Three o'clock again.

Three in the morning again, and the clock in the kitchen sounds unnaturally loud. Everything's cold and quiet and still I'm jittery, so cold and jittery. I'm making cups and cups and cups of tea. I want to walk barefoot to the park down the street, and lie there, cheeks nuzzling the dry grass, and breathe into the cold black soil, and wake in the chilly dawn covered in leaves. I want to chain-smoke in my knickers on the front porch in the dark. I want to dig my fingers into dirty concrete, and scratch out your name, and etch in mine. I want to drink the rest of that gin in the bathtub.

I want a first kiss.

I want to be alone with you, just a fraction too close, second-guessing myself, not able to breathe right. I want you to feel how cold my cheek is against your warm palm. I want to make some joke, some flippant remark, but I can't, because you're a fraction too close, and I can't quite meet your eyes, and our lips are barely touching now and the air between us feels heavy and compressed. All the blood is in my head. I want to pause, to remember this exact location, because this street corner that I've passed a thousand times or this unfamiliar porch will now be The Place Where. I want to feel how hot your breath is on the curve of my top lip. And when we do kiss, I want us both to realise that the only thing as sweet and poignant and terrible as this first kiss will be the last.

I want to stop being so fucking melodramatic, and remember that kisses and cold dirt don't mean much at all. But I can't, because it's three o'clock in the morning, and there's no cure for yearning until the daylight kicks in.

Baby went to Amsterdam...

I have this damn Peter Bjorn and John song stuck in my mind. Get it out, get it out, get it out! Also, I am all hopped up on cold and flu medication and leftover seritonin-blaster pasta. It was the nicest feeling to wake up groggy and phlegmatic this morning - okay, afternoon - only to find several messages on my phone from other editors telling me that they are fucking off work until the next batch of articles come in on Monday and that I should consider doing the same. So I am. Hooray!

I should probably clarify that while I love my job, a lot of it involves staring at computers and trying to decide between swatches and choosing fonts and rectifying kerning* and peering very keenly at a faulty monitor for hours on end, and while yes, I am sitting at a computer right now thanks for pointing that out, I have the option of moaning on the couch and napping and popping more pills and hacking into tissues and making cups of tea and trudging to the newagent in my pyjamas for tampons and liquorice, none of which I can really get away with at work, especially not the pyjamas.

Was that entire paragraph really one run-on sentence? IT'S THE DRUGS, PEOPLE.

Being drudgey and sick, while certainly not pleasant, is nice in that is gives me time to catch up on reading (magazines) and watching trashy TV. And playing with the duckling. Oh my God, what if this is the avian flu? Except that I am pretty sure it's not. Anyway, what I am also doing when my eyes are feeling up to it is reading through the archives of other people's blogs, and it's actually rather comforting to see that some of my favourite web writers got off to a similarly slow, self-conscious start.

Hopefully, this means that in time, my "readership" (ha! ha!) will grow beyond half a dozen people, and I'll attain some level of web popularity, then a cult following, all of which will be in direct corrollary to a magically vast improvement in my writing skillz and culminate in some sort of weekly Green Guide column and a name-drop in the Sunday Life** next time they do a "kids these days and their technology!!" puff piece. Or not. Anyway, the point (as if there is one!) is that I've decided to stick with this thing for at least a year, and see what happens. The only one of those things that I'm actually hoping will occur is that my writing skills will improve - it's a fairly good discipline, blog-writing, even if the results are fairly banal. Of course, a few comments now and then wouldn't hurt, but really, it would be nicer to be able to look back in a year or so and shake my head indulgently at all those clumsy metaphors and run-on sentences and whatnot.

So anyway. I just had to hang the washing out. What was I saying? God, I'm so scattery... scattery, jittery, higgledy-piggledy. Baby went to Amsterdaaaaaaaaaaam... Sorry. I probably shouldn't be allowed to write when I'm full of pseudoephedrine. A few of the chemists around here have a sign up in their windows with the words 'Pseudo Watch', which cracks me up every time and that's when I'm not even high on Codral. Pseudo-burglars, look out! Your pseudo-crime has been detected by the elite memebers of the pseudo-watch! Quick, someone call the pesudo-cops!!

And, being as how there's no graceful way to exit this rambling behemoth of a post... I'm done.




