B3UkjsZF_SMaa0A4RWSJJiYk-ITFFBL9lqBkNLmG1Mho1adurVuPz2jqEKet_xWm2__CXl6lVZRNvU/s4032/IMG_3044.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0o3iTBmEqXA4lKbERzC9asu3Y9LIsxy22fm2MOUJRHXsGV8x2U4o8L3vP4Lpku_55CGaO9KDVqYDp-RrN7gli3rxW0rQoleXHurMS-B3UkjsZF_SMaa0A4RWSJJiYk-ITFFBL9lqBkNLmG1Mho1adurVuPz2jqEKet_xWm2__CXl6lVZRNvU/s320/IMG_3044.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">by the end of tomorrow I'll have done 55 pages out of 138. I've been working on it long enough to have found out that when I tell someone I'm working on a graphic novel, the first question is usually 'who's doing the pictures', which makes me wonder what they think a person does when they do a graphic novel, if it doesn't include...doing the pictures. While I've been holed up happily at home, on leave, just working on the book I've mostly been listening to podcasts and not to music. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">While I waited for the bus to take me to the dentist place, it was such a nice day, and even though I could see the crooked stick-on bricks on the front of the new apartment buildings going up across the street and they always make me feel really repulsed and angry, and also, I was going to the dentist, I felt like listening to music instead of replaying again the daily Guardian news podcast which that day was gratifyingly detailed and specific about how much further south Peter Dutton's personal approval rate has gone. So I looked in the playlists I had saved in Spotify.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I sent some messages while on the bus and missed my stop by two blocks so I had a reasonable walk back to the dentist. I walked past the multi-level car park in Grattan St which some local authority has said is a heritage building and some people object to it being called that. Having just been looking at a 2023 build I felt that the car park was easily the better building and<a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2007/08/i-won-thirty-million-dollars.html"> could probably be easily renovated</a> into beautiful apartments that everyone would really love, or something like that. I was really enjoying the music, and honestly, I felt unreasonably happy. It's an easy enough claim to make, 'oh I felt unreasonably happy', but if you consider that I was walking along with dual awareness that everything right now was really good but also within mere minutes I would be reclined in a chair with implements and someone's fingers in my mouth, probing for bad news, you'll know it's not mere idle words.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I have to stop this nonsense now but it seems likely there will be more just like it in the very near future.</div><br /><p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-9515751726780825712022-04-17T23:20:00.003+10:002022-04-17T23:20:33.574+10:00Doing things<p> Spring and summer I had the new experience of coping with deep fatigue. It went away, mostly, and after it did I didn't stop appreciating how much better it is to go around without feeling like dragged and listless and like you need to crumple to the floor. Maybe a post-covid thing, partly; I have had a low key (in the scheme of things) case of long covid to deal with; but certainly also anaemia, and maybe just the foul climactic effects of La Nina and its gross humidity. I had an iron infusion in February and started taking the contraceptive pill, and with time I gradually felt better. I haven't used the pill since the early 90s and was apprehensive, but I didn't notice much difference to the system chemistry. I did however forget to take a pill at the regular hour - took it a few hours later - and I began to bleed the same day. Light bleeding, but gosh I feel like a wrung out dishrag again, restless and glum. It's been nastily warm the last few days, which either has not helped or has made it worse. Anyway, while this sucks, I don't expect it to last very long.</p><p>Fatigue and disordered sleep, and a break from routine, brings out a restless irritable grumpiness in me. I feel overwhelmed by the urge to be doing something creative and overwhelmed by the prospect of the herculean effort required to narrow down the possibilities to one and get started. I have a kind of accidental break from work going on at the moment, having racked up several days of time in lieu. Between Easter and Anzac Day I'm only going to work two days. So I've had three days off work already. </p><p>Yesterday was difficult, what with annoyances, weariness, and a foolish overestimate of what it's possible for me to actually do in a day; and because it was bad yesterday, today was better. I have a sort of crisis of personal shabbiness unfolding in slow motion - grubby worn-out shoes, run out of mascara and moisturiser, destroyed underwear, stains, sleep attire all got holes in it, not enough pairs of pants etc - so yesterday I went off to Fitzroy to buy some cloth to make new nighties and to buy a pair of shoes. Unfortunately both shops were closed so I went straight back to the tram stop. I sat down and started reading on my phone about how Albo is going to lose the election just like Bill Shorten before him, and I wasn't paying attention and a tram went past, so I got up and walked up Brunswick St and Gertrude St to the tram stop outside the Exhibition Buildings. It was hot and I felt waxy, like a piece of wax, in the sun. A tram came and I got on it. A familiar-looking man across the aisle gave me side-eye, which is really the worst of all the minor public transportation annoyances. I disembarked at Russell St and entered Mountfords the Shoe Specialist, where I walked around for a while hating all of the shoes, trying to remain true to myself and not forget and buy shoes I hated. Then I thought I had better go home empty handed, rather than die here angrily on the slippery and dirty bluestone pavement of Bourke St, so I walked down to Elizabeth St. There were some anti-vaxxers waving flags in the mall, with police cars parked at either end, across the tram tracks. One man carried a teddy bear, as large as himself, which he or some other person had dressed in a blue gingham school uniform. He had the bear sort of half in a headlock, half cuddled to his side and carrying it was making him slump and crazily lurch, at least, he was moving that way, I don't know if that's how he always moves even when not carrying a bear dressed to represent the innocent children of Victoria whose blood must not be polluted with vaccines. At least I think the person was a man. It doesn't matter what he was, not for present purposes; enough to say he was a massive jerk. There was an article in The Conversation the other day about how one of those lifetime cohort studies has determined that anti-vaxxers are that way because they had horrible damaging childhoods.</p><p>I've probably written about this before: when I have a stretch of free time ahead of me I often feel kind of cross about the fact that it's not long enough and also, that it's eventually going to end. If I don't feel cross it's often because I've persuaded myself that I'm going to be super-efficient today; I'll measure, cut, sew; I'll plan, sketch, colour; I'll gather the materials and I'll make the thing; I'll do the trial run and do the real one too. The odd thing is that as unreal as I understand this kind of thinking to be, it's more or less how I did use my free time before I became a mother. Back then I always had a room to mess about in, I suppose that helped. </p><p>In Elizabeth St I dragged myself through David Jones, an ordeal nobody should ever have to endure. I bought a new tube of tinted beeswax lip balm to replace one that got ruined in the washing machine. When I moved into this flat I sold my fridge and washing machine as the flat came with those appliances. The washing machine I have here now does not have a cold water input so everything gets boiled. I used to have two tubes, one in a shade called Cherry (warm red) and one called Rhubarb (cool red); Cherry got completely used up in the 2021 lockdown and Rhubarb was almost all gone too before it became hot boiled liquid wax and spread pink stains on Leonard's tile-print bedspread. In the shop the little stand with these tubes in it was three-quarters empty, like the shelves at the pet supplies warehouse, and the only tube they had left which wasn't a glossy pearlised apricot or mauve was the tester tube of Rhubarb, so I picked off the tester label and bought it. I had seen a bottle green beret in the shop window as I came in, and even thought it was 28 degrees and humid, even though climate change means there's really no meaningful use for woolen hats in Australia, even though I was there to buy shoes, I trudged up the escalators to the fourth floor in pursuit of a green woolen beret. As I approached the hat section I saw a delighted woman buying a green beret, which of course turned out to be the last one in the benighted shop. I walked up to a pair of boots standing on a circular plinth and lifted one to look at the price label underneath: $649. A woman dressed in black approached and said, Those are made in Canada and they're rainproof. I said What? and she repeated, louder, They're rainproof and they're made in Canada. </p><p>On emerging from David Jones I felt a new and different kind of retail anger and instead of going to the tram stop I turned and went into Cos. As I went in the door, a woman came out who I used to work with at La Trobe and whose dress sense I had fiercely admired, except for her to my eyes jarring preference for very dark wraparound sunglasses. She was wearing similar sunglasses yesterday and I'm not sure if they were the reason I didn't recognise her straight off, or were they the reason I did recogniser her eventually?</p><p>I walked without hope around the shop for a while and then I remembered that the disposals shop across the street sold work boots. So I went over there and tried on work boots for a while eventually buying a pair. I feel moderately ok about this having happened. I thought I had better go home and I tried to buy a drink in a shop, but the two girls at the checkout could not make it work so I stood there limply while they giggled and whispered to each other in Arabic. Eventually the taller one looked at me and said, I will have to shut it down and start it again and it's going ot take five minutes. So I thought it was okay to leave.</p><p>Now comes the part which I am least proud of, and I am zero proud of everything that happened up to this point so do your own research, as they say, less and less often do they say it these days but it's always on the tip of their tongue you just know it. Because I knew all the being in shops and so forth was going to be exactly like it was, I wanted to go shopping on my own and so at least the ignominy, the shame, the horror of it was endurable because unseen. But David was returning from a journey to the south-east in pursuit of pickles and there he was in Elizabeth St with a 3kg tin of them plus some other things; evidently having conducted a successful, non-humiliating shopping expedition. So we got onto a tram and I was cross and said nothing the whole trip. </p><p>Today has been better. I went to Preston for a piano lesson at midday, then I went to Bunnings to get some things to try to cure the two different kinds of sickliness which have come over some of my house plants. On leaving Bunnings I felt so weak and tired that I thought I had better go very slow and gentle for the next part of the day, which was going to the supermarket to but the pantry items I now buy in large quantities every six weeks or so. The supermarket made me tired and at the checkout I decided in future I'll just pay the extra costs and always order this infrequent big shop. I started doing that when recovering from being sick and stopped out of guilt at how pained the delivery guys always look when they've finished hauling my goods up the three flights of stairs to my front door.</p><p>I went home, unpacked my shopping (three heavily laden trips upstairs, downward trips conducted carrying things to go into my storage box in the basement) and did a couple of small, frivolous jobs around the house. Then Lenny arrived, always a real mood-booster, and we watched tv and ate dinner. And then I did the thing I'm most proud of; I got a scrapbook and a pencil and a rubber and drew a picture of Lenny while he sat on the couch reading comics on his Kindle. I want to get better at drawing and when I want to get better at doing something, practicing it feels so much better than wanting. I didn't do a good drawing but I will do a few things different next time. It was that twenty minutes drawing which made the day alright. It quietened all the grumpy cross feelings about wasting time and being too scattered to settle down and do things.</p><p>I rashly offered to take Lenny to see Sonic the Hedgehog 2 tomorrow - just writing that I feel triggered by remembering the excruciating, interminable boredom of taking him to see Sonic the Hedgehog 1. I hope tomorrow I can have another day of doing things, Sonic notwithstanding. </p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-80382664859029291502022-04-08T21:19:00.001+10:002022-04-08T21:19:08.184+10:00Chanticleer fell in the bath<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Leonard has been fairly unwell this week. I'm having to believe it isn't Covid, since he has been testing negative for five days, including one PCR, but it certainly looks and sounds like it. So a couple of days ago I made him take a bath instead of showering, and when he got out, for reasons best known to himself he left the plug in. A while later I was lying on my bed reading and I heard a terrible commotion coming from the bathroom, and then I saw a bedraggled wet fluffy black cat run out the door looking both persecuted and guilty. I realised he must have been trying to have a little drinkie of the cold cloudy bathwater or maybe to play with it somehow, and fell in, because he's bad at doing things that are important.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Als, today, Craig Kelly got egged, which is very pleasing. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Here are some photos<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFHccPWph-JjZgM7TWbmZlfFXRdgM0Jz3l4w4tSw5TcTX_0-jRs2yZ36kHcQKESQ_HbOzXcxplm1p-z1Le92Ipumh_HFRvRqog-KuicFK7A8vHaYjs3mFOhbUTro1swMOlIYX7KcHIjpDV5gFNOacxGDdaBRgOKdQenXZ97YJ0GNnAfmpz6eI/s4032/IMG_4327.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFHccPWph-JjZgM7TWbmZlfFXRdgM0Jz3l4w4tSw5TcTX_0-jRs2yZ36kHcQKESQ_HbOzXcxplm1p-z1Le92Ipumh_HFRvRqog-KuicFK7A8vHaYjs3mFOhbUTro1swMOlIYX7KcHIjpDV5gFNOacxGDdaBRgOKdQenXZ97YJ0GNnAfmpz6eI/s320/IMG_4327.jpeg" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFHccPWph-JjZgM7TWbmZlfFXRdgM0Jz3l4w4tSw5TcTX_0-jRs2yZ36kHcQKESQ_HbOzXcxplm1p-z1Le92Ipumh_HFRvRqog-KuicFK7A8vHaYjs3mFOhbUTro1swMOlIYX7KcHIjpDV5gFNOacxGDdaBRgOKdQenXZ97YJ0GNnAfmpz6eI/s4032/IMG_4327.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdLGx71oBUOm8MZ56Dwu4vpIkO4dg0KTco2reHa5AqYmtGF_Y4N4m6npI8Rq79mciVsfiAssqRz0THbxvBMP-xkheK_WM0CZa3114sTcIcRm9qpAiSN7u0aJM1UxwsBwltLc-vRjXQFOA1JKokZnA7IPrEenJCRw2j-25eCrQ-fBOwtVDGq94/s3024/IMG_4658.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdLGx71oBUOm8MZ56Dwu4vpIkO4dg0KTco2reHa5AqYmtGF_Y4N4m6npI8Rq79mciVsfiAssqRz0THbxvBMP-xkheK_WM0CZa3114sTcIcRm9qpAiSN7u0aJM1UxwsBwltLc-vRjXQFOA1JKokZnA7IPrEenJCRw2j-25eCrQ-fBOwtVDGq94/s320/IMG_4658.jpeg" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrcSNwJiA3tHANJrK7FvUNeS0bU2ea8kNCxVd6MiR97OPNOy93BdLe4SslY1zsfJpvDDDB7QNYK3itQ-LAupZdtDuPgC5YuezjXX8YIB2Op-Lwy6rxFv0wVn-P50Bmaj8TvJVahDVgOe1POKqn9Ny8Xu0sVYoOAFT5jWtTz_S8AGEEFs5yUs/s2320/6FB21E9E-DCCB-452C-B8C4-369BF791127F.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="2320" data-original-width="2320" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrcSNwJiA3tHANJrK7FvUNeS0bU2ea8kNCxVd6MiR97OPNOy93BdLe4SslY1zsfJpvDDDB7QNYK3itQ-LAupZdtDuPgC5YuezjXX8YIB2Op-Lwy6rxFv0wVn-P50Bmaj8TvJVahDVgOe1POKqn9Ny8Xu0sVYoOAFT5jWtTz_S8AGEEFs5yUs/w254-h254/6FB21E9E-DCCB-452C-B8C4-369BF791127F.jpg" width="254" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq6FiCfZ4-8xNifZBRsLvl_uMK7masmANUHRzRCKVTIKAjixC66YemeiCAZ_vmPS21iansrO9JTQYRteVvYLWjsXyHQz0CjLVputCb62Jy1bR2tTvxpTx4nemPgm64CRtdMfc-652I1hgjnwK2zjkQEWZOFA071ia4Osv_0OjxjHWY15sM7PM/s3024/IMG_4853.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq6FiCfZ4-8xNifZBRsLvl_uMK7masmANUHRzRCKVTIKAjixC66YemeiCAZ_vmPS21iansrO9JTQYRteVvYLWjsXyHQz0CjLVputCb62Jy1bR2tTvxpTx4nemPgm64CRtdMfc-652I1hgjnwK2zjkQEWZOFA071ia4Osv_0OjxjHWY15sM7PM/s320/IMG_4853.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi27jio2rvRaiGNQ2mJr1VysV1udjj7zH8I8aBkQmTpMN56msbRPZ13ygIPXmrDZxDzrEJIfqSaaPmGrhbd6-QJYJu_C0qOIT0imlOwM-KhjO6TMrl7CBOaLUTpnFxM4F_RTy5Crs0_qm2o10JGc7LthY9L8MamboBkTGsGL4A88dDOU6bYvhw/s3024/IMG_4869.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi27jio2rvRaiGNQ2mJr1VysV1udjj7zH8I8aBkQmTpMN56msbRPZ13ygIPXmrDZxDzrEJIfqSaaPmGrhbd6-QJYJu_C0qOIT0imlOwM-KhjO6TMrl7CBOaLUTpnFxM4F_RTy5Crs0_qm2o10JGc7LthY9L8MamboBkTGsGL4A88dDOU6bYvhw/s320/IMG_4869.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4Wc0XImKvT6vYdHQ2EiGAeUzolU61Ypz_j1Jpb7aZvHtVuPjEOJO5WVtEvFgmwWJ6UszySElOW5G4l_v0df_QWp7L9R0MbimCKxOYJjyd38gHQbEaMM-DB30AMa2CQiZontdr_xRlbNX9RegsP5Ogs9haeMHCdxit1dKd7LVRl02odkbzFYA/s3024/IMG_4880.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4Wc0XImKvT6vYdHQ2EiGAeUzolU61Ypz_j1Jpb7aZvHtVuPjEOJO5WVtEvFgmwWJ6UszySElOW5G4l_v0df_QWp7L9R0MbimCKxOYJjyd38gHQbEaMM-DB30AMa2CQiZontdr_xRlbNX9RegsP5Ogs9haeMHCdxit1dKd7LVRl02odkbzFYA/s320/IMG_4880.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwPJjmeAXk3kwky5zgGVp5QMZLV6lN7JztD0cKSfhZGcjAnMgB2qBEELJZIi3K3RR3Crw4QWDnc5oQHn3GSRd9kUlMj-pBZCWlmTcc8_yyrN-vUk15M3MGDaATuUri2ThbK7xw398hJExqxDzrNA_MGNK2ukhd_eAZkLUbxCkWrmJwqk2LnTE/s3024/IMG_4889.