Thursday, May 25, 2006

May 26

Last night Australia played Greece at the MCG in a preliminary World Cup 'friendly' (most of the time the teams were eyeing each other like baleful chimpanzees, ). Almost 100000 people in the stadium: it was like theatre on a great green stage, and I started to realise why there's such a fuss when goals are revoked or a foul is allowed. It offends people's sense of history: impossible to try and disallow something that has already happened, and in particular on the basis that it's unfair. Started to think shapeless thoughts which I can't quite express about sport as a metaphor for history, sport as a parallel of history, sport as a second chance at history. Seen from this perspective, my incoherent theory might explain why football matters so much and why a Togolese priest has seen fit to make a trip to Brazil to seek mastery over the fate of Togolese football through acquiring the superior magical knowledge of Brazilian voodoo. (spawning a discussion on an African talkback program on Sydney radio entitled 'does voodoo work?')

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

May 25

Woke up minutes before the alarm from a dream of writing- I was on the edge of a dark, damp forest which somebody wanted for a setting in a play or a film, and it was my job to describe it. A clogged creek flowed thickly through the leaf litter and beside the mass of darker trees, standing slightly apart, there was a willow with its paler fronds trailing on the ground. This was the site of some event which was to take place in the play/ movie - somthing horrible, it go9es without saying, but I wasn't especially concerned about that. Under the willow tree and mostly hidden by its hanging curtain of vegetation, was a small concrete foundation like a site for a caravan ina campground. This was the stage for the Event. I sat down on the soggy ground and started to write.

This was followed by a more archetypal dream of the walking-down-the-street-with-your-pants-off variety. Marcin is having a birthday party- I am not invited. I poke out my tongue and say' I'm busy anyway,' and then spend the rest of the dream moping around waiting to be found and appeased. Not very exciting but these are the sort of adventures I have these days- they all take place in the overheated hours between 10pm and 6am in the ever-changing landscape of the marital bed.

Monday, May 22, 2006

May 23

Winter is here, a leaden sky lying over the world like a dead weight, a heavy, inert cold that reminds me of Europe in November. It's depressing and I'm finding it difficult to move my seasonally affected arse beyond the confines of the marital Ikea quilt: shades, once again, of Polish winter. I remember arriving in Warsaw at the end of January last year and Marcin meeting me at the airport- the first thing he did was reach out, finger my coat and say, "Roza, it's not warm enough." I felt my self respect take a jolt- what could I, a frivolous puff of hot air drifting up from the thirty fifth latitude (south), possibly know about the deadly serious business of keeping myself warm? This morning I contemplated my clothes rack in the annual Mauy reckoning and realised I still have nothing remotely suitable for warding off this sort of grey seeping chill.

So those of us with attractive and appropriate winter wardrobes may find comfort in finally having an opportunity to parade in their knee length boots and tweed: as for me, I am seeking solace in soup and sleep. (also alliterative sentences by the looks of things). Off to complete my reading of the weekend paper which I have been too sluggish to manage until now.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

May 18

My mother, at 62, has retired, and has started to write some undefined hybrid of family history, world history and fiction constructed over and around letters found in an old suitcase in her garage - from her great great uncle in the trenches, from his sisters and family to him at the front. She has taken to telling me (quoting Manning Clark) that anyone who wants to know the meaning of humility should try sitting down and confronting a blank page. This is how I feel this morning in front of my blog, though I am wondering if it counts as a blank page with the free holiday (call within sixty seconds to win) flashing up in the left hand corner and the tempting offer of an enlarged cock inching its way (no pun intended) across the screen. The whole interface* is crawling with imperatives, urging us to want things- money, clothes, hot chicks, large cocks - in an escalation of desire that never ends. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my topic for today.

Last month I want with Marcin and Kuba to see an exhibition at the Maritime Museum about WWII in Australia, about the bombing of Darwin and the Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour. Part of the display consisted of Women's Weekly magazines from the forties, all urging frugality and recycling. They were full of clever instructions on how to turn an old suit into a housefrock and a pair of decrepit pantaloons into an evening gown, lists of the benefits of saving your string and stockpiling old newspapers. Frugality (along with sock knitting and market gardening) were seen as service to your country- bizarre to compare the Women's Weeklys of today, with their exhortations to buy buy buy , to these quaint old dinosaurs with their tinted pictures and recipes for making a jam pudding out of a pile of sawdust and two plums.