*A lot of font-related jargon sounds pleasingly dirty. Just one more reason that I love this job.
** I'm not italicising Green Guide or Sunday Life as they are sections, not banner publications. Is this correct or should I have put single inverted commas around them a la poems and chapters? Tear strips off me, copy editors of the internet!

Oh, so exhausted.

My God. I am feeling like the worst kind of stereotypical, tampon commercial/terrible sitcom crazy menstrual lady right now. I just ate an entire packet of liquorice allsorts, some pickles and cheese on toast, and a hefty chunk of banana bread, and then washed it down with several hot chocolates and glass of juice. It's like by getting my period, my body is reminding me of what it would be like to actually be pregnant. Or at least giving me a preview of how I am going to eat when pregnant. Whichever.

What's worse is that I've quite stoically, pragmatically gotten through the stresses and sadnesses of the past week and now suddenly, because of one stupid day of hormonal fluctuation, I am sitting on the floor crying, reading the sad parts of novels and letting the tears slide off my nose onto love letters that I foolishly keep in a shoebox and freezing with panic when I realise that the person who wrote them doesn't love me any more. Honestly. This is pathetic, right? I know that. But instead of getting up and cleaning up the banana bread detritus in the kitchen all I want to do is curl up in a ball, under the blankets, fully clothed, and close my eyes so hard that I get dizzy and see little spots, and fall asleep wishing that the doona were somebody else's arms.

I know this will pass. Tomorrow I'll get up and wash my hair and go to work and write some half-embarrassed, self-deprecating comment here about being so melodramatic. But right now I think I'll go and have a bath, despite the drought, and drink gin, and cry, and hold my eyes open underwater and listen to my own wretched heartbeat echo off the porcelain sides of the tub. Because right now I'm terrified that I can't hear my own heart beating. And I'm scared that no-one else ever will.

Hegel

I'm an auntie! Pat came over last night with a bag of groceries and a big cardboard box, containing a german phenomenologist. Named Hegel. Who is actually an adorable duckling.

Right now he's chirping at his own reflection in my bedroom - he's only twelve days old, you can't expect him to have completed the mirror-stage - and trying to jump into a green bag of old clothes. Last night we had some people over for a boozy dinner and a good half of the evening was devoted to cooing over Hegel, who kept falling asleep in people's hands and trying to climb over their shoulders. His silhouette is all fuzz. He's damn cute is what I'm trying to say.

There have been a few scary reminders over the last couple of days of the transience and unpredictability of life, and having a duckling follow you around and fall asleep in your shoes seems to be an excellent counterbalance to those shadowy, three-in-the-morning fears. I very much recommend you try it.

Karaoke Cherry Pop!

Well, I did it, in a most spectacularly underwhelming fashion. Went back to Karaoke Dokie for Seb and Gill's birthday party (after spending the day tramping around Fitzroy in the hot sun looking for birthday presents, falling asleep at my computer, and drinking godawful gallery-opening wine - I think I was delirious). For some reason the DJ kept playing people who had put their songs in before me, and nothing wrong with that, except that I got progressively drunker and tireder watching some very talented media types work the mic. By the time my name was called I was halfway out the door to catch the last tram, but came back, took a last swig, got up on stage and sang the shortest karaoke song known to man, hit - and bruised - some extremely delicate high notes, and made a semi-triumphant exit.

Why am I telling you this? I don't know, why do I tell you people anything? I thought you would be chuffed that I'm attempting to craft some sort of cohesive narrative from my fear of public singing, but maybe I'm being that aunt that gave you socks for your birthday when what you really wanted was a Transformer. Also, I'm hungover, and the thought of writing anything more than a snippet at the moment is daunting and head-pain-inducing. I'll try to write something later. Something cooler than socks.

On the upside...

A good night's sleep makes a world of difference. What a nifty little aphorism! My mouth still hurts like hell but I made some jelly to eat for breakfast, so at least it will get some sweet, port-wine-flavoured relief.

Also, the phoenix rising out of the ashes of the crazy, tense, yet ultimately tedious work situation is this: a slightly butchered op-ed in The Age. I preferred my own header - 'What we have here is a failure to communicate' - but I am not bitching, no siree. At least now I can say I've been published in student papers, small press and the mainstream media, as if that arbitrary, probably-only-exists-in-my-own-head holy trinity will somehow set me on the path to a half-way credible journalistic career.