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwPJjmeAXk3kwky5zgGVp5QMZLV6lN7JztD0cKSfhZGcjAnMgB2qBEELJZIi3K3RR3Crw4QWDnc5oQHn3GSRd9kUlMj-pBZCWlmTcc8_yyrN-vUk15M3MGDaATuUri2ThbK7xw398hJExqxDzrNA_MGNK2ukhd_eAZkLUbxCkWrmJwqk2LnTE/s320/IMG_4889.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidLwgDIeAakz-O7xtoPgPYishIgUDTWGRAuOolrbRHjHQ1nwJbEskBZfMEG_3Hax-V5VdcZl1J9d8KlJAL8PozTEEkkrutLwjkGistSdx2EPV8DNjlKRP_ifjtSjdH0qbqakN8G9ATyGkykL7FUaEyvc3lkSA5ljj-BP6Y0875Ih-fS20pUVo/s4032/IMG_4957.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidLwgDIeAakz-O7xtoPgPYishIgUDTWGRAuOolrbRHjHQ1nwJbEskBZfMEG_3Hax-V5VdcZl1J9d8KlJAL8PozTEEkkrutLwjkGistSdx2EPV8DNjlKRP_ifjtSjdH0qbqakN8G9ATyGkykL7FUaEyvc3lkSA5ljj-BP6Y0875Ih-fS20pUVo/s320/IMG_4957.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjojFoJvylTjsmg5AiNCBdbPatal5wCBlId_K7Uwe90PcfB9r8i250lrk1vxk1n5nJZwZvseIyZDFi5b9dzJ3G5CZjrMKd5KcQI86qLjwAFynsVFJSLvrqM118M1wf_vI9Z0X5cUK0dXEKzDQoE0w3qY4dcUDbfc9Ah93TopFM-WH6AvrgB490/s3024/IMG_5036.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjojFoJvylTjsmg5AiNCBdbPatal5wCBlId_K7Uwe90PcfB9r8i250lrk1vxk1n5nJZwZvseIyZDFi5b9dzJ3G5CZjrMKd5KcQI86qLjwAFynsVFJSLvrqM118M1wf_vI9Z0X5cUK0dXEKzDQoE0w3qY4dcUDbfc9Ah93TopFM-WH6AvrgB490/s320/IMG_5036.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-kbUYCp74bp3Sl-Zp9GCvcQWcjnfbN4jPpei9ipgApgVXLRxfN8iKcKgE_kcPzNGnqZfSgtMBgKxxvrSyTwVurMidijO_HxKfhXmyRWBOevSU71eNsrsI3DIy-CNECy6DoUWq_sx0imzBMC8DUbYZo9P0EeBfSLHjLZk0hZeNKLfNAyPe_TA/s3024/IMG_5280.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-kbUYCp74bp3Sl-Zp9GCvcQWcjnfbN4jPpei9ipgApgVXLRxfN8iKcKgE_kcPzNGnqZfSgtMBgKxxvrSyTwVurMidijO_HxKfhXmyRWBOevSU71eNsrsI3DIy-CNECy6DoUWq_sx0imzBMC8DUbYZo9P0EeBfSLHjLZk0hZeNKLfNAyPe_TA/s320/IMG_5280.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpgS2hMQOLlSyxvutRF10cMqGSQfNju3vVMVsnYVKDP6ZejBc34ikYOYCkuZ-HlbPLNjFxb5oiFycTFz6fto4a53YcQcFYcJd3PuFlDqTwqSadmef_TNGLcRVex1pvVW3SffjeiJiqqLuLyP5NzzHI733U60E3RBxXSJxk_QmHsLj5JW8a_lQ/s3024/IMG_5355.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpgS2hMQOLlSyxvutRF10cMqGSQfNju3vVMVsnYVKDP6ZejBc34ikYOYCkuZ-HlbPLNjFxb5oiFycTFz6fto4a53YcQcFYcJd3PuFlDqTwqSadmef_TNGLcRVex1pvVW3SffjeiJiqqLuLyP5NzzHI733U60E3RBxXSJxk_QmHsLj5JW8a_lQ/s320/IMG_5355.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5S3gIC7_fOwF8XIO4zTt1wXZCVQHHPI8k2UTmANJzumXnknqm8J7D-Lj_8Cmrpg5eO1lcZtZlFgdMcs8IpClc1kjJMD-iM4LkncQ_bFYvDGcG9gC2T5t545AsE4IL3RO3L8Co0ZsOCmW-5Z3mgdfEMHUZ6g_VfaifKTZ9I1hP_vWq-j_TL1k/s3024/IMG_5379.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5S3gIC7_fOwF8XIO4zTt1wXZCVQHHPI8k2UTmANJzumXnknqm8J7D-Lj_8Cmrpg5eO1lcZtZlFgdMcs8IpClc1kjJMD-iM4LkncQ_bFYvDGcG9gC2T5t545AsE4IL3RO3L8Co0ZsOCmW-5Z3mgdfEMHUZ6g_VfaifKTZ9I1hP_vWq-j_TL1k/s320/IMG_5379.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAfxxq3DAR4w57QCxWJLZvhxYvQIFlv4LOoDvq-oCjiZRtroFaAxbR1T8ltwrnZDxpp_98ndgFKplspM_jzehs-wz9YELMfuRZqs4LyGmyPYI06hTfGQ2D6NDYdE5uNyyMw11Df8YZeyXx9FVZlPLOpamEWDXqQEKs1hBoIxsGydbfoTe8Yio/s4032/IMG_5415.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAfxxq3DAR4w57QCxWJLZvhxYvQIFlv4LOoDvq-oCjiZRtroFaAxbR1T8ltwrnZDxpp_98ndgFKplspM_jzehs-wz9YELMfuRZqs4LyGmyPYI06hTfGQ2D6NDYdE5uNyyMw11Df8YZeyXx9FVZlPLOpamEWDXqQEKs1hBoIxsGydbfoTe8Yio/s320/IMG_5415.jpeg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Cx5Y9Dm2m28VCbKqkT78QFpJs_obgF2VALddU_WlQTYntEXKNoszrDzo7GwtAGjMPp6A5rEtfC8dihEflznE0riJJHPgpq30lvHPHbUaXzIzTOSU10SIblnp7jKWzZV_UECFT4WDIikdHYkBlvg8Yk6qIkqwXv6hq2Q71Nc5TZB6vqLPiVw/s3088/IMG_4053.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3088" data-original-width="2320" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Cx5Y9Dm2m28VCbKqkT78QFpJs_obgF2VALddU_WlQTYntEXKNoszrDzo7GwtAGjMPp6A5rEtfC8dihEflznE0riJJHPgpq30lvHPHbUaXzIzTOSU10SIblnp7jKWzZV_UECFT4WDIikdHYkBlvg8Yk6qIkqwXv6hq2Q71Nc5TZB6vqLPiVw/s320/IMG_4053.jpeg" /></a>'I'll have more to announce about that tomorrow' as Dictator Dan used to promise us.</div>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-88073929922809595872022-03-24T22:10:00.002+11:002022-03-26T17:04:33.005+11:00I'm back! and I'm annoyed.<p> It's been a while since I last blogged, I hope nobody was worried. There is never going to be a reason to worry. Obviously I'm always going to come back, sooner or later. </p><p>Plenty has happened. I moved house in September last year, during lockdown, in order to live near <a href="http://lorrainecrescent.blogspot.com">David</a>. I got covid in October. Proper Delta covid lad, not your pissy mincing other little kind as minced through by Barnaby Joyce, Scott Morrison, Josh Frydenberg, the Queen and Clive Palmer amongst other people who God should have taken, if he really existed which obviously he doesn't. </p><p>While I was in a fortnight's solitary confinement my best friend of more than thirty years died of cancer. We finally sold the house in Brunswick the weekend I was released, for a shocking sum of money, but not actually enough for me to buy another place to live, it turns out, my insultingly low salary means I can borrow very little. So I'm still considering what I should do with the money now. </p><p>I went back to work on 7 November and have basically been there ever since, excepting a 2.5 week period in summer when I had recreation leave, booked in order to go to Germany and Finland but a few weeks out, just at the turning point of the omicron wave, we decided to postpone it another year. I'll be surprised if north-eastern Europe is in any way a safe travel destination come next January, but hey probably anywhere is safer to be than in an Australian summer in the second decade of the twenty-first century. </p><p>I've just finished another week-long solitary isolation period at home, no illness just the full logistical nightmare of trying to do my job in an increasingly dysfunctional working environment. Like the Victorian state opposition, I keep thinking it can't get any worse...and then it does. </p><p>I started having piano lessons. In Preston. I think I'll be able to play the piano pretty well eventually. My piano is under the stairs.</p><p>Where I live now there are beautiful windows at both ends of the two levels and the outlooks are four different yet uniformly gorgeous combinations of buildings, sky and leafiness. Out of my bedroom window there is a view down to a spectacular, decadent enclosed shared garden with lawn, paths, pergola, crepe myrtles, azaleas, rhododendrons and a quirky assortment of mature tall trees. Birds zap and dive round, yelling, mapping 3D paths between trees so you see glimmers of how the neighbourhood looks to birds. At eye level there are interestingly Rear Windowesque buildings opposite with lit windows framing the silhouettes of people who I know more about than I really should, thanks to the magic of the private facebook group for the complex and my insatiable hunger for little details that can be recklessly assembled into a narrative. Beyond the buildings are rooftops and more trees and a single big new apartment complex that always looks to me like a cruise ship gliding up alongside the pier. Nestled below the sky is the tall elongated cupola of a Ukrainian church. </p><p>It took me a long time to recover from the cove - months, really. It was heart and lungs for a considerable while, plus deep fatigue. Now I'm just really unfit and when I get tired it's from being flabby and weak rather than from any more ominous reason. I hardly ever ride my bike any more and I can't understand why. I have got to lose weight. Menopause and 50 is coming for me. My hair is well past shoulder length. I'm going to let it go all the way down to elbow length and get a heavy fringe cut into it. Like many people I have lost a lot of hair post-covid. I did have a lot to lose so it's not too alarming as long as I don't think about it much. It's growing back, shorty and fluffy bits sticking up over the crown of my head.</p><p>My cats have been really lovely and kind lately. I mean, they broke a big arched mirror in my bedroom by jumping all over everything, and they still won't let me pick them up, but Chanticleer in particular really gets a lot of satisfaction out of coming over to me and looking at me. Just because anthropomorphising is a long word, people think when they say it it means something. I have known this cat at very close quarters for two years now and I know he feels immense and complacent satisfaction when he sits on the floor next to the couch or the table and stares at me. In the mornings when I get up they are so anxious and worried that I might not feed them, it's completely adorable. They love the windows too. What they see is the cat from next door who is allowed to go out in the daytime. She's a real sourpuss. She goes down to the garden and we all watch her picking her way crossly through the grass and fallen leaves. And like me they also dig the hell out of all the bird activity. In the afternoons Pompey likes to lie by himself on one of the beds. He has a pretty good time. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_iqDvnyigBe-wGienWC4pFvqT9OS0MMUi91dMORur4E7tRuLY-iCnBTZz55VT-F6ZsITVqh2xamj-cFMLd5PE5f7bUQuG_MKtR1GbhhArrSlPxgPvxHcHUWjqXk2cLiesT6rWLmsKEnPMsFJh0avXGLrUlhuZVWrLnwNWFAO882XxCLre4LI/s3024/IMG_3300.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_iqDvnyigBe-wGienWC4pFvqT9OS0MMUi91dMORur4E7tRuLY-iCnBTZz55VT-F6ZsITVqh2xamj-cFMLd5PE5f7bUQuG_MKtR1GbhhArrSlPxgPvxHcHUWjqXk2cLiesT6rWLmsKEnPMsFJh0avXGLrUlhuZVWrLnwNWFAO882XxCLre4LI/s320/IMG_3300.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>I haven't bought a new pair of shoes for five years. In December I got new prescription glasses and sunglasses, then I left the glasses on a tram, so I bought another pair. Then I lost the sunglasses too. All my underwear is worn out and disintegrating. The problem is not funds but time to go to the shops and do the shopping. I just can't make myself do it. This has happened before, now that I think about it. I think there was a stretch of some years around about 2002-2005 where I would have to pull my knickers up several times an hour, if walking, because of dead elastic.</p><p>I've been to some good places; Daylesford and Hepburn Springs, Canberra, Williamstown, Oakleigh, Brighton, Ballarat, Warrnambool. I didn't swim in the sea once last summer and I regret it now, but it made sense at the time. The last film I saw at the movies was Licorice Pizza and it was excellent. This quarantine I watched Yellowjackets on tv and it too was excellent. I had to end my subscription to the LRB, after twenty years, because they just would not or could not (i feel convinced that it's would not) transfer billing to a credit card which is not the old last remaining joint one with my ex-husband. They've got form. It took several years of persistent complaining before they removed the unrequested Mrs from address labels bearing my name. I get the New Yorker by post, it's more frequent than it needs to be but I do read it. I also took out a print subscription The Atlantic in November but have not yet received a single issue, fair enough, I didn't really expect to. I also have Crikey, the Guardian, The Age and the New York Times. When I wake up in the night i listen to podcasts. It's a wonderful insomnia session when there's a new Guardian Politics podcast. The bread and butter of this affliction is a three-times-weekly US foreign policy show called Deep State Radio. It's good. I've been listening to it since 2017. The ecstasy of their hatred of Trump in 2019 carried me through the tormented nights of the very last weeks of ended marriage and before separation.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-73775434149298523712021-06-03T22:26:00.003+10:002021-06-03T22:34:22.809+10:00Prince Phillip died<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7LXh3UjpBsm6HJBkmiW8v2fp4FOhcNkQrLR66vpEb89pJVOjVgeCFsJOGR4Pzl5OATbkuE8rIk31wLWn1wPErdO0sI2YfI3uQYBb0ExephjRwarbyAm8H3-N3jI0ok9BfwgK9rQ/s2048/IMG_0955.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7LXh3UjpBsm6HJBkmiW8v2fp4FOhcNkQrLR66vpEb89pJVOjVgeCFsJOGR4Pzl5OATbkuE8rIk31wLWn1wPErdO0sI2YfI3uQYBb0ExephjRwarbyAm8H3-N3jI0ok9BfwgK9rQ/s320/IMG_0955.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>I'm just easing myself back in to my blog. So many things have happened and in almost all cases it didn't even cross my mind to blog about them. Andrew Laming, he's another one I failed to blog about several days in succession. But there's just so many. Well, that's the terrible majesty of blogging, you just have to be like, well, I missed the boat on writing that down at the time and now it's gone forever, sunk to the bottom of the ocean and broken and swollen and brittle as glass, silted over, lost in the dark. </p><p>I moved my cane palm inside off the balcony a few days ago because it hated being outside, but now it's inside Pompey has started to eat it, and knowing what he's like he won't stop eating it until it's completely denuded of leaves. </p><p>Lockdown is just boring, thankless, a shit job one can aspire only to endure. For all of them my strategy has been fundamentally the same although the methods of executing it have varied. It's to exert myself and make effort, and to ignore my inclinations till they can't be ignored any more. So there is no putting off of things that are tedious or dismal and there is no indulgence. A Zoom workout before dawn each day, and ten thousand daily steps on top of that, no alcohol and next to no sugar, a brisk morning walk and a takeaway coffee carried back to start work, outside for brief bursts of ball games at different points and a long energetic walk between 4 and 6pm, keeping a close eye on the progress and timetable of school from home, plentiful varied healthy food, games and puzzles and craft and funny videos, and keeping things really clean, warm, fresh and comfortable. Jesus Christ it is a drag. At this stage, an unspeakable indulgence would be to snuggle against my pillows well past sunrise reading <i>Mr Bligh's Bad Language.</i> Maybe on Sunday I will allow myself this. But one has to be careful. A little bit of leeway and a cheat morning turns into a cheat day and cheat week, and before you know it you're where I was at the start of January, nominally still working from home as was mandatory, but in reality not even able to get out of bed let alone function like a proper person. </p><p>This effortful lockdown life is designed to make and keep Leonard cheerful and happy. It is achieving that, although it must be acknowledged that I don't actually know whether he'd be just as happy with a whole lot less. It feels worthwhile when I put him to bed and he says he's had a great day and hopes tomorrow will be great too. I've been in analysis long enough to know that the anxious care I provide to him is being provided also by me to another baby whose survival I am always very frightened and uncertain about. </p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-63553669623615878052021-05-31T22:52:00.001+10:002021-05-31T22:52:08.776+10:00forgot to blog<p> Sorry, forgot to blog - the pandemic is still on though, and the liberal party are still cunts. If you were wondering what happened on days two, three, four, and five of five, probably not much, I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. I'm sure it was all fine.</p><p>Dot points:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I'm in bed and I've got both cats, but they are here because of freshly washed fluffy mohair blankets and not because of me. I've also got six pillows and a cup of liquorice tea. It's cold tonight, the stinging sort of cold that makes climate deniers really excited and happy. It's ok during the day because the sky is blue and the sun shines on things, but it's going to be a bitter winter once the dullness and greyness closes in. And that means I am probably going to get really, really fat.</li><li>A week ago I thought my pandemic experience had decisively changed, from being an existential terror to an ordeal by administration, but then everything went to shit again in Melbourne and here we are in another lockdown, my guess is a full month of this then a gradual easing of restrictions. But who knows. Everyone's triggered. I got up and did a Zoom gym class at seven and the people in it were glum. My workmates are gloomy. </li><li>On the weekend I succeed in getting myself injected with the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, many months before I had expected it would be possible for me. Therapy today was devoted to unpacking why I believed I would not be given the vaccine when I presented for it, even though I had made an appointment, and also why I bothered to show up given I fully expected to be turned away because of some kind of technical error in the booking system. But the whole exercise was as smooth and as mundane as the check-in process at an airport. When the pandemic started I thought that receiving a vaccine would mark the end of the pandemic as a personal experience; I don't think that now, but it's a turning point, and it happened under appropriately surreal circumstances. </li><li>I went to the rectangle with Leonard this evening, nostalgically and indulgently as we'd already had an extensive play at the much more glamorous oval, and I was overcome with anger because someone had placed a transistor in one of the football-watching shelters and it was blaring out bad FM radio. I said to a man my age stiff-leggedly kicking a soccer ball in figure eights round little plastic cones, Is that your radio, I knew it was his because of all his equipment, and he goes Yes why? and I said Because it's really annoying. He said Well I like it and you should go home if you don't like it. I walked away and he called after me Everyone here likes it. </li><li>I went with my beloved partner to Tasmania in April and it was heaven. I have also had a haircut and bought some long straight pleated skirts. I found a tall potted fiddle-leaf fig the foyer of my building. It had a piece of paper bearing the word 'Free' slid between two of its leaves, so I took it home. </li></ul><p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-40773774609935463872021-02-19T23:20:00.006+11:002021-02-19T23:21:43.465+11:00Hot days and long weeks<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtJvQR1aUeqOLW1q_Sna7W4Vpj2ovsFZk7yaUTuL9cLPgoSLvr0RwAF8KNJ-kg9xYmXKugXfo4ID89BHyDvj-GnxN2IG-RNNY1zxSukp4h58X4iZwZbn7xmhQ_nuBubHnGJhSBjQ/s2048/IMG_9484.