Yes

I noticed last night that Photobucket has restored the photos in my blog archives. I did have to pay them some money today to ensure this state of affairs continues but I think I'd better take the whole sorry experience as an urgent prompt to do something about backing up the entire blog in some manner. Any suggestions about how to do that will be most gratefully received.

NAOMI SKIP THIS BIT ==== Anyway it's good that the photos are back because now there is a point to sharing the information that the most viewed entry on my blog is this one - Terrifying Spider Post, November 3, 2005, with 4799 page views and counting. ==== OKAY

Also good is the restoration of the his n' hers knitting pattern collection. I have somehow lost the actual knitting patterns so the digital versions are all the more necessary. Really how did I lose these? There are some boxes of books and booklike materials in the shed which never got unpacked since we moved into this house nearly six years ago, and possibly that's where they are. I hope it's where they are, because if not, I must have thrown them away, and I just don't want to have anything to do with myself if I was once capable of carrying out an act of such immense criminal negligence and then repressing the memory of doing it.

Precious Jumpers

The Warm Ones

Twin Sets

Lady/Man Classics

It's so good to see these old familiar faces again!

I divided today between reading A Fringe of Leaves, which I have not read before and I am loving it utterly sick, and sitting in a neighbourhood bar with my friend and our two sons. The bar is closing tomorrow because the building is on a site which will soon be developed into apartments. I don't care about any of that, and I super don't care about the bar closing down because it is a leading offender in the putting of way too much meat onto people's plates. My friend K is friends with the owner and she wanted to go there so we did. And I admit that quite enjoyed myself: the kids played nicely, the staff kept bringing us free food and there was a mounting air of misrule to the afternoon culminating in a huge and presumably completely illegal fire that was lit in a 44-gallon drum in the back yard. It did me some good to have a break from the everyday. I have been in bed for several hours now and I can still smell the woodsmoke in my hair.



A Fringe of Leaves



Bar

The paras photographed are so perfectly typical of Patrick White. I can't easily think of another novelist who is so extremely good at dispensing the irony in a perfectly even and delicate mist that settles seamlessly on 360 degrees and three dimensions of the narrative situation - characters, narrator, novelist, all the relevant social & historical contexts, all the relevant reading publics, everyone comes in for a spray. He is so, so good at finding that little crevasse of ambiguity between the ridiculous and the sincere, and having found it he proceeds to spin vast internal epics within that space. The challenge, as always with White, is to attend to the fragments of story information he embeds in the cosmic turbulence of what lies beneath the things his people are saying to each other. If you omit to dedicate a corner of your mind to tracking what's actually happening - who these people are and why they are going somewhere in a carriage - the novel will fall apart in your hands and you will become irrevocably lost. I kind of want to let myself get lost in it, I'm afraid. Maybe I will.

Vinnie has always liked me more than he likes any other person but in the past week or two he's really intensified his attentions. I think he might have lost his heart to me, actually, which is a bit of a shame for him, because my feelings are the same as they've always been. He's been following me everywhere and he flings himself on the floor near my feet, on his back with all four paws dangling stupidly in the air.  And now he is indicating he wants to sleep in here, on my bed, and he knows perfectly well this is not allowed.