Anyway, we're planning a big birthiversary bash for Seb and Gillian tonight, involving gallery-opening wine, sushi, and karaoke, so I might raise a glass of champagne and then down several more. After all, jelly beats porridge any day.

Blah blah blah.

I feel like a big sack of blah at the moment. A big, flavourless sack of gruel. Millet, even. Porridge made with water and no salt.

Work has been hectic and yet banal, I'm running on two hours' sleep, I've somehow cut the roof of my mouth so that eating spicy or scratchy food hurts, I'm looking at words and they don't seem to be spelled right. Maybe I don't feel like I am porridge. Maybe I feel like I'm wading through it. Maybe my metaphors are as pedestrian as... as... a pedestrian.

Yeah. I think I'm going to quit while I'm behind.

Victory!

This morning I screwed up all my courage, did some sit-ups, and took on the Myer lingerie department for round two of the Great Bra-Shopping Smackdown! 2007. And, I am delighted to say, I won.

As I might have mentioned, I had my ass beat a few weeks ago when, dewy-eyed with optimism, I skipped blithely into that maze of lace and cotton and linoleum on a simple quest for bras. I had my ass beat severely. I'd forgotten, you see, how department store make me freak the fuck out when I'm feeling a little bit delicate. When I'm feeling a little bit delicate, I find something really sinister about the overly-cheery sales assistants, the confusing lay-out, the racks and racks of same and same again, the fluorescent lights, the piped music, the lack of fresh air. It's the same sort of feeling I get sometimes when I'm looking at twenty-something brands of toothpaste at the supermarket, most of which are made by the same two companies, or when I wander through the fruit and veg section to get to the checkout and realise that I can't actually smell anything. When the entire philosophy behind a physical space is overconsumption, and you're boxed in, removed from any organic sensory experience at all. That feeling.

So yes, I started freaking out almost immediately after walking in last time, but stubbornly I insisted on trying on underwear anyway, thinking that I could just get in and get out and not have to deal with it. I made my way through aisles and aisles of undergarments, and picked a few out that were pretty and that I could afford. And, oh my God. I had forgotten about the change rooms. Harsh lights, carpet, and three unforgivingly angled mirrors. I'm ambivalent on chunks of The Beauty Myth, particularly the idea that the patriachy is consciously subjugating women through the deliberate exploitation of body insecurities, but whoever designed these cells must truly hate women. Or at least, not realise that underwear, apart from being functional, is supposed to make a woman feel seductive.

Because when I try on intimate apparel - and if it's in the name, Myer, you might be able to take a few contextual hints - I want feel comfortable physically, but I also want to feel comfortable emotionally. Naomi, I am not subscibing to the hegemony of the male gaze when I say I want to feel desirable, okay? It's just that when I try on something that I may wear and buy, that will conceivably be the last thing revealed to someone else before my own skin, I want to fleetingly feel as beautiful and powerful as I might feel in the eyes of a lover. "Fuck the hierachy" would be my motto any day, but in this case I gladly would substitute the male gaze for the overtly critical female gaze, the one that eviscerates any romantic notions of desirability and picks up on flaws - and magnifies them - instead.

In fact, I would argue that the female gaze - especially in the case of self-regard - is more overtly objectifying of women than the male. In that change room, under glaring lights and with nowhere to turn, I became an object - a distorted mish-mash of forms, of legs and arms and breasts and belly divorced from any sense of self and subjected to relentless scrutiny. And if clothing really is as much about affect as function, you fucked up, Myer, because I just cannot imagine that this is a good business model. What custom do you have to gain from making women feel like shit? Do you think the more you send women scurrying out in despair, the more they will buy thinking that if they just pay enough now they can avoid the ordeal for a while? Because I just don't think it works like that. As soon as I earn enough to buy boutique lingerie for everyday, and not just Best Knickers, I'm outta here. You've been warned.