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtJvQR1aUeqOLW1q_Sna7W4Vpj2ovsFZk7yaUTuL9cLPgoSLvr0RwAF8KNJ-kg9xYmXKugXfo4ID89BHyDvj-GnxN2IG-RNNY1zxSukp4h58X4iZwZbn7xmhQ_nuBubHnGJhSBjQ/s320/IMG_9484.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Big, big sigh. I'm really tired but without being ready to rest. I left work just after 8pm this evening and got home about 9pm, and I washed, ate, fed cats, but mainly I sort of fidgeted about for an hour and a half. The five-day lockdown we've just had in Victoria has taken its toll. The psychological experience of the pandemic is like being a wartime submariner. Moving fast but to where? Sailing blind in cramped chamber adrift a vast darkened ocean, wary, submersible, going silent, sometimes hearing the shocking subsonic thud of depth charges going off around you. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As soon as my shoulder was better enough (it is still quite painful a lot of the time) I went back to work and worked from there every weekday for a couple of weeks. I am carrying and juggling a heavy and complicated set of coloured balls at work just now, and while much of it is very basic work of the kind I thought I'd finished with for ever, the simplest things are all suddenly much slower, harder and more uncertain to do now. Many of the staff I relied on to take care of big chunks of my areas of responsibility are currently dealing with big, rough personal challenges and simply aren't around much. So I am holding things together and trying to push through progress on the big thing that will relieve the pressure on us, which is bringing the volunteer workforce back into action. They've been away for a year and the operating environment is drastically constrained so their re-entry has to be thoroughly managed and also allowed to happen at all their various different paces. You can see the whole question is somewhat overwhelming. I have dealt with miniature versions of it before however, in this job, in coping with the critically under-resourced projects that come up in the seasons of Anzac Day and Remembrance Day. The way I usually handle such tricky demands is to let all the mess and complications well up, overflow, in the physical form of a hundred thousand scrawled on scraps of torn paper and post-it notes spread on my enormous desk, in not ever shutting down my computer and seldom closing programs or even windows, in acquiring clipboards stacked with to-do lists that I keep adding things to as well as crossing things off. I knew, when I restarted working from work, that I'd be in for a certain amount of this way of life and I thought it would take about two weeks to get ahead of the game, if I threw myself into it and worked at it feverishly for just those two weeks. But then lockdown chucked a whole extra week into the timeline, and I think that's part of why I feel this tired and this wired too.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Last night I forgot to take my tiny quarter of a tiny sleeping pill until it was much too late, and so I was awake most of the night: I slept maybe three or four hours and got up feeling pretty awful; made a slow start to the day by riding to Northcote for breakfast with a friend (I don't if they still even read this blog? Do you?) and then it was well into a hot glary dusty and windy morning and I rode to work, though Fitzroy and Jolimont and Richmond and finally across Birrarung Marr, past the gargantuan tent city and vast almost empty blue seating banks of the Australian Open, and across the Domain parklands. By the time I arrived at work I was dripping with sweat and radiating heat off my head and arms. I took a cold shower, but I was still sweating, even after I got out and dried off. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The next ten hours passed in a daze of diving repeatedly into that thick desktop soup of floating disjointed bits of task set aside till they became time-critical, or till I had enough of several similar little problems to wipe them all out with one big gesture of a solution, numbers of people I didn't want to call back yesterday but felt I could cope with them today. In the end it was difficult to make myself leave my desk and go home; I feared the wallop of the heat outside, but more than that I didn't trust that I'd pulled things together enough for next week that I could just go home and not think about it again till I walk in the door on Monday. That's my own special personal variety of lockdown-triggered hypervigilance kicking in. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I sewed 28 new cloth masks over the first two days of the five-day lockdown. Clearly kind of mad. I needed some new ones, but not that many lol. Still, if you have to wrap your face and mouth and nose in hot, clammy cloth that stops you from breathing, seeing and thinking with any semblance of clarity, it's nicer to wrap yourself in fresh and clean pieces of cloth than in grubby frayed old worn-out ones. Anxiety always finds a way of justifying its flaring ridiculousnesses.</div> <p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-16623399845916113832021-02-01T23:37:00.006+11:002021-02-01T23:37:55.001+11:00We're exempt<p>I just reread my last post and look, there's no getting past this, when I'm pretentious I'm very pretentious. Sorry about that. It came out a bit worse than it needed to, because when I sat down to write, I had a lot of different things in mind I wanted to write about and I envisaged a much longer post casting a much wider net. But of course what happened is I got too sleepy and had to stop. So there you go.</p><p>A poet whose work I really admire periodically unplugs all his social media - I realise of course this isn't unusual, I've done it myself at times - but he said once he does it because he can't bear how the habit of posting comes to dominate and frame how he sees everything, at the moment of seeing - like he can't have an experience without it happening in terms of how he's going to frame and filter and caption and tag it. I recognise (and deeply dislike) that syndrome but where it's pernicious is on the very rigidly formatted platforms, instagram and facebook most typically. Blogging is not like that, for me it's not. I do occasionally become aware that I'm going about my life and simultaneously describing it to myself in a sort of diary voiceover, but after all this time, that's a mood which when it comes signals to me not that I've given up authenticity in exchange for a performance. Rather it's almost the opposite. When I think about how to put an experience into words while it's still happening it means I am having an unusually rich time of it inside and there are things to unpack, or process. </p><p>So it was like that when I started writing my last post. I'd spent a week with Lenny doing school holiday things, and I wanted to capture and reflect on what that week was like. It was up and down, demanding and satisfying; we did a mixture of interesting things and very dull things; he is growing to an age and condition where we can really talk and do things together, intermittently, but it's still interspersed with stretches of coming to meet him in conversation where he is, at nine and a half years old, and that's not terrible of course, especially when there's nothing else I need to be doing, but there's an adult self which has to be quiet and watch and think and somehow entertain itself while that's going on. And I wanted to write about how overcome I was by the beauty of a modest little stretch of road in Silvan, in the Dandenongs, among the cherry orchards; about Hanging Rock; about paying a visit to the cat cafe; about how I felt both attacked and deeply amused by the art gallery installation of a cookie cutter apartment fitted out and finished exactly like mine except everything in it was either too big or too small. But in the end all I could do was gush a bit about Eric Ravilious (the book was a part of all the other things I didn't write about) and note that the year, the shattering year of 2020, was ending. I spent the evening with Lenny, as always when with him feeling alone and not alone, and at midnight I was sat in bed, writing, like I 'm doing now. And then my phone buzzed with a text message, a lovely HNY message from the person who enriches my life in a hundred different ways, and then I was tired and no longer believed I could write anything truthful and real before I would need to sleep.</p><p>And that was a month ago and a lot of things have happened which deserved to be recorded and might not be if I let this stretch of silence go on any longer. So I am now going to ruin the train of thought which I have just set in motion, and revert instead to dot pointing, out of chronological order and also out of order of magnitude. I don't work like this to try and be cute. It's just the way that the jumble of mental clutter needs to be untangled.</p><p>- Pompey is really getting into me in a big, big way. When I go to bed at night this is apparently a signal to him that he should come and get on the bed next to me, gaze into my face much as John Belushi looks at Carrie Fisher at the end of The Blues Brothers, poke me with his little white fists, claw at the blankets etc. It's kind of annoying actually, but surely it's a stage on the way to properly sitting on me and letting me pick him up and cuddle him. What a massive goose he is. </p><p>- Next pandemic I will be more conscious in how I approach the Christmastime collapsing in a heap, because I really fucked it up lot this time and paid a heavy price for doing so. As the end of the work year drew nearer and nearer I just started throwing things off the bus, as it were; on some level I thought 'rest now and sort out all the messes next year'; which is very fine in theory but in practice I didn't allow myself anywhere near enough time off work to draw a line under the year and regroup for 2021. And so I went back to working before the new year was a week old, and crapy ergonomics combined with stress produced an unbelievably painful seized-up neck and right shoulder which has necessitated a lot of time off work, physical therapy, opioid painkillers and prescription anti-inflammatories to get better, and is still not right. The back of my neck has a spot on it which feels like it's been hit with a hammer. </p><p>- David and I were in a pub a few weeks ago and everyone but people actually eating and drinking were wearing masks, in accordance with the rules at the time, except for these two painful people standing by the corner of the bar waiting for a table. You know that dumb braggadocio - silent, subtle Travis Bickling - so stupid always but extra so in 2021. A woman working behind the bar asked them to put on their masks. 'We're exempt' one of them snapped, and while they clearly weren't, nobody made them, and I was pissed off about it for a long time, like days afterward, although they mustn't have had Covid, since i don't have it now, and they don't seem to have caught it since or we would have been informed all about it by the government. Half of the psychic energy eaten by the pandemic these days is consumed in torturing oneself with stupid feelings about people like those two. I used to think it was just people in Australia and the other places which have managed to get control of the virus who had the ridiculous petty luxury of entertaining spiteful and petty feelings about others' failure to obey public health rules, but now I think everyone everywhere probably is knowing these emotions now, and that's why we should be studying them and learning all we can about them so we can insert them into the historical novels we will write 6o years into the future. </p><p>- Keven Andrews has lost preselection for Menzies LOL LOLOL oh LOL LOOOOOOOOOL, this only just happened today, so I am still allowing myself to enjoy the crap out of it before the reality inevitably sets in that, as has been proven unbeleeeebabblery depressingly often in Australian political life over over the last two decades, whenever they finally get rid of one monstrous liability it is only so another even worse one can immediately take its place.</p><p>- Lenny has started Grade Four and seems to be enjoying himself.</p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-19304605460811046992021-01-01T00:52:00.003+11:002021-01-01T00:52:27.620+11:00White horses<p> I've only just got Lenny off to bed. New Year's Eve is strange, isn't it, or is it? Ordinary experiences, movements or gestures even, begin to feel more and more loaded, potentially momentous, or maybe just ponderous, as midnight approaches. I have plenty to say but also I'm quite happy to be on my own - I don't feel particularly the lack of a person here right now to say my things to. But I can imagine sitting here writing till they're all said, or till I fall asleep, whichever comes first, and why not? What a very much okay way to be, right. </p><p>Today I found and instantly bought a book that is such a potent example of the loadedness imbuing everything today, I already doubt that I can adequately convey the quality of this experience to you. I read it this evening while pretending to watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Poor Lenny, so much of the screen-watching I do with him I do halfheartedly and grudgingly. Well, he enjoyed it despite never having had any previous exposure to the key concepts of, variously, History oral presentations, flunking of said presentations, threats about military school, hot stepmoms, Eddie Van Halen, Napoleon, Socrates, Billy the Kid, Freud, Ozzy Osbourne, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan or flying Vs. He had some knowledge of Beethoven though. </p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9t-WXCUGlGQJF4BQP9MfCaWAJk3kFEVRVlYnmaHlWAqrASYSTUuherjGcqhDfMNhbV2gTXUlUigM0SFyTQSgOydRuquGcO8muSoruIVcLgOmGERMpBXdE3LPQn3l4Fd0UNsUTmA/s2048/IMG_8857.heic" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9t-WXCUGlGQJF4BQP9MfCaWAJk3kFEVRVlYnmaHlWAqrASYSTUuherjGcqhDfMNhbV2gTXUlUigM0SFyTQSgOydRuquGcO8muSoruIVcLgOmGERMpBXdE3LPQn3l4Fd0UNsUTmA/w400-h300/IMG_8857.heic" width="400" /></a></p><p>We went to the National Gallery (of Victoria) today and on impulse I enquired in the bookshop if they might have the catalogue of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/apr/05/ravilious-dulwich-picture-gallery-review-watercolours#:~:text=Ravilious%20review%20%E2%80%93%20exhilarating%2C%20enthralling%20and%20outstandingly%20beautiful,-Dulwich%20Picture%20Gallery&text=Ravilious%20at%20Dulwich%20Picture%20Gallery,It%20is%20also%20a%20revelation.&text=It%20shows%20what%20drew%20Ravilious,world%20he%20chose%20to%20depict.">a retrospective of Eric Ravilious</a> I saw last time I was in London and have been thinking about a lot the last couple of months, especially when I've been out of the city driving across the plains of western and central Victoria. They didn't have that book but they did have this one. </p><p>It's a 're-imagining' (the jacket flap's term) of a projected Puffin picture book Ravilious was apparently commissioned to make, around 1939, about Neolithic hill monuments in the South Downs, but never got further with than making a rough mock-up, which surfaced ten years ago in someone's papers, and is just sketches of page layouts with reproductions of some of these mesmerising, & already by then celebrated, watercolours of his pasted in. So a pastiche of the kind of text you might find in an educational book for British children, about British landscape and history and traces of connection with the deep past, at the beginning of the Second World War, was commissioned, and a contemporary illustrator chosen to do some pastiche illustrations of stone tools, barrows, archeological sites etc, to complete the book. </p><p>The book is a very beautiful object, designed sensitively, printed expensively, quiet but kind of lavish too, it really could almost pass for a replica of a genuine 1940s publication. It must've been an honour and also a terrifically interesting project to be involved in the making of this. But of course what it also is, is a phenomenally strange and impudent simulacra, a headlong new assault mounted by the forces of Keep Calm and Carry On upon the senses and faculties of those of us who <a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2017/01/share-something-difficult-youve-been.html">smugly shook our heads at that immense folly</a>. It's a thing that makes the already risky nostalgic facsimile publications look like sober, respectable textual objects. There is a deep, deep madness in this book and I am, I admit, pleasantly puzzled about whether the madness is wholly a symptom of that familiar, grotesque fascination with the aesthetics of wartime Austerity (cf <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/21/the-ministry-of-nostaglia-owen-hatherley-review">Owen Hatherley</a>) which has happened to land for once upon cultural material with enough substance to survive the messing around, or is it that, plus a bat's squeak of an echo of the genuine, mysterious thrilling madness of an image of an animal cut deep into a hill three thousand years ago and cared for and renewed by people across that stretch of time, glimpsed from the windows of a train rushing across the landscape and drawn in light and colour by someone who saw how it all belongs together, the moment in the train and the thousands and thousands of years on the hillside.