So this week we have two social markers of the last hundred years in Australia- the graph of the female suicide rate ( I can't get over the beauty of it, the elegant geometry that leaps and sinks and refuses to explain itself, the temperature chart of a century) and Women's Weekly magazine. Time to ablute and abort Mission Blog.


*what a nice word.
in·ter·face ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ntr-fs)n.
A surface forming a common boundary between adjacent regions, bodies, substances, or phases.
A point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact: “the interface between crime and politics where much of our reality is to be found” (Jack Kroll).
Computer Science.
The point of interaction or communication between a computer and any other entity, such as a printer or human operator.
The layout of an application's graphic or textual controls in conjunction with the way the application responds to user activity: an interface whose icons were hard to remember.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

May 17

PS Happy birthday to my blog which is one year old today.

May 17

Back to a.m. blogging interspersed with searches on Vanuatu and forays into The Complete Book of Sexual Love, which we found in the rubbish that people had put out for council cleanup in Dee Why (along with Where do I come from and The Hunt for the Red October). Somebody has taken their perusal seriously and underlined relevant sections in green highlighter.
eg:
'Orgasm in males is of course essential to procreation, as climax brings about the release of sperm. In women this is not so.'
and
'It is said that many married men who also use prostitutes do so because of frustrated 'fellation libido'..............Provided that the man is scrupulously clean and has washed his penis thoroughly, the practice is in no way unhygienic.'

Being a high quality book which doesn't stint on colour photographs, there can be found within its pages a catalogue of codpieces and cartoons, erect satyrs and women in garters, pictures of Leda succumbing to the swan and statues of Priapus, and a discussion of the medical problems of Akhenaten, king of Egypt from 1379 to 1362 BC, who 'suffered from an endocrine deficiency. His statues show a very unmanly body with heavy hips, breasts and a pronounced stoop. Surprisingly, he was not infertile and fathered six daughters.' Venus of Willendorf, faceless and fertile, rubs up against purse-lipped 1920s pinups rendered breathless by whalebone and photographs of medieval chastity belts. It's far more comprehensive than the other sex manual we found with it, which was more clearly a product of its times (the seventies) and featured misty shots of hairy sepia couples in the throes of coitus and looked like The Joy of Sex without the rose-coloured tinting.

Monday, May 15, 2006

May 16

Despite my best intentions, two blogless weeks, which have been spent undergoing and organising certain rites of passage. Graduating, arranging a wedding, buying tickets for a honeymoon to Vanuatu. I don't quite believe that I'm doing any of this and a small independent voice in the back of my mind is chanting a litany of the joys of spinsterhood and commanding me to do a Google search on codependency. The part of me that faces the world has begun to discuss the possibility of buying a flat in Warsaw. Probably the majority of my panic is caused by the fact that it really does look as if it's going to go on for a long time, which requires a renegotiation of everything - no use waiting for the divorce to free up my time.

In the middle of all this Peter Carey's wife has made the front page of the Herald 'striking back' at a smear campaign against her based on an ugly divorce, claiming that she slaved away over his manuscripts for years and this is the thanks she gets. The headline runs Peter Carey's ex speaks out- I can't even remember what her real name is. Is it a reason not to get married? In my opinion it's a reason to be wary. Along with the spike in female suicides that shows up on suicide graphs for the twentieth century in the late forties as all the maimed and twitching diggers came home and started asking for their jobs back. Overall, male suicides were still higher, though women made more attempts. We are either more ineffectual or more equivocal, or maybe it's a matter the available means? Sticking our heads into unreliable ovens or overdosing on not-quite- toxic enough tranquillisers while our male counterparts went and shot themselves competently in the head. Time for work in the blazing autumn suburbs: this wave of arboreal red might be the most excitement Ryde sees this year. Over and out.

Monday, May 01, 2006

2 May

The current plagues of 44 Chelmsford St include: cockroaches, fungal growths, dust mites and alley cats. There have also been several sightings of rats which I would rather not discuss. Maybe it will prepare me for the houses of my mad people, who are starting at last to move out of the hospital- heady and nerve-racking times.