Ahem. Anyway, I was about to give up and leave in a huff when it occurred to me to utilise Myer's sole advantage over other shops - middle-aged "fitters", invariably no-nonsense, querulous women who will feel you up briskly, snatch away whatever lace confection you are holding with shake of the head, and return with something in a different size that only looks vaguely like your original garment but fits like a glove. And that is exactly what happened. Which is how I came to possess two identical bras, one navy blue with cream polka-dots, one cream with navy blue, with their respective matching ruched boy-leg knickers.

As I was leaving, the women who had fitted my smiled at my choice and said, "The one you had before is pretty, but it isn't doing many girls any favours. Now, that one is flattering, and you almost have a 1940s look about you, so you'll have that sailor-girl feel in it." And I could have cried I was so grateful to be reassembled from my various parts and made coherent and individual again. Hello, my name is Jess, and I am not a collection of blemished and misshapen limb-shaped lumps - I am a sailor girl.

Anyway, despite my totally unneccesary detour through the philosophical angst invoked by consumption and aesthetic facticity, I consider the expedition a triumph! (Leaving aside that it was a triumph defined by an act of consumption...) Most importantly, now there will be no more underwire poking into underarms, no more stretched straps, no more warped and lumpy cups from over-washing. Yes, friends, tomorrow will be a new day! Now, does anyone know any sailor boys?

Three unrelated things.

1) 7-11 is currently advertising a "sports slurpee": it's the "AFL Sports Slurpee - CHARGED WITH ELECTROLYES!". I saw this going past the Brunswick Rd 7-11 on the way in to work this morning and it made me smile, partly because I imagined a big pink waxed-paper cup with tiny molecular particles jumping and sparking off the top, and partly because it seemed somehow charming and quaint that sportspeople should warrant their own special slurpees. I liked the idea of AFL footballers sitting in their locker rooms before the match, spooning up their special frozen sports colas with those funny spoon/straw things and then heading out onto the field. I also liked the scope it left for other specialty slurpees - perhaps the "yoga slurpee": some sort of frozen orange juice, "CHARGED WITH INNER PEACE!" Or an "arts slurpee": "BLITZED WITH CREATIVE JUICE!"



2) I had a really horrible dream this morning, and while I generally think it is really banal to write about your dreams I can't seem to shake it from my system. (A seamless segue, from ill-advised marketing ideas to the dark, dark workings of the subconscious! That is why these things are 'unrelated', fool.) It was one of those scary dreams that seems utterly real, and that when you wake up make you overwhelmingly relieved - a direct contrast, I suppose, to those dreams where you're madly in love with someone, which always make me sad and grumpy when I awake to realise that the dream lover does not exist.

Anyway, it was one of those pursuit dreams where you're being chased across a number of scenarios, constantly hiding from some shadowy peril. At one stage I found myself holed up in a country house that I have visited in real life, hiding out with several (real) friends. One of them volunteered to go outside with a gun and act as a guard, and I understood just a second too late that he meant to commit suicide. He'd locked the door and I forced open a window just as I heard the shot. By the time I got to him his breathing had become shallow, and the scene had changed to some kind of college dorm room, and I teased him for choosing such a crappy place to die. As his breath became more laboured, he asked me whether he would ever meet me again, and I said yes, even though neither of us believe in an afterlife, because we'd never had a chance to fall in love on earth. I stooped my head down and he lifted his to kiss me, and I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth.



3) The magazine was given a number of tickets to Keating! and the only thing I really have to say is that this might possibly be the best comedic musical in the history of musical comedy. There was a Keating/Hewson rap battle over the GST, a mambo for Mabo, a Cheryl Kernot/Gareth Evans love song. Sure, you could say that it pandered to a cetain partisan political viewpoint, but I believe humour transcends political boundaries and it would take a particularly stodgy bastard not to giggle insanely at the Alexander Downer number.

Since it was opening night, the place was crawling with photographers and celebrities. We ended up waiting in line at the box office Johns Brumby and Thwaites, as well as former soap star Kimberlie Davies. The biggest celeb there, of course, was Keating! the man, and the moment he stepped on stage with the cast a shiver went through the crowd. He was so fucking cool, too - the cast were all dancing around to the band, so Keating started jiving in a very deadpan, Reservoir Dogs kind of way. He thanked Casey Benetto for the tribute, hugged the actors and musicians, and then threw his arm around Eddie Perfect, who played Howard, and declared, "I can't help it - I love the little desiccated coconut!" And as they were leaving the stage, he grabbed the mic and added, "Don't worry - the coconut will get his comeuppance!"