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0mC7seKJpGEBaQ-rADYbruYZncM4-HggHX37yhEMFDLfFfk8kAUzXMyAaG8SRrctiscrherbMLKMIVjDZdxjJ6ja8EFl5FDjuB-W1IkZATcK8kOPF7qJL-5eqirju4VlwyaOKCA/s2048/IMG_8856.heic" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0mC7seKJpGEBaQ-rADYbruYZncM4-HggHX37yhEMFDLfFfk8kAUzXMyAaG8SRrctiscrherbMLKMIVjDZdxjJ6ja8EFl5FDjuB-W1IkZATcK8kOPF7qJL-5eqirju4VlwyaOKCA/w400-h300/IMG_8856.heic" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT57lKj7tNZa_yu6rJGiXvWQ9rUk82OJai2kSLZL77dv0j2PBCz__B5Symy1FsvQT1VwSgP4QXiRRNuwH5-M5L690tYu1am_UVecgzisrkucZFxCwaXu3bLEaR94RQ94k3C08ysw/s2048/IMG_8855.heic" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT57lKj7tNZa_yu6rJGiXvWQ9rUk82OJai2kSLZL77dv0j2PBCz__B5Symy1FsvQT1VwSgP4QXiRRNuwH5-M5L690tYu1am_UVecgzisrkucZFxCwaXu3bLEaR94RQ94k3C08ysw/w400-h300/IMG_8855.heic" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><div><br /></div>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-84791404553163750552020-12-21T22:07:00.003+11:002020-12-21T22:17:45.249+11:00Shit, sugar, surrealism<p> A couple of weeks ago I responded to a Guardian poll asking readers to sum up 2020 in a single word and the results were published today. My own word was 'surreal', but the wisdom of that particular crowd shone through and the consensus word, by a long margin, is 'shit'. </p><p>The surreality of daily life remains a consistent experience for me. There is always this mismatch if not collision between what's going on right here and now, where I am, and what's happening in other places: new records for disease and death are being set and broken daily in the self-destructive fallen empire states, but here, right now, I sit looking out through a stand of bamboo at birds crossing a gently darkening sky, breath deep and easy, body pleasantly tired, awash in peace, solitude, the clean delicate bliss of complex shifting palettes of coloured light, and the luxury of perfect music and a mind ready to hear and receive it. The hardships of the past months - not over, I could not get out of bed on Thursday, I just lost it with everything - for me and most of us in Australia are the consequence of preventative measures not of the virus itself. So they are a kind of theatre. An aesthetic experience; you have to keep on telling yourself it's happening, if you want to stay out of trouble.</p><p>I went to work today, and almost the first thing that happened was a colleague called out my name across the empty visitor hall. I walked to the desk and she handed me three wrapped gifts; two boxes and one round tin of Cadbury Roses, all from volunteers and all necessitating a straightfaced entering of gift source and value onto the gifts register devised to weed out corruption among civil servants. I don't need that kind of sugar in my life so I carried them to the office and left them all on the communal lunch table by the big window, looking a sad shadow of its former invitation-to-gregariousness self with just the dismal overly symbolic stage dressing of a big sticky bottle of gross cheap hand sanitiser, two chairs where there used to be nine, and surrounded by dead office plants. Surrealism, always the lesser, bourgier, more shit expression of the dislocative effects of modernity. As I rode to work I thought Today I could properly clear out my desk and my locker in the changing room, and then next year bring in fresh everything - sunscreen, lens cleaner, soap, towels, deodorant, changes of underwear, headache pills, coffee grounds, muesli, hair elastics, all these things I seem to need. I opened the drawers in my desk and felt overcome with confusion at the variety and volume of forgotten objects crammed in there; a cardigan I had completely forgotten about, shoes, a biography of Edmund Campion, a plastic bag full of tiny dirty military ribbons and buttons and motheaten cloth patches, useless foreign coins, tissue paper, coloured blocks of oven-harden modeling clay, an empty jewelery box, an empty plastic kimchi pot, notebooks, umbrellas, knee-high stockings, a hat (but not the favourite one, the one I lost). I shut the drawer leaving all of it undisturbed inside, forever presumably. There were ten bottles of wine on my desk, left there by departmental Santa for me and the education staff. I've brought home two. I think I will need to go to work most of the time next year, regulations permitting. It's getting too heavy and weird here working by myself. Happy as anything to live here by myself but working here as well is not how I want to spend my life. I appreciated the normality of the workplace today, even though it's really not terrifically normal anymore.</p><p><br /></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-88229827147154449192020-12-08T22:24:00.001+11:002020-12-08T22:25:31.910+11:00Thank you body<p> I could have sworn I'd fessed up here to this cringemaking notion I have, that the people who have used their talents and skills and more, something of their deepest, best selves, to make available an experience of real connection in the pandemic's wilderness of solitude, loneliness, and isolation, who did acts of enormous, heart-feeding good because they knew people needed it, those people are in fact its saints. But I did a little search in the archives and no. </p><p>The reason I mention it now is because I'm going to write about the idea in the post's name, and that phrase belongs to one of my pandemic saints, <a href="https://www.performinglines.org.au/projects/enemies-of-grooviness-eat-shit/">Betty Grumble</a>, who is a genuine goddess and who did nearly a hundred online <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tv/CEvCCyujdt8/?hl=en">Grumble Boogie sessions</a> this year (all archived in her Instagram feed's IGTV section) - joyful, energetic, inclusive, funny, accessible, hot, and a she has a rare gift for making dance not a spectacle but an awakening. </p><p>I looked out for saints of the pandemic, and I'm still looking out for them. It's a way of seeking out smoking gun evidence that people are ready to exert themselves to bring a bit of light into the world. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFmsg7wl9MgznQS6YymdOWw/featured">Jennifer Ehle</a> sat in her car and read Pride and Prejudice into her phone camera, chapter by chapter. Jarvis Cocker did a disco by live feed from his living room and sometimes his girlfriend, his unimaginably groovy yet ordinary real-person girlfriend (and by being so ordinary in her grooviness, even more groovy, of course) got up and danced - it was just six weeks of Saturday nights but they read the mood of isolation and made it a lo-fi, deadpan funny, transcendent shared experience. (You'll enjoy him talking about this year on a recent episode of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjwmY1KKDmo">Midnight Chats</a>.) I know this is in a different register entirely, but Sally McManus, leading the Australian union movement, took effective action at the beginning of the pandemic and got Jobkeeper. The government didn't do that because they thought it was a good idea, they did it because they were pressured into it. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/magazine/yoga-adriene-mishler.html">Adriene Mishler</a>, who has been doing what she does for a long time, was ready when millions of people needed her. I needed her twice a day for, goodness, two months? I don't know but it was all of winter, basically.</p><p>Today after work I paid a visit to the brow maintenance depot and had my apocalypse brows* seen to. I also expensively solved a problem I had about what to wear to the posh Christmas lunch work function at the Town Hall tomorrow. I've gone up a pants size since the last time I bought pants from Cos but I don't really mind. I like the pants and the nice restrained loose elegant linen and silk knit top, both very dark blue, which I came home with and I will feel ready for pretty much anything tomorrow when I put them on. This is important because I have organised this event and there will be 96 people at it, and there will a lot of concern for me to feel that it goes smoothly and people are looked after, and also a lot of intense greeting people again after this long, difficult separation.</p><p>Last night I combed my eyebrow hairs straight up, instead of letting them lie along the brow line, to see just how long the long ones really were and I was really a bit taken aback. The woman this afternoon trimmed those and brought the outlines back into focus and at her suggestion she put a bit of dye on them to cover up the two hairs in each brow that have turned white. My eyebrows are now jarringly dark, to my eyes, and thick and shapely, and they remind me by turns of Gough's eyebrows and Chanticleer's tail. These are of course both very honourable associations, and I will slowly get used to my face having an element of artificiality to it and at the same time the tint will fade away. </p><p>It's so obvious I guess and trite to observe that living through a pandemic is an intensely bodily experience. My pandemic has been. Acute awareness of my own body and its vulnerabilities as it moves around public places, and other people's bodies conceived of as vectors of danger. The solitude amplified the way that bad feelings hung about in limbs, torso and head as tightnesses, crampings, strange tense flutterings of nerves and uncomfortable sensations. I have not had any kind of virus at all for well over a year now, I barely remember what it's like to have a sore throat or a blocked nose, but virus anxiety at its peak made me so attentive to minute fluctuations in how 'well' I felt from moment to moment. And my body has changed, so much, and this has really been a hard experience. Sedentariness and a re-awakened tendency to nervous eating put on kilos of flesh. Muscular parts, like my bike-rider legs, got smaller and softer, I lost much of the core strength and stability that made physical activity always an easy, pleasant, pain-free experience, and all this change happened so quickly that I became disoriented in my own body. My sense of control over my body, and with it, enjoyment of it and appreciation of it, is returning, but not because of a return to physical fitness and to the shape and size of the body which fits into most of the clothes hanging in my wardrobe. It might be quite a while before that body comes back, if it ever does. What is happening is I am coming to terms with the one I have. It's actually good.</p><p>It is so easy, especially in a body that has known about trauma, to be distressed by, or angry about, or disappointed by, the kinds of changes my body has made this year., and to fall into punishing it for being weak and imperfect. Much harder to value it, dig it, have fun with it, look after it and thank it for being what it is and doing what it can do. </p><p>The other really important thing that happened today is I used the sub-street women's toilets next to the old GPO and as I descended the stairs, I was gladdened by the clean and shining terrazzo floor tiles and cubicle walls, the row of mushroom-like vinyl padded stools facing a long low mirror, the smell of mild disinfectant regularly mopped around the toilets and sinks and the soft illumination coming through the opaque skylights. I know this tile would have been chosen because it's pink, but I don't care. I think it's lovely.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBNEnkezmP8jL7VbQldtp2qHrj8eCIBRqZVENJQ4nfk3tcE8ZkdcdEo0zCzEj5Htt3J2iB2sfGaw_-l-8CZjbPLbjjUsOyQMvABwtiGO3LKicwuLsn0lITMDm5tQX9GxdhmY0ClQ/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBNEnkezmP8jL7VbQldtp2qHrj8eCIBRqZVENJQ4nfk3tcE8ZkdcdEo0zCzEj5Htt3J2iB2sfGaw_-l-8CZjbPLbjjUsOyQMvABwtiGO3LKicwuLsn0lITMDm5tQX9GxdhmY0ClQ/" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>*credit to Zoe for the photograph which gave me this impeccable, enigmatic, magical phrase</p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-53216074413942841032020-12-06T14:32:00.006+11:002020-12-06T14:45:28.624+11:00Saturday and today<p> Leonard wanted to try baseball, I understand, so Dorian organised for him to get involved with a local group. (Whenever something like this comes up I remember <a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2011/04/rules.html">this post</a> , this hubristic, forgivable post, censoriously laying down my principles for parenting, one of which was that extracurricular organised team sport and music lessons are not forbidden but not encouraged either. That's still how I feel, but we now have both and I'm ok with it. </p><p>But yesterday was the first time I had escorted him to baseball and, as he did warn me in advance would happen, parents were made to join in. That wasn't too bad - I am quite fit, reasonably coordinated with ball sports especially after the horrific months of playing daily ball games in the park in lockdown, and I've been around long enough to know that little children are generally worse at most things than most adults. What I wasn't prepared for was the coach being the walking embodiment of all the reasons I would move out of the Brunswick area if it was a realistic option. Well, stuff is devised to be put up with and I put up with it. At the end of the session we were sent to the clubhouse to speak to someone there about paying fees and getting a t-shirt. So we did that. I was really pissed off that the people in there were not wearing masks and that while we were in there, heaps more people came in, like stupid, complacent, pre-pandemic sheep. The person who told Lenny he's now a member of the Fitzroy Baseball Club had siad that and issued other instructions in a very bossy loud voice and I caught her tone when we turned to leave and I said to everyone and noone in particular, Go outside and line up, do you think covid is over? because it isn't. </p><p>Then I had to go buy cat litter and sticky hooks, up at Barkly Square, but we also went to two op shops, the bike shop, a bookshop and we bought buns and coffee and ate them in the outside part of the shopping centre. Kmart didn't have any sticky hooks but the pet supplies shop did have the type of cat litter I normally get, which was a relief, because this week I've had a much inferior type in the litter tray and the cats have tracked it all through all the rooms. I have started feeding them Hairball Control instead of Indoors and they don't throw up any more, so that's a definite win, although I know they will think of something else to do. </p><p>Leonard was very pleased with a book he found in Vinnies and walked along the road showing me the map drawn in the front. This reminded him of the fantasy series kids at school are into at the moment so we walked down several blocks to the bookshop and I bought him the first three instalments. It's called Warriors and is about the adventures of several groups of feral cats. There are six series with five books in each series. When I hear about things like this I know why I am not rich. But he was immensely delighted to have these books and thanked me so happily three or four times as we headed back towards the pet shop. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlcv1K1U9f3wKK6PtBVWYRDV5kcx8Or37mLSslTIYZVKf1_GsLlJ2j-EUtjlHsr2HxiFoLE5ZVz_tE8fTO6W2vysQRAb9x03BMNcsUzwVvZQzTlpjU6IltVeEg0T1LFpVbzpRdxg/s2048/IMG_8366.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlcv1K1U9f3wKK6PtBVWYRDV5kcx8Or37mLSslTIYZVKf1_GsLlJ2j-EUtjlHsr2HxiFoLE5ZVz_tE8fTO6W2vysQRAb9x03BMNcsUzwVvZQzTlpjU6IltVeEg0T1LFpVbzpRdxg/w240-h320/IMG_8366.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p>Along Sydney Road yesterday artists were painting Christmas murals onto shop windows. A young and very pretty woman was painting on the window of a bar near Edward St, with two old drunk stale-smoke-smelling nuisance type men standing on either side of her as she knelt down to paint a bit near the bottom. As we passed one of them turned to Lenny and began haranguing him about the books in his arms. I didn't intervene, out of a sense that everyone should have the chance to fight their own battles, and Len got away from him soon enough. A little further on a woman stopped us in the street and offered us a Sydney Road shopping bag, which I accepted. Choose carefully, she said holding up a bundle, Because one has a gift voucher inside. Lenny picked the right one and so it is that we have a $100 gift voucher for a kebab shop that is ranked on Trip Advisor as #161 of 173 cafes and restaurants in Brunswick. In February I had invited my whole work area to my house for dinner as a fundraiser for the ASRC, but of course that was postponed. I'm wondering if it would be bad, or rather, if it would be unacceptably bad, to invite them round again and use this voucher to provide part of the meal. What else can I possibly do with it?</p><p>A highlight, or at lest a feature, of the afternoon was getting further than we ever have before on a torturous online game Lenny is becoming obsessed with because it is so fiendishly difficult and we never manage to complete it. In the game you are in charge of a convict ship and the aim is to reach Van Diemen's Land without everyone dying. So it's a real barrel of laughs and ethical minefield to boot. It's here <a href="https://www.sea.museum/discover/apps-and-games/voyage-game">https://www.sea.museum/discover/apps-and-games/voyage-game</a> . We ran out of water about three quarters of the way across the Indian Ocean. Bummer.