I don't think Kevin Rudd is quite charismatic enough to warrant his own musical, but you could feel a swell of hope go through the audience as people let themseves believe that the next Federal election would return a Labor government. Anything to get out of the relaxed and comfortable rut. We all went for beers afterwards, and debated policy and sang bits of the musical until last call. Which reminds me, I need to enrol to vote...

Ouch, part two.

Q. Why is Jess such a fucking idiot?
A. It's just habit, I guess.



So here's part deux in the series entitled, "Jess should not be posting when she's drunk". This series should possibly be subtitled "while booze is but a band-aid solution and no panacea, our heroine believes that drowning her sorrows in a haze of tears and then writing about it for the consumption of strangers while listening to Fiona Apple is a good idea", but any self-respecting editor would strike that immediately. No run-on sentence ever did no-one no good.

Anyway, it's past midnight, I'm drenched (internally) with beer and I can't walk in a straight line, and all these things are consequences of my own stupidity this morning (except for the passage of time - that's one thing that, comfortingly, I cannot seem to fuck up or fuck with). Which is not to say that the day was a total write-off - between its ignomious start and bleary-eyed end I conducted a pretty good interview with a Very Big University Cheese, did six or so hours of transcription, designed the cover for the next edition, and neologised a few fairly charming malaprops. I also bought Seb an "Ice T" brand iced tea as a birthday present, which I think no-one but he and I will find funny in the slightest. I plan on making him an awesome birthday card to go with it - something along the lines of Ice T telling him to stay off drugs and to avoid gangs like the plague. And perhaps a birthday sentiment, I don't know. Hey, it would be lame even if I weren't drunk. Leave me alone.

I think part of the problem right now is that I'm back in the insomnia slump, and so only had two hours sleep last night. Just as I was starting to fall asleep, Paulina woke up and started regaling me with tales of her Uncle UFO, a UFO-obsessed Pole who was also a hunchback from polio. Then she fell asleep, and kept kicking me as I tried to doze off.

Fortunately I'm still in the first flush of sleeplessness, where I can get up and read or paint or watch TV and not feel exhausted in the morning. I know that in a few weeks I'll be tired and grumpy, but at the moment I still feel I'm stealing hours in the dead of night, hoarding them against the daylight when I'll be forced to get up and go to work and can't wander into the back garden in just a thin slip and feel the cold dew beneath my sleepy feet. I'm still infatuated by the night, and standing outside in the cool thick air eating figs off the tree seems like an unimaginable delight.

Funnily enough, drinking doesn't seem to send me into any kind of stupor, so I suppose I'll be up tonight, toes in the damp earth, thinking about the day and wishing that I hadn't felt compelled to spill my intoxication into the neat, orderly world of the interweb. I should also mention that apart from occasionally proofing things I don't edit this at all, so the record will always show my drunken blatherings. That's okay, I guess - though I'm still trying to figure out the bounds of disclosure on this this, my own fallibility will always be up for grabs. And right now I am very fallible - so fallible, in fact, that I am falling... falling... off.. my chair.


Excuse me.

Happy Easter!

This year, the Easter Bunny brought me:


- Polish almond chocolates
- pomegranates
- a discussion of electric gherkins and the botanical requisites of "berry" classification
- a slumber party with Paulina
- the discovery of Coburg Lake
- a relaxing picnic at said lake
- many cups of tea
- a five-day weekend
- hours of sunshine
- a hangover
- a delicious breakfast at my old work (including 1 x sexy ristretto)
- piles of washing up
- a Jean Cocteau films
- a Tarot reading
- wild exhiliration, utter contentment and crippling anxiety (though not neccessarily in that order).



How about you?

A beautiful clumsy day.

Just book me a show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival already, because my morning was a comedy of errors.

It's my dad's birthday today, a fact which I had completely neglected last night when I was madly sewing buttons onto a canvas. Shit shit shit, thought I. My dad never makes a fuss over birthdays and if it were up to him they would probably just slip by unnoticed, which is an attitude I've inherited. I mean, it's nice to acknowledge the fact that someone's alive, but isn't it nicer to just be generous and thoughtful on a daily basis instead of concentrating all that attention into praise for the fact that someone was born? Congratulations - you successfully escaped the womb? I digress because I am loopy and tired, but the point is that I had nothing to offer the man who raised me until I had a fuzzy moment of illumination in the shower and decided to take him out to see Carlton lose one night. I mean play. Where am I going with this?

Oh right, he was coming over this morning to drop off a dress that Mum had made for me to wear to Lily and Ryan's wedding*, and so we sat down for a cup of tea and had a chat. It's funny how much I sometimes miss the little things about living at home - snuggling up on the couch, racing my dad for the nine letter word, drinking cups of tea, silly running jokes that don't really go anywhere. I think also in the last years my parents have started to treat my like an adult - a vague, occasionally petulant adult - to the point where I was having coffee with my mum the other day and she said, 'It's so good to take a break from parenting!' Which was nice, but at the same time, I'm still not really used to being an adult yet so if you want to adore and protect me a little while longer that would be fine.

I am wandering all over the place here! Anyway, after my dad left, I went to wrap the watercolour I had done for Lily and Ryan - I'm a bit broke and making things is always a good way to say "it's the thought that counts" - and what did I do but SPILL WATER ALL OVER IT. I spent the next fifteen minutes betwixt stages of dress, trying frantically to dry my hair while simultaneously drying the canvas. In the end I just had to add more purple, so Lily and Ryan, that is why there is so much goddamed purple at the bottom of the painting. Man, I hate purple. I can't think why I even included it except to even out all the yellow. Which is now unbalanced. By all the purple.

Because I didn't have time to dry my hair properly I threw the curling iron on, and promptly burned myself with it. Burning myself reminded me that I had left the kettle on, which had pretty much boiled dry by that stage. Oops! I finished my hair and put on the dress, which turned out to be too short for the slip I had borrowed, and fortunately it was Housemate Bec and her super-fantastic lingerie collection to the rescue. Thanks, Bec. Feeling somewhat calmer I went to touch up my make-up, putting on concealer in the steamed-up bathroom without realising that I still had paint all over my fingers. I had a purple chin. Thank God I had a second look before leaving the house.

Getting dressed I laddered my stockings. Somehow, I cut my foot. And my hand. But then none of that mattered, because I went and met Tilly on the corner and walked to the wedding and the clumsy clumsy day became a beautiful clumsy day.






*I kind of feel a bit uncomfortable writing about the wedding as it was so intimately Ryan's and Lily's that it feels like theirs alone to tell. So I will just mention briefly that it was beautiful - funny and unpretentious and charming, and full of a quiet grace. It made me feel temporarily less cynical. I think everyone felt that way - warmed pehaps; melted slightly by being in the presence of two people who are so genuinely and steadfastly in love - and it felt like their little house was throbbing like a golden heart, illuminated against the eggs-and-bacon ordinariness of a Saturday morning in Brunswick. It made me wonder how many small fragments of beauty play out every day, unseen by most but cherished by a few. It made me feel optimistic about the inherent goodness of the world, but maybe that's just the champagne talking.

A few things you might already know about me but then again why would you.

1) I wander around when I brush my teeth. I find it almost impossible to brush my teeth in the bathroom. If I am forced to, I will pace like a caged animal. It's as though I forget how to make a brushing motion when I am standing still.

2) It is rare that I am actually reading my book on the tram. Secretly, I am watching you.

3) When I am very nervous, I recite parts of 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' underneath my breath.

4) I cannot remember the last time I wore trousers.

5) In my handbag, there is: a tube of mascara; a pink lipstick; eyeliner; a crumpled up easter egg wrapper; a turquoise comb; some loose change and bobby pins; a strip of Panafen Plus; tampons; my wallet' a notebook; a phone; a pencil; a studio photo of Harold from Neighbours; a pen; and The Four Quartets.

6) I will have a macchiatoni or a ristretto, thank you.

7) I refuse to accept that the international standard spelling of "sulphur" is now "sulfur" and will continue to spell it the old-fashioned way.

8) I am terrible at telling jokes (see a few posts previous). But I am very good at making puns.

9) Last night I dreamed that I was forced to sleep on the floor at a holiday retreat while all the couples there were given beds. This morning I woke up with an extremely sore back. I don't think it was a coincidence.