</p><p>Today I finished reading Don Delillo's new novel that I bought on impulse yesterday, a bit like settling into an old comfortable well worn pair of slippers, if wearing slippers always gave you a sense of looking squarely at the fatigue and confusion and paranoid uneasiness that floats through postmodernity - I didn't expect anything new and didn't get it but the first line of the dust jacket flap made me want to spend $30; it said (basically) that the book (which is a disaster novel) had been completed just before the pandemic began and therefore deals with a different kind of critical irruption. I enjoyed the book, which is called The Silence, sorry I should have said that, and will read it again. Lenny has been listening to some classic Goon Show episodes so it's been a kind of Style Wars experience to the morning, or maybe a The Two Cultures experience. He enthusiastically ate the lunch I made him (wraps) which was a relief because he'd only nibbled at the breakfast (pancakes) and at last night's dinner (ramen). I'd have just had eggs and kale for every meal if I was by myself, and that's exactly what I'll do next week because he's going this afternoon. I really miss him when he isn't here although I do have a lot of enjoyment and get absorbed deeply in things, it's not a pining away sort of missing. But it's strong. </p><p>The rest of the afternoon I'm going to cut out yet another linen <a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2017/12/style-3371.html">Style 3371</a>. I'm actually wearing the black one I was making in that post. It is really faded and the linen has washed and worn thin and it's only a matter of time before it tears. The wax print cotton one I made has already torn at the inside corner of the square neckline, not surprising since there is no structural reinforcement in the garment construction. The dress I'll cut out today is in a rich deep cyclamen pink linen which I is a bit of a gamble - I'm not sure the shade really does much for me and even if it does I expect will lose a lot of colour in the wash, because all of the other linen I bought at the place this came from has been crappily dyed, unfortunately, because it's a gorgeous smooth rolling pliable weight just perfect for hot summertime. I'm also cutting out some slips from another pattern I've been making and remaking since at least the early 2000s. Sometimes I think I really shouldn't keep making the same garments over and over again, but then I think who gives an absolute stuff, I can do whatever I want. I really need some glove puppets to dramatise these internal conversations.</p><p> </p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-52877109493017622452020-12-04T14:26:00.000+11:002020-12-04T14:26:01.680+11:00Birthday Week news<p> The gods of Birthday Week have been really kind. I celebrated the fairly nothing birthday of 48 in the style I wanted to, I have had gifts fairly lavished upon me and I while I have had so much work to do that meeting people for coffee has had to be put off, I've got a few of those lined up for next week, so we go from birthday week to birthday fortnight, just like that, in the merest, merest blink of an eye. A terrible beauty is born! 48 is really OK. I am middle-aged but I don't feel it, except in the sense of carrying the heavy and invisible burden of detailed knowledge about things that existed and happened five decades ago. Late at night on the evening of my actual birthday I made a $10 ebay purchase of a book my parents gave me 38 years ago which I lavished deep attention on. It's mildly MR James-ish creepy folktales illustrated by Jan Pienkowski who is best remembered for Meg and Mog but also did a wonderful line (literally) in Arthur Rackhamesque illustrations updated for the 60s and 70s, which appeared in children's novels of the kind I had a bottomless appetite for - spooky adventure stories, Neolithic SF, time travel, supernatural victoriana. I'm looking forward to getting it in the mail. </p><p>In an hour my department will have our regular Zoom friday afternoon tea and quiz. It might be the last, I understand. I hear from people who work elsewhere that the return to their workplaces is still shrouded in the mists of totally off the table for now and cant even begin to imagine it; when I was at work yesterday, to do things I can't do at home then leave immediately, I got the distinct but still puzzling impression that I'm expected to be going in there for substantial amounts of time irrespective of whether or not I really need to. I'm just going to wait till I'm actually explicitly told, Go To Work Now. Meanwhile afternoon tea today will feature the delivery to me by email of a homemade birthday card decorated with a picture the team has decided is a fair representation of my interests (can't wait to see THAT of course) and also a quiz, not the standard Age trivia but a custom one somebody's googled, again, chosen specifically to embody my workplace official interests. This year I think we've had hamsters, art, WWII (sigh), food. I'm a bit worried it might be a too-esoterically hard Jane Austen quiz and all my whining that the Age quizzes don't have any questions about Jane Austen will come back to bite me. The natural and unabating joyousness of a work-from-home festival of Laura's Birthday is likely to have something of a pall cast on it by the fact that the first thing we'll do in that call is start a discussion about the Brereton Report. I still don't know what I think its implications are for us. I've booked myself in for the amazing service provided for free by <a href="https://ethics.org.au">The Ethics Centre</a>, a phone conversation with a counsellor experienced in teaching others frameworks for ethical decision-making. If it's useful personally I might suggest we get someone in to workshop the problems with us as a group. Chatham House rules.</p><p>Pompey is flopped on the balcony playing with his fluorescent yellow toy mouse, and I have been stroking Chanticleer, beside me on the couch, so assiduously that the side chops of fluff on his head are all smoothed and sleekly flattened, with the result that he has acquired the ephemeral appearance of being a normal-looking cat. It's uncanny!</p><p><br /></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-23785618050363138942020-12-01T21:23:00.003+11:002020-12-01T21:23:40.543+11:00Solutions<p>I wrote yesterday that I had 'a bit of a problem' at work - well, now that problem (in fact a grotesquely rotten one) is sorted, and sorted to a far better outcome than was initially in view, although it's going to be a mad scramble now to swing operations around very quickly. It will be worth all the scrambling however. I owe my director lunch, not only for getting us to this solution but also for taking on the chin the email I sent her this morning stating that I thought a very bad decision had been made by our big-boss and that I did not intend to carry the can for it in the many discussions entailed for me in disseminating the problematic decision. I think I wrote not long ago that she's very good to work for and she demonstrated that again today, vividly. If I can book a table at the gardens cafe for Thursday then it will be my very real pleasure to show her some appreciation. (is this getting creepy? I guess things might be edging in that direction. It's been/being a long year.)</p><p>Well, this afternoon I removed three of the drawings on the wall and took them to the framer. They're going to be Christmas presents.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPDpxztBT3AvM2Z4zTe1mUZzFNwPpX0FChcCL9cdkFX7vbvidjWkGH0xNUaCNcJRTkNcT2SEit4S2HVZadYn1hK3y2PT-0hQmFVx8HZ8t5f12P1OnxCDVWEuUlKz_UFN7J66rxcQ/s2048/IMG_8316.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPDpxztBT3AvM2Z4zTe1mUZzFNwPpX0FChcCL9cdkFX7vbvidjWkGH0xNUaCNcJRTkNcT2SEit4S2HVZadYn1hK3y2PT-0hQmFVx8HZ8t5f12P1OnxCDVWEuUlKz_UFN7J66rxcQ/s320/IMG_8316.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNGyoGkDhdZ_qmq0FrGZUcQRQ4z3w-W5kW0r1WwM7R1q_ZldP2JxpTsMyHoV-076d8vXWMMzTO_t1EgsqMkdpbjciNevgHdl0hCIbnv-UAFlyJXN6eMMMvtZMomg6GMID_o2ylQ/s2048/IMG_8318.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNGyoGkDhdZ_qmq0FrGZUcQRQ4z3w-W5kW0r1WwM7R1q_ZldP2JxpTsMyHoV-076d8vXWMMzTO_t1EgsqMkdpbjciNevgHdl0hCIbnv-UAFlyJXN6eMMMvtZMomg6GMID_o2ylQ/s320/IMG_8318.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgduCgJlor0nJ26ZIQDfzmUFIg-_svts80mdEEsj-uyBfkP9VVAIhEME57xvBRzU7HiuIyYZBsVkGBDMvCx-tVoCzy-aADAAD-oFM6gktlIkiiQsMFR9LXpU6qL07-8XNKAtz-PuQ/s2048/IMG_8319.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgduCgJlor0nJ26ZIQDfzmUFIg-_svts80mdEEsj-uyBfkP9VVAIhEME57xvBRzU7HiuIyYZBsVkGBDMvCx-tVoCzy-aADAAD-oFM6gktlIkiiQsMFR9LXpU6qL07-8XNKAtz-PuQ/s320/IMG_8319.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Sometimes the giving of Christmas presents is a minefield of drab emotions. Resentment of consumerism goes head to head with the desire to try to at least do it well if it has to be done at all, and if it's not done, then what is Christmas for the irreligious?* Eating? </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">These three gifts won't be like that. They mean a lot to me: the pleasure and the healing of the doing, the circumstances of the doing, the sitting with them every day in this room, the thinking for a long time about what they mean, the thinking for quite a while about not keeping them and what I can be going on with once they're not around, and finally now the giving away. I'm giving them to people I love, people who can receive and carry all that loadedness, or alternatively not carry it and just let it be, as the circumstances of our lives require. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm keeping the one I like best; also the one I fought with the longest and am still not sure whether I got the better of it in the end; and the one that is definitely a failure; and there are two unfinished drawings which will stay up on the wall until they get finished, and they will get finished. One is the start of a bigger project which I'm uncertain I found the right form for, and finishing the drawing will help me make a decision about that. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The small drawing <a href="http://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2020/08/night.html">in this post</a>, I would like to give to my analyst, but I have a feeling it's not done to give your analyst a gift. Imagine how I'm going to feel when I google that question after I publish this post and it turns out that aaaaactually, patients are supposed to give their analysts presents and I am therefore <i>nine years behind. </i>I often have a suspicion that psychoanalysis is over when the patient can do the things she thinks she might not be allowed to do, like give the analyst a present or tell her she doesn't want to be psychoanalysed any more. But I would like her to have this small bright image of people connecting in the dark masked solitariness of midwinter lockdown. Raw and unframed. I haven't seen her since March except through the computer.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Well what can I be going on with when these drawings are not around? I have a couple of ideas about that, but (I think I told you this already) as my previous director used to say, sort of crossly, 'anyone can have a good idea.'** So I'm thinking. This post is part of the thinking. I continue to be excited by the beauty of the physical world and could happily keep on responding to it in pencil on paper. But you know, I think they were actually right at VCA, if they were really saying what I now take them to have been saying; you don't have to mirror the world to appreciate it, you can just see it and that's enough. But you might want to find out why you appreciate what you see.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ7c_nb9n-2IeBGidQyTxqv1b1mOCOqBIZVnxA9UgRfxPvi2sd3bR8Ar7k3491urJ1tNvq4rE974s08CGg433q8vbfIcrghwRdNObDvpLvYbmwt3xdDLm59HGdcGTrmBByG69Ncg/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ7c_nb9n-2IeBGidQyTxqv1b1mOCOqBIZVnxA9UgRfxPvi2sd3bR8Ar7k3491urJ1tNvq4rE974s08CGg433q8vbfIcrghwRdNObDvpLvYbmwt3xdDLm59HGdcGTrmBByG69Ncg/" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>* The thought of belonging to some form of spiritual tradition is just an unsolvable paradox, or maybe just a mess not a paradox; the nourishing and humanly necessary element but also the vulnerabilities to perversions and predators. When I was about nineteen or twenty I shared a house with a man called Andrew, and once he was sitting in the kitchen listlessly strumming his nylon-string guitar and he said, 'I envy the Aboriginals. We'll never belong here the way they do.' This was a radically new idea to me; I'm not saying it's a good one. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div>** one of my ideas is to do something with a list of the things people have said to me that I've thought about again and again. Is that what 'resonating' is? I'm thinking not just of Deep stuff like Andrew's comment about 'the Aboriginals' and J's inarguably true remark which was also a way of not letting anyone else in the team have an idea without it being shot down, but also of the teacher at VCA who said I had a bad-shaped head and my first yoga teacher who told me my arms are like a gorilla's.<br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-81727503000938279482020-11-30T22:15:00.008+11:002020-12-01T00:31:19.666+11:00Media storage<p>Something odd happened an hour or two ago. I'd gone to the basement of the building to put stuff in the recycling skip and then stow my trolley in my storage cage. I came back up in the lift and got out at my floor, and for a brief, completely confusing moment, the building seemed to have been reconfigured while I was downstairs because there was a blank wall facing me where the long hallway should have been. I'd turned left instead of right. So I'd somehow become disoriented in the lift. It was just a moment, but it was a moment of total bewilderment. </p><p>I turned and walked down the hallway, reassuringly still there, and noticed it, which I don't usually; it felt airy and bright and when I rounded the corner I glimpsed the big pin oak tree in view of the window in full fresh leaf. I might live here for a long while yet, I thought. That would not be bad. </p><p>I felt weighed down with lassitude for most of today. I've got a bit of a problem at work, emphatically not one of my making, but still, I'm going to have to do the clearing up and it's a particularly draining kind of clearing up that I'm going to have to do. But I think I feel like a wet bread roll because I overdid myself on Sunday. The morning began mildly enough but I felt like I might fritter my weekend day away without noticing, and my word I loathe that feeling, so I tackled my list of tasks. I ordered a small selection of modular shelving units from Ikea and booked the first available collection time the system showed me - some days away - but about an hour later I got a text saying it was all ready so after Lenny came we went there and picked it all up. At nearly ten years old he still enjoys playing house in the showroom just as much as he did when he was four. He fell asleep on the way home, but revived and rallied enough to urgently request that we set up and decorate the Christmas tree after dinner. So that's what we did. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlHiSqJ3_h-EcFgr703J_CK4UaELbnV_VO9gxhTsIV8bCVe72rljr-dOzBpntxYkYJPShGwgD7CuLEwH4G0Nv-C0Wdv4esXunWuA-IZ2CL2TDqF09awmPOgkqECmv6tjlPLXDtbg/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlHiSqJ3_h-EcFgr703J_CK4UaELbnV_VO9gxhTsIV8bCVe72rljr-dOzBpntxYkYJPShGwgD7CuLEwH4G0Nv-C0Wdv4esXunWuA-IZ2CL2TDqF09awmPOgkqECmv6tjlPLXDtbg/w240-h320/IMG_8312+2.HEIC" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">After he finally went to sleep I couldn't help myself and I started putting together the furniture. I was tired and I felt I might've made a poor choice of thing, but even setting those factors aside I don't believe I've ever had a worse ikea assembly experience. It was just so difficult to get it right - like, lots of strength in the hands needed, the necessity to crane your neck on odd angles to insert fragile plastic fastening pins. I was corkscrewing away trying to get the legs on the thing and thinking, Why did I acquire so many records, like that Jon Hassell record, for instance, I'll probably play that four times a year tops, and now I have to push these stoppers into that black thing, and it is HURTING my FINGIES, because I ran out of shelf space. At about ten p.m. I realised I needed to stop, so I watched some TV, foolishly proud of myself for sensibly stopping before the whole situation degenerated further. But I was late to bed and slept fitfully, so today wasn't as pleasant as Mondays can often be.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The TV is an object of unusual interest to me at the moment. I do not think I will ever be desperate enough to watch The Crown, but I have so enjoyed reading in the leftist press about the various bleatings emitted by a cavalcade of tory fuckwits who think it's a good use of high office to write to Netflix and order them to insert a '<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/nov/29/the-crown-netflix-health-warning-fictional-oliver-dowden">health warning</a>' at the start of the show to tell viewers it's fiction (in between not incidentally writing to collecting institutions ordering them not to return stolen artefacts and ordering the BBC to not stop playing Rule Britannia at some fart of a thing they play it at). The A plague on both your houses effect kicks in pretty quickly, of course, because the only more unanswerable question than 'why not "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/16/the-crown-fake-history-news-tv-series-royal-family-artistic-licence">caricatur[e] the royal family in the worst possible light</a>"' is 'why are you making a show about the royal family at all'. But still, it is so nice to open my news apps and see so many ignorant, entitled, privately educated freebooters snivelling to Mother while people who deal with storytelling and the past all the time are just standing there, a small cruel smile playing about the corners of their mouths, saying<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/fact-or-fiction-british-government-says-the-crown-should-be-clear-20201130-p56j0c.html"> I told you so.</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">What I did watch on Netflix and do recommend: The Trial of the Chicago 7, and The Queen's Gambit. God, I have to go to bed. I'll write about them tomorrow. I also recommend Jon Hassell's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO64qXPnHBY">Vernal Equinox</a>: it's perfect for listening to as I am doing now, alone in a quiet room, late at night in early summer.</div><br /><p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-42469080307168857052020-11-26T22:14:00.003+11:002020-11-26T22:17:45.842+11:00dot points!<p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I continue to be interested the pandemic experience, especially in the Melbourne variety, somewhat mysteriously to myself, since I'm also really bored with thinking about it and talking about it. What is that? A couple of nights ago I went for a drink and a walk with a friend I haven't seen in person for a year. This was also the first time I've done that nice low-key social catch-up thing since Amanda came to dinner in June, in between the two lockdowns. Draining as it is to be sociable when you're really not used to operating in the proper mode, let alone when what it consists of is three straight hours of 2020 lockdown and pandemic notes-comparing, I still just found it really compelling to hear about how someone else's child has fared, what someone else's working from home has been like and what someone else really thinks about the politics of pandemic spin in Victoria. </li><li>To be quite honest I am at a bit of a loss about how to go about restarting casual social contact. I'll do it, but I just feel really dorky and awkward about getting the ball rolling, and frankly it can really be a drag finding mutually appropriate times, and then it sucks time away from my current life, which is really pretty excellent I have to say. The other night, as the time to meet C got nearer, I really didn't want to go out, I wanted to not brush my hair and instead lie on the couch and read my book, but I forced myself and then it was fine. </li><li>Next week is Birthday Week and after angsting inconclusively for a while about whether or not to attempt some sort of picnicky party, I've resolved instead to set up a string of catch-up walks, coffees, maybe dinners (I'll have Leonard) etc through the week - starting this weekend, even, and extending on into next. I say 'I've resolved to' but I haven't done the setting-up yet. I will though.</li><li>With the freedom to come and go from the city restored I've already made two visits to the rest of my family, who are all living in my parents' house in a regional city. And that was pretty nice. The presence of an eight-month-old baby is, as you know, a rock solid guarantee of happiness. Leonard came with me the second time and acted around this new cuz just exactly how I knew he would - he smiled at her and chatted to her in baby talk, remarked often on how it's a bit creepy the way she stares and stares at him, refused to hold her, and then after a while pretty much ignored her in favour of his book (seven of thirteen, something about dragons something something.) So visiting family is something i recommend. What I don't recommend is having a Zoom appointment with your shrink in the spare bedroom of your parents' house. I don't want to forget how teeth-grindingly uncomfortable that was. I mean, I'm definitely not going to write a novel about the pandemic or anything but you never know when some scrap of uninventable real life is going to come in useful.</li><li>On that topic, I've written and drawn a short comic in tribute to Basil, drawn from a combination of many years of occasional reflection on how good he was combined with extensive mining of the riches of documentation laid down in this blog. I've never done a comic before and it was a super interesting exercise and also one I was heartily sick of by the time I'd finished it. My drawing is really a bit stuck in a kind of tentativeness or anxiety, it's not free and spontaneous the way that it will get when I bite the bullet and take some life classes - it's not even capable of generating a stylish line, let alone a correct one - and so I soon realised I'd condemned myself to a large number of finicky drawings of the same animal, ironically an animal who was as chill and unfussed a creature as any who ever lived in a house with people. It was lucky that this happened to be an animal, and a narrative, that I knew as well as I know my own life story, so trading on the strength of that foundation I got it done and found plenty of moments of playfulness to enjoy along the way. That is a technical perspective. From the point of view of my emotional life I am glad I've made something to acknowledge how much that animal enriched my life. I used to make fun of him but honestly, he was excellent. The comic is going into a little book David is compiling and I'm not too sure when that'll be good to go, but when it is I'll send you a copy if you'd like one.</li><li>Going to work tomorrow for a couple of hours - haven't been there for five months - there are complicated rules and caps in place around who can and can't go there but these might be lifted pretty soon the way things are headed. I'm really looking forward to it. </li><li>Speaking of work and work things, I'm reading the 450 page IGADF report on the Afghanistan Inquiry. It's sickening, horrifying and depressing in every way, even coming after extensive whistleblowing and in the context of a lot of generally very concerning stuff about the way the SAS operates and the way certain veterans of the Afghanistan war are lionised. I don't know how my work is going to change because of it but I do know it's going to have to change. How to set about beginning to come to terms with it is not something i can comprehend right now. All I'm doing at this stage is working on getting on top of the facts and the way the ADF and the government are going to deal with them, and taking note of the demonstrations of how not to deal with them that various players in the commemoration industry are currently providing on a daily basis.</li></ul><p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-40493415768627043482020-11-23T22:56:00.000+11:002020-11-23T22:56:23.840+11:00Pompey's Dread<p> I have to get up really early tomorrow but it's important to make known the fact that Pompey has apparently decided to imitate his brother and grow nasty matted little dreadlocks in the patch of strange Bunyip Bluegum-like muttonchop fuzz which protrudes from behind each ear. He doesn't know how to do it properly though of course - how could he, he just lies down on my bed and lies and lies and lies there until something briefly causes him to get up, then he lies down again as soon as he can and the whole lying-down in total peace and comfort and being almost completely asleep thing, the whole nightmare of that, happens again. So because he does not pay attention he only grew one dread and it was very inexpertly anchored to his head and I was able to just grab it and wriggle it away from his head while I was patting him just now. It looks like a sea monster. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq1hg6ZFac00nb8YexacUYNKFQiPCKZm-73CffCRir7dGa7X7Rawc4XLukj3mmIVz7wxVoXS87-zSbygpV8HsBolBkup_KnUf1vGp7fgScS45JjBPW57y_esGXy2q_mayQJnkjjg/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="343" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq1hg6ZFac00nb8YexacUYNKFQiPCKZm-73CffCRir7dGa7X7Rawc4XLukj3mmIVz7wxVoXS87-zSbygpV8HsBolBkup_KnUf1vGp7fgScS45JjBPW57y_esGXy2q_mayQJnkjjg/w257-h343/IMG_8192.HEIC" width="257" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The fact of the matter is I got out of bed to tell you this and you are not even grateful.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-29294847965197669512020-11-18T14:14:00.001+11:002020-11-18T14:14:22.450+11:00if you draw almost anything, set it free<p> Remember <a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2019/08/how-to-draw-everything.html">this library book</a>, about how to draw everything except women, that I fucked around so crossly and enjoyably with last year? Soon after I returned it the library billed me for damaging a book - fair - I didn't pay though, and switched instead to using Leonard's library card when I want to borrow books from there. Makes sense, really, he can be liable for late fines, which have just been reinstated after months and months of library-book limbo (they let us borrow at different times in lockdown, on a click and collect type system, but we have not been asked to return any till a few weeks ago). At this library they want to be paid fines in food rather than money, though, and the only food Len has exclusive rights of ownership over is the Lindt white chocolate in the pantry which he would prefer to die of library fines than be parted from or know that someone else was getting to eat it. Well, anyhow, when I would go to the library, I checked on the book and it was still in circulation, sometimes on the shelf and sometimes not, damage intact so to speak. I never knew though whether the additions were noticed by borrowers or what they made of them, if so, or whether anyone fed anything back to the library. The book just was there sometimes and other times not, clearly conducting its business without reporting back to me. This too is fair.</p><p>A couple of times in recent months, though, most recently just last night, I've heard back. Both times via the same grapevine, which is, essentially, our dear friend <a href="http://ampersandduck.blogspot.com/">Ampersand Duck</a> aka Caren Florance, a natural magnet and clearinghouse for everything that happens in Australia and probably the world in the realm of book arts intersecting with rebellion. A while back someone she knows posted a link on her FB of a post about the altered book in an inner-north FB group. The poster to the group had borrowed it from the library, and got it to the extent of apparently talking about it with her kids. Caren tagged me and I was of course thrilled no end. Someone in that group got in touch with me again yesterday to say they too had borrowed the book and had some fun talks about it with the family at home. I love everything about this and feel really quite grateful to the library for letting the book go on with its life in this way.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNjO3ZZB5IsKNMUZAPLdw3CCYeVvZJGAEI8rF9WFJZ_vplhQSa3yQrba5ucgLd1HkS3NFadJBx3EYO794Whk_U0kH1Dvxzm8FgdgOCl2n1HS1ZTcXQhWXcEwAY95uX3e0Va5VNDA/s2048/IMG_8120+2.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNjO3ZZB5IsKNMUZAPLdw3CCYeVvZJGAEI8rF9WFJZ_vplhQSa3yQrba5ucgLd1HkS3NFadJBx3EYO794Whk_U0kH1Dvxzm8FgdgOCl2n1HS1ZTcXQhWXcEwAY95uX3e0Va5VNDA/w357-h476/IMG_8120+2.HEIC" width="357" /></a></div>A couple of months ago, now that many of the old Shrine lifers have moved onto other things and people generally feel a bit freer to innovate in appropriate ways, I was encouraged by my really pretty great manager to actually do the artwork for a pre-Remembrance Day activity I'd been involved in generating conceptually. <p></p><p>It is not in my job description to do this kind of thing but I certainly can do this kind of thing, and have been wanting to for a long time, so this was a really personally satisfying project purely as an emblem of a very good mutually supportive working relationship. I am so lucky to have this job, I know it. </p><p>Well, the activity was to 'make and decorate' a messenger bird, part dove and part carrier pigeon, bearing in its beak a message to someone far away and missed. The maker and decorator puts their own message. </p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">The idea was, as always, to bridge people's experiences now (especially children's and young people's) and the area of human experience the Shrine is designed to express and shape. So I drew a template, not incidentally did it while working from home, and much more difficult than doing the artwork was figuring out how to get it scanned whilst living in 5km radius, everything closed, only four reasons to leave home lockdown. One of the small-business people in my street did it for me, and also this has a personal importance reflective of what it means to belong to and be grounded in a community. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p style="text-align: left;">Our marketing people have been sending pictures every now and then of the bird doing its thing out in the wild. I love these, too. I will do a lot more of this kind of thing for work now. </p></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5-_fNlWHDeECJ-LkD5xEWKeMY0mILwPbcf5jI94o35sJFdWJgJ6RyJrtj_wc5ztHoWgHy6KuqDmMtUFpO9ON7XmMlz9-dSZstBlf4uc0aCqg_75CvYbtz6KKilHTUwnb1KqiTow/s350/Screen+Shot+2020-11-18+at+1.35.31+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="296" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5-_fNlWHDeECJ-LkD5xEWKeMY0mILwPbcf5jI94o35sJFdWJgJ6RyJrtj_wc5ztHoWgHy6KuqDmMtUFpO9ON7XmMlz9-dSZstBlf4uc0aCqg_75CvYbtz6KKilHTUwnb1KqiTow/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-11-18+at+1.35.31+pm.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjphiaxkYr8iXfT00CjcfWfvzCJ9KgLEpFKZypxAlcV9Zjs1hwcn2ddtnNIphBF2qo0BqBM0b4nWRgE85oBOZkV8FGdU7v9DP7EbszX2-tzUBzHvK8gA1yVicjonUCmu1RRi9EV7g/s325/Screen+Shot+2020-11-18+at+1.35.03+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="292" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjphiaxkYr8iXfT00CjcfWfvzCJ9KgLEpFKZypxAlcV9Zjs1hwcn2ddtnNIphBF2qo0BqBM0b4nWRgE85oBOZkV8FGdU7v9DP7EbszX2-tzUBzHvK8gA1yVicjonUCmu1RRi9EV7g/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-11-18+at+1.35.03+pm.png" /></a></div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkIjb09txW1k7qYwKAenny4CFysVKS5z95Z9k-_z9UyICW5UrZE02-8WqKoKU4mSkCGNiX9qqzXK2l0ZvvCmUf6Wb0vZ70r7_gH2bucYDer7yFTJSPzaPUpyrt_pj5tsBXy-D9LQ/s315/Screen+Shot+2020-11-18+at+1.35.55+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkIjb09txW1k7qYwKAenny4CFysVKS5z95Z9k-_z9UyICW5UrZE02-8WqKoKU4mSkCGNiX9qqzXK2l0ZvvCmUf6Wb0vZ70r7_gH2bucYDer7yFTJSPzaPUpyrt_pj5tsBXy-D9LQ/s0/Screen+Shot+2020-11-18+at+1.35.55+pm.png" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-84306544866648499372020-11-15T22:48:00.003+11:002020-11-15T22:48:53.522+11:00the sense of an ending; Brazen Hussies<p>As has been pointed out to me recently, I once considered myself a fluent and informed reader in the language and concepts of eschatology and apocalypticism, and therefore I had imagined that when the endings began I would not experience them as qualitatively strange. But what has actually happened is so remarkable to me: I recognise the forms of world-ending cataclysm, unfolding in exactly the ordinary, drab, weird but unspectacular ways they have been shown to do in the great political imaginations of people like Lessing and Ballard and PKD and le Guin and KS Robinson - but I still find it mind-breakingly strange to see it and experience it as it happens. I feel like I go on about this all the time. It is one thing, it turns out, to grasp the truth and inevitability of modernism for the modernists, and quite another to know that the basis on which you live your life, you conduct your practice of reality, you experience your sense of self and world, is a series of hollowed-out forms that will now mostly serve only to amplify alienation and surreality. Don't get me wrong, I don't fear this scenario. I know the artists will find the new forms. But I know too that I'll have to wait till they do to understand what's going on; I can't figure it out by myself. I just see the puncture, the shape of the hole.</p><p>Timelines run side by side like lanes of a swimming pool and the currents in them move at different speeds. You can flow across from one lane to another and travel at different speeds yourself. Here I sit, cross-legged on my couch, looking up at the sky outside and listening to the wind pick up speed; I'm in the quiet, still, present, introspective but aware state I think of as lava-lamp mode. I know I'm in a slow lane, a backwater continuum, right at this minute, but also that my life, what remains of it, is going to be lived in this way, drifting in a stream grandfathered from a past reality, largely in my head, watching the world, enjoying it or being distressed by it, being connected to it, but never having to stay out there in the psychological thick of things if I don't want to. It is not at all bad. I have to do what I can to prepare my son for his independent life and at times this is a very frightening, saddening prospect. But that's what having a child is, when you get right down to it. You can't look after them forever.</p><p>Perversely I sat down to write something intentionally not at all in that vein: a reflection on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/05/brazen-hussies-review-reclaiming-the-history-of-australias-womens-liberation-movement">Brazen Hussies</a>, a documentary about Australian women in feminist movements in the 1970s. David and I went to see it the day before yesterday and I really enjoyed it, as did he I think. I used to go to the movies a lot and write about them with conviction and unselfconsciousness (<a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2006/06/basil-doesnt-care-all-that-much-about.html">for eg</a>) whatever they happened to be like. Every so often I wheel the blog around and point it outwards rather than inwards, for a while, and I think that mode is coming into the ascendant now. The surreality of the present moment envelops everything and must be acknowledged though; cinemas have only just reopened in Melbourne with strict occupancy limits of 20 per space. When I booked tickets there was the usual type of diagram showing the available seats but they were dispersed in paranoiac blocks and groupings around the seating bank. In the event, of course, there was just one other pair of spectators one -- sitting in the row in front and immediately to the right -- thus four intermittently masked people in a cinema for about 60 - and we had ended up sitting probably closer to each other than we would have done if left to our own devices and not having to think tediously about plague. I'm not saying 'oh the people who set up online ticket sales are so stupid', it's just the everyday kabuki of dealing with our situation.