One-Handed Reading List

I found a little bit of money in my account the other day. There was a book sale at uni. I think you can see where this is going.

While I didn't go all-out bug-fuck crazy - that is, I left the Phaidon coffee table books on the trestle table where they lived after slavering madly over at least five of them - I did come away several kilos heavier in books. And it seems that at the moment I have a one-track literary mind, because apart from a Lester Bangs anthology and a Sylvia Plath volume this is what I bought:

The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis
Crash, J.G. Ballard
The Key, Junichiro Tanizaki
Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
The Sexual Life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet
Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Laura Frost.

I bought the Amis because I remember reading a review that was quite passionate about it. Unfortunately, I can't remember whether the reviewer loved it or hated the book, and now I suspect that perhaps they hated it, but I've always meant to read some Amis at least and this one is quite slim. The others I bought partly because I was in a saucy mood but mostly because I have been giving serious thought recently to a thesis based around sex, subjectivity and the abject in twentieth-century literature, and they seem to get more or less consistantly referenced in the readings I've been doing. (Ho ho, it's one-handed reading because you need the other hand to take notes! It's funny because I mean academic wanking and not wanking in the literal sense!)

I'm not sure that Sex Drives is really going to resolve many ideas for me, since it's based around Sontag's idea of "fascinating fascism", and (from a quick read of the introduction anyway) seems to focus the erotic appeal of fascism as sublimated by the subject - that is, cultural influence on the erotic imaginary - rather than the idea that libidinal urges are repeated at a national level, sublimated themselves as political discourse. That's not really a quibble. It's interesting to read something that approaches the topic in a way I probably never would, and certainly no-one is obliged to go around spouting Freud - it's way more complex than that. But at the moment I tend to believe that the political will of a country is reflective of its inhabitants' psycological nature, and not the other way around.

Anyway, there's an interesting-looking chapter called '"Every woman adores a Fascist": Margeurite Duras, Sylvia Plath, and Feminist Visions of Fascism' which should provide food for thought, particularly as Duras is one of the writers I want to focus on. If my French were better I'd even consider doing a comparative study between Duras and Pauline Reage. I guess the thing I'm getting at, which the French do better that I can, is exploring the link between sex and the broaching of subjective stability - either by the abasement (and therefore transcendence) of the subjective self as in The Story of O, or by sex's explicit (ha!) relationship to the abject and so its temporary abolition of psychological "order". I guess what I'm getting at is something like "jouissance" being translated as "orgasm" in the English version of L'Amant. I am getting at a thesis-length version of that very translation.

Also, when I say subjectivity, I mean I would want to look at both the character's psychological subjectivity as created by the author, and also the language in which sex scenes are written and the critical distance the author/narrator maintains - which I guess is more Lacan than Freud. It would be both. Am I even making sense anymore?

Dear God - this pseudo-intellectual yearning for a theoretical analysis of dirty stories is making me realise how much I've been missing study, and how slack my faculties have become from a few months of inactivity. It's a bit scary, and I think I need to go and read some Kristeva and stop posting my first-year-level observations (there's a lot of tension between the subject and the abject! sex both informs and is informed by politics!) on the internet lest any academics be reading this and laugh at me. You know - as bored academics are wont to do. In the meantime, why don't you go read a dirty novel? It's good for the constitution, you know.

Judaism for Dummies

or: This Seder Felt Strange for Many Reasons.


(So a Catholic, an Anglican and a Jew are about to be knighted, and they all must go and kneel before the Queen. The Catholic goes first, and kneels down before her. He says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The queen taps him on the shoulders, then the head, and commands him to arise, for he is now a knight.

The Anglican goes next, and kneels before a Queen, and says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The Queen repeats the process and commands him to arise.

Finally, it's the Jew's turn, but he can't remember the words. His mind goes blank. He kneels down, and begins to mumble under his breath, "Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh, Mikol haleilot..." and the Queen turns to her chancellor, raises her eyebrows and asks, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?")



Why was last night different from all other nights? Because it was the first Seder we'd celebrated since by grandfather passed late last year, and no-one knew what to do.