</p><p>Well, ok, the movie. We didn't see the start, but of what I did see, the only thing that didn't work for me is the name of the film, which is generic, and thereby does a disservice to the marvellously personal and particular nature of the women's stories canvassed in the film. There is no more relevant example of the power and impact of finding the right name for a project than the name Michelle Arrow gave to her very fine book about this era in Australian history viewed through the lens of the Royal Commission into Human Relationships, which is called <a href="http://www.newsouthpublishing.com/articles/seventies-how-personal-became-political/">The Seventies</a> - not some name limiting the scope of the narrative to changing conceptions of gender or sex roles, or even to changing conceptions of what constitutes the political - just, The Seventies. But that's really my only gripe. This is a great film for the present moment and I'm really looking forward to discussing it with lots of people. I hope it's widely seen, sooner or later. </p><p>There are a few household names among the interviewees - Anne Summers, Eva Cox, Elizabeth Reid - but mostly the women are people who were very well known in the interlocking circles of the women's movement but not personally famous outside of it. This amplifies the effect when we are shown a woman talking to camera now about what she did in the 1970s and proximately shown photos or film and sometimes sound recordings of her actually doing it. So two women who made and performed in dadaist agitprop films - which we see, with them strong and beautifully naked on camera in a self-possessed way that calls to mind John Berger's distinction between fully inhabited human nakedness and the deracinated 'nude' of western painting and, I fear, of most of the undressed women on screen which you come across these days - we see sitting in inner-urban terrace-house kitchens, talking about the jolt of electricity of finding each other, and the dimensions of joyous rebellion their friendship had enabled them to unleash. We see a group of young single mothers who refused to give up their babies and supported each other to demand a social safety net and even more importantly an acknowledgement of their humanity, and we see them now, still not really very old women, remembering the appalling institutionalised cruelty of efforts to separate them from their children. We see young Aboriginal women impatiently taking white women to task for the unconscious racism of their feminism, and we see the same women as elders now, drawing attention to how much of the work of decolonising itself feminism still has yet to do. This historical double-tracking effect is used with consistent unobtrusive intelligence in the film and speaks of a very disciplined approach to the proper use of archival materials - the story you tell has to grow out of what you discover in the resources and not the other way around. The man sitting in front of us used his phone to video the credits, I have no idea why but if it was so he could go and track down the sources, great; the credits listed sources in generous and unusual detail; you almost did feel invited to pursue your awakened interests and encouraged to use the work done by the film as something to build on. In many ways the film practiced the central insights of second wave feminism; dialogue matters; the personal is political; if your story isn't being told then you must try to tell it and that includes finding out where you came from.</p><p>In a <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/jenny-turner/dark-emotions">recent and excellent LRB review essay</a> dealing with a number of books and films about the women's liberation movement, Jenny Turner notes that for major figures in the movement, 'the story of what she did or didn't do within the movement is going to be "precious" and most likely painful, possibly the most painful and precious story of her life' and this brings with it attendant complications and challenges for oral history interviewers. You see something of this in Brazen Hussies to an extent with Anne Summers's contributions but definitively with Elizabeth Reid who occupied and extraordinary, almost transcendent or mystical position as the figurehead of the women's movement, the sole voice in government of women, and the punishing and ultimately thankless task of policy watchdog. A whole other film about her is implied by what we see in this one. </p><p>On a personal level the material I found most engaging came in the series of variations on the theme of dismantling the internalised structures of oppression which got in the way of forming free and equal relationships with other women. Over and over women spoke about how they had to listen to each other, trust, negotiate, respect each other, learn to like each other and not become entrapped in the meshes of jealousy and suspicion. I understand this so deeply. The practice of consciousness-raising is a fascinating historical moment, and it's over but the traces and echoes of CR hang on in many of the ways women gather and connect and the ways they talk to each other when they do. Again, the liberatory nature of these post WLM practices is something I understand from the most valued experiences of my own life. I felt inspired by the film to do more to connect freely and equally with other women. </p><p>Also, I found the faces and voices extremely beautiful to watch and listen to, both the young women a long time ago and the older women now. I acknowledge that of course, for me there is an irresistible element of coming home in the encounter with any depiction of this milieu - this is my mother in about 1976, sitting on one of the same chairs that have a place in my own house today - but still, I 'm considering asking for a mid-70s shag cut next time I go to the hairdresser. </p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj97J4rn83PwsjoOHE_SGQNvTFncSTNhNnxMyncbMhhuCv6uQs0Q_JuRL8-0DJSEZer0ONICosV0vhjYty7m9FLlabNAat_pO7sNjqZKaOeU3AEELcpAYrRGtvw-9pFeNeTz9df_g/s1600/IMG_6511.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj97J4rn83PwsjoOHE_SGQNvTFncSTNhNnxMyncbMhhuCv6uQs0Q_JuRL8-0DJSEZer0ONICosV0vhjYty7m9FLlabNAat_pO7sNjqZKaOeU3AEELcpAYrRGtvw-9pFeNeTz9df_g/w240-h320/IMG_6511.jpg" width="240" /></a></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-45313343551071264442020-11-14T14:43:00.003+11:002020-11-14T14:50:30.330+11:00Back onOn the 'doing things again now they're allowed' bingo card I have accrued many red Xs. I've been to the beach twice. I went and looked at a house for sale (on my relatives' behalf, not on my own). I have had a haircut, eaten in a cafe and in a restaurant, been to the gym, visited, seen a film in a cinema, and oh my goodness I have been to some places: the distant alien lands of Ballarat and Sunbury to the west, and to the southeast, the proximate alien lands of various suburbs where people aren't ashamed to vote for the Liberal Party. Emails are coming thick and fast about going back to the workplace. I drove past the workplace last night and it looked unfamiliar and strange in the glimpses I caught of it because while I have looked at images of it on every working day since last being there in June, last night it was shaded and half-obscured by trees and I saw it from a road which has substantially changed in layout due to the progress of the Metro Station and tunnelling works going on at that location.<div><br /></div><div>Everyone still talks incessantly about the virus. If you listen in to those conversations (and I do, my street is noisy and populous so snatches of chatter float up to me all day long) they are becoming rote now and their content isn't apprehensiveness and fear, it's what a drag it is to remember a mask when you go out and whether we will be allowed to go north for Christmas. It's been fifteen days since a new infection was detected in Victoria. I pity the fool who breaks that run. How would you be? As it if wouldn't be enough of a misfortune getting sick, you also have to be the person who causes everybody in Australia to pull some sort of disgusted face. </div><div><br /></div><div>I wonder what's going to happen now? Seems kind of possible that everything is going to resume just how it was, in a way. I looked out my living room window yesterday morning and I could see welding sparks cascading down off a crane being assembled in the pit on the other side of the half-finished mega development next door. So that appears to be starting up again. Gambling, recreational shopping, binge-drinking, public cooking of animal flesh, traffic jams, punishing the unemployed, horse racing and the fast fashion industry all appear to be resuming with renewed ferocity. I have some absolutely ridiculous 'is that all there is' type feelings about how the pandemic has not put paid to a long list of terrible social practices we did really fine without. Ideally someone would explain all of this to me. Aside from you, Katharine Murphy is the finest explainer of Australian public life but she is in Canberra and cannot help us here in Melbourne.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Photos now:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeyiu5whIfhzWlR46QsA6AWYJzy4vBO5zPOhTcDS4YuvQwzhLf5I-KjJy9DmKgHL4qlKmPx2hmGc0Xq6XegkJz7FLT3EOGCKneOe-dT4W5ZgoVUi8anx4xxAxJJtpaDmcVobO-kw/s2048/IMG_7792.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeyiu5whIfhzWlR46QsA6AWYJzy4vBO5zPOhTcDS4YuvQwzhLf5I-KjJy9DmKgHL4qlKmPx2hmGc0Xq6XegkJz7FLT3EOGCKneOe-dT4W5ZgoVUi8anx4xxAxJJtpaDmcVobO-kw/s320/IMG_7792.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPh-NZL_11dZmYE925Wt-_oNTUlxOD-bqSAJlnjM44eqLMLZtLPjjQWBGICX50tfjXdDhNBvOVzHAcmHbkQZKjIpIYqBoAwYo6xaTjW7rp-f97ptA6JYKRcfq1o-vXI7c2hYCfpQ/s2048/IMG_7800.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPh-NZL_11dZmYE925Wt-_oNTUlxOD-bqSAJlnjM44eqLMLZtLPjjQWBGICX50tfjXdDhNBvOVzHAcmHbkQZKjIpIYqBoAwYo6xaTjW7rp-f97ptA6JYKRcfq1o-vXI7c2hYCfpQ/s320/IMG_7800.jpeg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Qn4w7uihFJj2VUwtKk_R-bZCEZ7BsGE5wWnIckjmvjGbNTsgfGwjAwREs6ZZvo1-JQJ9J0GDtKjt3eouw2M4Riwud-8pXoebydYuHq46VjLetZrwWVfcawjL9yCw1itjTXaT0A/s2048/IMG_7609.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Qn4w7uihFJj2VUwtKk_R-bZCEZ7BsGE5wWnIckjmvjGbNTsgfGwjAwREs6ZZvo1-JQJ9J0GDtKjt3eouw2M4Riwud-8pXoebydYuHq46VjLetZrwWVfcawjL9yCw1itjTXaT0A/s320/IMG_7609.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQWGhrZNZZGbQWirM1Qwu6G-UrhrCVrtlmC3NrqUie70ciAu-oBRmyxSSVGCuRlrDa7lAxvGyYZNR8j4YazN_i4NwyhtCIBn4JcjO6gqQkHfH4HqF2gX4KZo6yPGV1Ay43ltqJsg/s2048/IMG_7868.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQWGhrZNZZGbQWirM1Qwu6G-UrhrCVrtlmC3NrqUie70ciAu-oBRmyxSSVGCuRlrDa7lAxvGyYZNR8j4YazN_i4NwyhtCIBn4JcjO6gqQkHfH4HqF2gX4KZo6yPGV1Ay43ltqJsg/s320/IMG_7868.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLgGu_D0W0MZrxKstFCqsHLs_PzTK0kmHLiLtiPPyp4MDw-7SO9-wDfquj9TRh7zrP4HNZFmMOmaGEPBhGSwg9ikce6N36kHVLQwg9dhi-DhaqdPs7Bx8TsQAuBxdnwsW7oqRFA/s2048/IMG_8065.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLgGu_D0W0MZrxKstFCqsHLs_PzTK0kmHLiLtiPPyp4MDw-7SO9-wDfquj9TRh7zrP4HNZFmMOmaGEPBhGSwg9ikce6N36kHVLQwg9dhi-DhaqdPs7Bx8TsQAuBxdnwsW7oqRFA/s320/IMG_8065.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-22386157493967558332020-10-27T22:27:00.000+11:002020-10-27T22:27:00.719+11:00what's a blog<p> I can't pretend to know anything about what keeps a blog going. I actually think it's one of those very interesting activities embedded in the lives of thinking people which thrives best and is most interesting when you don't look too closely at why you're doing it. I get into rhythms of writing and then that rhythm is interrupted by something or other, and what brings the ensuing period of silence to an end is just a feeling that I should write something again, doesn't really matter what.</p><p>When I started this blog, in 2005, an individual blog lived in an ecosystem populated by thousands of other blogs; they were new but they had antecedents; they existed in and got a lot of their liveliness and meaning from structural relationships to prior forms or to coevals. Now, that's really all finished. I read about five or six blogs that are still alive. It's weird. It feels like being one of the last survivors of a shipwreck, but at the same time, all I have to do is open a different browser tab and ALL the people from blogging are still selflessly devoting eight hours a day to entertaining the crap out of each other on the internet. For a while somewhere in there I hypothesised that even though what the bloggers I constellated with called the 'blogosphere' was becoming a ghost town, another generation of blogs was probably growing up somewhere in a network unconnected to ours and therefore invisible. This was a wrong belief; the big social media platforms ate blogging. There are pockets of surviving colonies (sewing bloggers still blog and read each other - that kind of thing) but it's finished as a textual project. I think of my blog as still responding to live relationships still but they aren't textual or structural. They're actual 'relationships' relationships, with, like, people. I write thinking about a collection of individuals who I have a wide variety of relationships with. That spectrum of relationships spans the full range from lawful good to chaotic evil - and you're in there, of course you are - and the point is that the writing has to then be a private endeavour, to be shaped by what I know and feel about the people reading it, and not by a conception of working in a medium with conventions and publics. </p><p>The usual impulse I have when I get down to writing one of these silence-breaker posts is to gesture in the direction of recapping what's happened since last time. Well, even though it's only been about a month, that feels like too big of a task to be methodically worked through. In the special category of pandemic news I will note that Melbourne's drastic shutdown of over a hundred days has successfully brought the daily numbers of new infections down to an incredibly low level. Which is great of course, but if the lockdown was the only possible course of action(because nothing else works) then I really wonder why the state is being opened up again. I think I've become institutionalised to the lockdown, like many people probably, and am having a bit of a hard time mustering enthusiasm for resuming many of the activities and experiences I've learned the hard way how to do without. That said, I have glimpsed, like the silver flash of a fish darting through a shaft of sunlight many metres below the surface of the ocean, a sort of fantasy of putting on a nice dress and carefully brushing my hair and going to one of those places where you sit on a chair you haven't sat on before and someone you don't know brings you food. One of <a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2017/02/footwear-log_9.html">these shoes</a> fell out of the wardrobe the other day ( I was looking for a cat) and I laughed at it for a while. Then I took its pair out of the wardrobe and put them both on and sat on the end of the bed absorbing the strange, complex and not altogether dreadful but not altogether nice sensation of wearing high heels. </p><p>Leonard went back to school at the start of the term, a couple of weeks ago, and is doing really well. I don't think his going to school muscles are properly built up just yet but school just makes him tired, not stressed, I think. The return of his social existence brought me such relief, I really cannot express it. I'm still processing the emotional aftermath of the release from the perpetual effort to compensate for everything he was missing. And I am doing a pretty shit job of catching up on the scary big backlog of work I neglected in order to prioritise being present and engaged for Leonard as much as I possibly could. The mental image is of a ship slowly righting itself after weathering a hugely destabilising wave. I will right myself and it'll take a little bit of time. </p><p>Pompey is wailing to himself in the darkened hallway which means it's time to go to bed.</p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-45744992887635724752020-09-20T22:52:00.000+10:002020-09-20T22:52:01.193+10:00Yarra<p>Paid a visit <a href="https://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-confluuuuuuuence.html">to the confluence</a> last evening; the water was slamming itself unusually hard over the weir like it couldn't wait to get the fuck out of Melbourne. HA! HA! Ha more fool it if that's what it thinks is going to happen, Melbourne is like The Doors now, don't you know that Mr Water? No one gets out of here alive. As we watched the water slam misguidedly away a soccer ball came to the edge and rolled over. It was a few minutes after sunset and I had a torch pointed at the ball, which seemed to be mostly dark with white patches (I don't know the technical name for what those bits on soccer balls are, and I don't want to know, it's of no interest to me & I'm confident I will never agayne have occasion to talk about the surfaces of soccer balls even if I live to be nine thousand years old) and the white patches were wet and they shone in the torchlight like big starey bunyip eyes. So when the ball sank into the rapids and bobbed up a couple of times before disappearing for good it was a bit creepy, although admittedly not as creepy as a very small cadre of anti-lockdown protesters going to the postapocalyptic abandoned shopping mall of Chadstone today and singing 1.5 choruses of You're The Voice to the police who I suppose promptly arrested them right there outside of Coles (open) and Angus & Coote Jewellers (closed). The Age contacted Glenn Wheatley for comment afterwards which was also a standout creepy event even for these unprecedentedly creepy times.</p><p>The Yarra Trail delivered like it always does. Jeez but it is good. The day was over and there's no moon right now so the only lights came from streetlights a little way off, sometimes filtered through peppercorn trees or reflecting softly off the planes of concrete bridges spanning the river gorge, or from coming and going bike lights, or from serene and romantic-looking lit windows in the tall apartment buildings overlooking the Abbotsford loop of the river. There were lots of birds, not many bats, far fewer walkers and riders than I thought there'd be, and one immensely cheering possum staggering about in a tree and shoving branches up and down. So what you get from the river in the dark is the essentials: its movement and its coolness and its smell, and most of all, the space it's cleared for itself.</p><p>A few weeks ago I walked a bit further along that bit of the river with a work colleague who's having a very bad time. Before that I think the last time I was there was a weekday maybe two days after I moved out, when I was very shaky and raw, as one is when one has just done that, and I rode alone around the capital city trail. I stopped at Dights for a while, maybe half an hour, hard to say how long. I'm sitting here remembering that day and that ride and recognising, indeed understanding, what was happening there. The trail is a circle, 30 km, almost flat, varied but always exquisitely beautiful, and for long stretches it's quite deserted even as it threads you between built-up areas and busy roads. I had never lived alone before my marriage ended. Lenny had not come with me to my new place, he would be coming to me in a day or two, but until then, I'd temporarily left him, and the phase of my life defined by him, the house, the cat, everything domestic and personal bar a few possessions, and some level not consciously accessible to me I knew that being alone was something I had to go into blind, no map, no going back. Money poured through my fingers like water in moving out and the establishment of this rented flat; I got a promotion and pay rise in November last year but at the point when I moved out and for a long time after that I had to be very frugal. On the ride round the Yarra trail I picked foliage and flowers out of municipal plantings to put in a vase at 'home'. There are nineteen potted plants in this room now.</p><p>I've learned how to live alone, or how to live the version of alone which you have when your child lives with you half of the time. It is very much okay. Time alone is not down time or dead time between livelier experiences. Sometimes it's glum and sometimes it's strange, and sometimes when the setting and atmosphere is nice I wish wistfully for a companion to be there and share that enjoyment. Most days I also wish my cats could talk, they seem to think they can but they cannot, it is all lies or at least, misinformation. What do they think of me? I was with my dearest friend last night by the river; it was not complicated, not overloaded, peaceful, simple, right. </p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-69790878942284691732020-09-15T23:28:00.004+10:002020-09-15T23:28:44.632+10:00This is Your Lighfe! Such a Boringkh Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Since I began using a sleep tracker app I've paid more attention to what I can do that produces a sound, restorative sleep. The ridiculous disco lightbulb, if I set it to a low mild orange and read by that light, seems to really help, as does not going to sleep too early in the evening. A few simple observations like that, and here we are: sleeping half as much again as I was this time last year, and without the assistance of any kind of drug.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I recently signed up to participate in <a href="https://sites.utu.fi/mind/en/">a study on how Covid affects our minds</a>. For this I report my night dreams and daydreams (you have to set aside time to daydream) every day for at least a fortnight. It's a lot of work and my dreams, so far, are embarrassingly stupid. I am definitely dreaming more. This morning I was deep in a heavy dream when I woke. The pink blocks are dream state sleep and even for me this is a very dream-intensive night. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1045" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidVWBKompjyHlHXEEhVK5A6icp-7eZH7joI3H8xqKsRKFSiUatRQO7KD1iFf_idL_Yiu1F2zadHOkhhBu52Bpg4cECvMr1VqTl7Qi6I86C-rCjElL3u3DNmTLaFBp0e4VIwYJ_ng/s320/IMG_6858.jpg" style="text-align: left;" /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I know I write this a lot but daily waking life is now so much like a dream, in so many respects, that I question whether isolating special states of mind and attending to those is not sort of missing the point. How dreadfully arrogant; I don't mean to say that those scientists designing and running their study don't know the nature of what they're investigating. It's just a question I ask here because I can.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In the supermarket yesterday afternoon I looked (again) at all the people walking round totally normally but wearing face masks. I look at this all the time on the street too, when I'm walking. The mask is the mark of calamity and everyone walks round with it on their faces as if nothing has happened. At this point I now feel cocooned inside / behind my own mask. I feel invisible, looking at other people. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This morning brushing my teeth I thought (again) that the uncanniness of the virus is that spread itself across the whole world, inexorable, omnipotent, unified, microscopic, fragmented, mindless, and it made no concession to anything or anyone. It has total power to affect and change everything, and it has this absolute power without intelligence or consciousness. This is not frightening, but it is very strange. Possibly I only think this because I never bothered to get a scientific education.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">David came over this morning and made pancakes for breakfast. This was delightful, and novel rather than strange. But the pancakes themselves were strange. I asked for mine to have a face on it and I definitely got what I asked for.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjExAXLuaHozGnFGykgM3VFejp0iaN2vVvT3J-DX5s_kvGx8ixYByvEmoBZT2hees7DMAJ1LqXGRsa0UCYyBATZgOCU9cppj8NyVrtDWwSFrMlrQ42v-grup70chcTlrarvriLOgg/s320/IMG_6842.jpeg" style="text-align: left;" /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The torment of this work week and its too many meetings every day: four meetings today, on three different video call platforms, and three personal calls. A colleague is having a birthday tomorrow and, you know, I sincerely hope it's as happy as it can be - but I felt I couldn't come up with a pithily phrased piece of well-wishing to contribute to the collection which is going onto the 'card' that he will receive by email tomorrow. I should've just written 'I hope your birthday is as happy as can be'. Instead I Googled for a line and was punished / rewarded with a website of phrases plucked from the linguistic corpus of a parallel world I can almost imagine.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqfz2aI_5ewyxG3WK-W5C210xHlecrNgMQetofVgSDTvznhza-LJAX5j-f1GAoqSCAuWqu45a4Rwp5P73nUHMeNTam2Z5mE-zxWGBo3V0vlyOPmzF7UDYZbFieB5Bn9aMOWhBFqQ/s1920/IMG_6847.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqfz2aI_5ewyxG3WK-W5C210xHlecrNgMQetofVgSDTvznhza-LJAX5j-f1GAoqSCAuWqu45a4Rwp5P73nUHMeNTam2Z5mE-zxWGBo3V0vlyOPmzF7UDYZbFieB5Bn9aMOWhBFqQ/s320/IMG_6847.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I had an idea for a sustained drawing project. People have suggested 'a children's book'. This is a book idea but not for children particularly. It's an album of pictures of the things Victorians have been fined for doing contrary to public health orders. Two women were eating ice cream in the street at 2am etc. For months we have been supplied with these little glowing wires of images of what's going on out there in the night and the distance. We are given these stories for political reasons and Victorians have been issued with more than ten million dollars worth of on the spot fines, but the stories themselves are so curious and evocative. A man went to Gruyere to buy a vintage car. A woman said she was going to work, but she was in her pyjamas and had two dogs in the back. I made a big list.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Then I set off for an aimless walk. After a bit I thought I might as well go to Piedimonte's, although to myself I kept saying it was Pellegrini's and this was exasperating, because I know perfectly well that it isn't. (I stood in front of closed-up Pellegrini's a few weeks ago, when I went into the city to give blood, and stared into the dark while a friend on the phone told me she had found out she must have her breasts and ovaries cut away to avoid getting cancer.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As I got closer to Pellegrini's I mean Piedimonte's I saw loads of posters on houses whinging about how Piedimonte's is going to be made taller, and I felt a disreputable, shabby, mean little stab of savage pleasure that the inmates of these lovely warm interesting tactile houses and streets are shameless and selfish enough to squander their complaining energy on complaining about the local shop instead of, oh, just about anything else </div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiloGfilvhcW9xeNAcsr2kxZhJ_bLUSSjtqan54MLqdR4SOzfWs3dbhKmeNNzJs6qxjsPPA0OFPL7GBYO2kk7dM5fAYqUeOxRZ0rJLhWB1F6wOKA5qfJ1TJEzNkiZsK_1EeZ80LjQ/s2048/IMG_6852.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiloGfilvhcW9xeNAcsr2kxZhJ_bLUSSjtqan54MLqdR4SOzfWs3dbhKmeNNzJs6qxjsPPA0OFPL7GBYO2kk7dM5fAYqUeOxRZ0rJLhWB1F6wOKA5qfJ1TJEzNkiZsK_1EeZ80LjQ/s320/IMG_6852.jpeg" /></a></div><div><br /></div>On the walk home I started to read the newspaper on my phone and please, just join me for a moment in noticing how weird, how <i>really really really weird,</i> is this man who's convening some sort of retarded protest against Daniel Andrews. Check him out.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhteb1aqf4K4FRFWSvDZV2BDkUUlk5se_La_T5pZigqm-AE9nB2OoCUgdjAloqzCButMYvgrVrHZUoZQ-ayDxdM00XNC9MkJ0Ux-WOj0zEKkSKrNTJkvL9CRN9zXRHLSanReS5v4w/s800/Screen+Shot+2020-09-15+at+9.52.02+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="800" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhteb1aqf4K4FRFWSvDZV2BDkUUlk5se_La_T5pZigqm-AE9nB2OoCUgdjAloqzCButMYvgrVrHZUoZQ-ayDxdM00XNC9MkJ0Ux-WOj0zEKkSKrNTJkvL9CRN9zXRHLSanReS5v4w/w394-h286/Screen+Shot+2020-09-15+at+9.52.02+pm.png" width="394" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>I bought a bunch of poppies at the shops and I was so pleased, because I've wanted a bunch of poppies since July and I really thought I'd missed the season. But one of those flowers has a green hairy casing on the bud which is as long as my hand from the heel of my palm to the tip of my middle finger. It's a goddamn triffid!<div><br /></div><div>Fore completeness' sake I had better note that a short while ago Chanticleer rolled onto his back and stretched his paws up past his ears and let out a deep full-throated uncatlike groan of a yawn, most unlike him really. I tried just now to reproduce the sound he made, in the interests of describing it more accurately to you, and I woke them both up, which is only fair since they wake me up every morning. <br /><div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not going to say '2020' any more, because I have a feeling that this freakeigh kinda business is here to stay, in one form or another. Well, goodnight. I'm going to close my eyes now and listen deep with my heart to this record playing now, Pour Down Like Silver by Richard and Linda Thompson, the opposite of weird, clarity and sincerity of sound and purpose, and drift off to oblivion somewhere unmoored in the dark between 1975 and now<br /><br /><br /><p><br /></p></div></div></div>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10611988.post-11737379304526999192020-09-11T21:59:00.002+10:002020-09-11T22:01:36.320+10:00my maidenhair<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-1h7_bIn4RrwXiqgOcTAop36rPmTBVqxp4GpRJSvJx0q3g7fSFGgcZiIG7d3WNJgNDowhAbite34Y5y2IDp6iC5XIDafGMLJAfIA4OK9ecxP4carzDxigqUE_VPI-kkksuDh7ew/s2048/IMG_6770.HEIC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-1h7_bIn4RrwXiqgOcTAop36rPmTBVqxp4GpRJSvJx0q3g7fSFGgcZiIG7d3WNJgNDowhAbite34Y5y2IDp6iC5XIDafGMLJAfIA4OK9ecxP4carzDxigqUE_VPI-kkksuDh7ew/w300-h400/IMG_6770.HEIC" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The days and nights are getting warmer and windier and the air inside the flat is on balance probably not as dry as the air out on the balcony, so I've brought my maidenhair fern indoors till summer's over. It will be terrorised by the naughty brother, who one day when bored bit holes in all the leaves of my never-never plant and has ignored it ever since, and who chewed all the pups off my spider plant when I foolishly moved it down off the top of a high cupboard last week because it was flourishing so beautifully. But the poor fern can't stay outdoors. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Lenny gave me this fern for my birthday last year and rightly or wrongly, probably the latter, I took it as a bit of a passive-aggressive gesture on the part of his father who of course assisted him with that purchase. So it has been a point of pride to make this plant thrive and flourish, and of course, they're extremely beautiful when they do. I am careful to make sure I help Lenny organise birthday and Christmas and Father's Day presents, not for Dorian's sake but because Lenny deserves the happiness of giving a gift to his parent. I had to take him to a shop and send him in by himself with money a couple of days before Mother's Day, and it was one of the sadder small moments of novice single parenting. I've done a full year of all those dates now and it's ok. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The grittiest parts of the week of parenting/work/managing school/staying home 23 hours out of 24 are done, now. I always underestimate at the beginning of the week just how brutal it is going to be, which is probably a survival mechanism a bit like forgetting the pain of childbirth. Modifying my diet means that for every one of the 21 meals in a week at home that I plan, prepare, serve and clean up after, I need to make something different for Lenny than for me, so that has been a huge drag. I haven't lost any weight but I do feel hugely better without empty carbohydrates bloating up my system. I didn't want to feel even a hint of hunger while weaning myself off added sugar and bread and pasta and most fruit (but having all these on hand for Lenny to eat) because when I am hungry, or when I am unsettled by something going on int he work sphere (which happened about nine times a day this week), I find myself standing in the kitchen peeling a mandarine at best, making an unnecessary piece of toast at worst. So I haven't been hungry and I can definitely eat smaller amounts of nutrient-dense food next week without hunger or loss of energy. Actually I really love bread in all its better forms and would be very grieved to never again to go to A1 Bakery and inhale a freshly baked puffy floury spinach and sumac pie. This thing I'm doing is a diet although you are not meant to call it that, because diets are temporary and this is meant to be permanent lifestyle change. But here we are deep into a real shitty lifestyle change, this is a solid lockdown arse-to-couch situation; twelve weeks of dieting will hopefully put my body back to rights and also see me through to a time when I can resume most of my usual exercise and therefore go back to eating whatever the fuck I feel like eating, without paying for it in the form of waistbands that begin to dig into the nice soft flesh of my belly.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I was a bit mean to Lenny earlier this evening after he laughed and said something cheeky when I asked him to bring his own dinner things inside off the balcony. It's a bind really, I wait upon him hand and foot in terms of domestic labour (even though I know I shouldn't) and it is my highest priority in these months to make sure he's as happy as he can possibly be when he's in my presence, and all that takes a lot of strength; at the ragged end of a rough week which ended with a bang in a once-in-a-decade level of disconcerting work situation, I snapped at him, he withdrew, I felt angry at everything on my own for a while, then went and made it up with him. He accepts those overtures of repair very readily - seemingly much more readily than I was ever able to do. I trust that he has some resilience, founded on the steady and consistent experience of love and trust, to tide him over the moments when life isn't perfect. I give him 21 meals a week and only crack the shits at one of them, well, I can forgive myself for that.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This flat is really good but also I'm so incredibly tired of being in it always. Setting aside that stay in hospital in April, the last time I spent a night anywhere but here was when I went to Sydney for work in October or November last year, and before that the last place I spent a night somewhere not-here was the 27th of June which was the last time I slept at the old house. [edited to add: no I don't think this is right: I went to Lancefield for craft camp in September just before the cat circus moved in.]</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><p></p>lucy tartanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244574932248425378noreply@blogger.com0