Seder (the Passover meal) has always been an oddly formal occasion in my family. My grandfather was very, very religiously conservative - probably the most orthodox you could be without, you know, actually being Orthodox - and so high holidays were always celebrated very solemnly. No hymns for us - no lively debate around the dinner table - no banter over the passages of interpretation. The Haggadah was always read in Hebrew. So the Seder for me was always much more grave and mysterious than it was for most people I know.

The table was always presided over my my grandfather, who was deaf and increasingly frail and demented. In between the ceremonial parts of the meal my grandmother would be back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, fretting. I don't think she has ever eaten more than two bites of any Seder meal. Anyway, things followed a pattern, and pattern becomes tradition, and tradition becomes law. We continued to do even the things that are generally just included to distract little kids - like hiding the matzo and demanding a prize for its return - long after all three of us girls were in our teens. In the last few years, as Papa grew increasingly frail, the roles became reversed, with us humouring him and playing along as he pretended not to see the square, flat serviette perched obviously on the mantlepiece, or behind a cushion. His face would break into a grin as we pulled away the cushion with a flourish, and bartered for glinting foil gold coins or lilac-wrapped blocks of Kosher Swiss chocolate.

This year there was none of that. My grandmother had a bossy Hungarian woman in the kitchen fussing over things, but she still didn't eat. No-one shouted and mimed our after-school activities to the head of the table. There was no maror, no potato dunked in salt, no wine to dip our little fingers into. There was no Hebrew, no arguments in Hungarian across the dinner table so that the kids don't understand. In another world my dad would have taken over the ceremony, but he left the shul at seventeen and never looked back. So we decided to just have a quiet dinner - my parents, my sisters, Helen, who my dad has taken to calling the Fourth Daughter, and my nagyi and her sister.

It was pleasant, but breaking with tradition after all those years is still disquieting. Towards the end, in the hospitals wards, the hospice, with the smell of antiseptic and the cheerless painting, the intubation, the drips, the dementia, it seemed better that Papa goe quickly. We couldn't imagine his anguish at conducting the Seder from a hospital bed, and frankly he was so out of touch with reality by the end that I don't think he would have been able to.

When we were young and he was babysitting, he would sneak us chocolate wafers. He worked in the schmatte trade and could fold a shirt beautifully. He refused to talk about Hungary or the war until he had Holocaust flashbacks two years ago, last Seder, and we found out that his sister died at Auschwitz with her children. My sister is named after her, although my father didn't realise at the time. When he rang to say it was a baby girl, Papa cried. He worked in the Kodak factory after immigrating, almost every day, for a year. He always called my dad's friends by their full names. His pants had creases down the front, precise. He would poke us in the back to make us sit up straight and gave us horsie bites that left bruises. He didn't know his own strength. I miss him.

Papa died on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year. He was in a coma but I'd like to believe he'd been holding on in order to go out with a little symbolism. Patterns make tradition, and you break with law, and traditions become memories. This Seder felt strange. For many reasons.

Ouch

I started this morning crying in the changerooms at Myer, found myself attending a ridiculous anti-bullying and harrassment seminar at lunchtime, and then ended up hiccoughing on the last tram home.

All in all, an utterly inglorious day.

The Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad.

So since Tuesday I've been craving this vaguely Japanese eggplant salad like crazy. I bought most of the ingredients at the supermarket on the way home, and then realised that I had forgotten the miso and tofu, so the eggplant went back in the fridge. Wednesday and Thursday I was out, and then on Friday, when I went assemble the salad, the eggplant had mysteriously vanished from the fridge. Foiled again!

By yesterday afternoon I couldn't stand it no more, and so, armed with all the neccessary ingredients, I began to cook.

The thing is, by that stage cooking the salad had become much, much more important than eating the salad. Now, for me there's a fairly simple corollary between cooking and stress. Namely, I get itchy baking fingers when something is going wrong in my life. I spent a blissful evening making a hundred cup-cakes for a party recently, and come exam time I am usually to be found in the kitchen, wreathed with steam from the oven, fingers burned, mixing batch after batch of biscuit mix, mashing bananas into a pulp for bread.

But this was the first time I have ever craved the making of an Asian salad. The baking/stress corollary is fairly straightforward, but what does it mean that I suddenly felt compelled to slice an eggplant into paper-thin slices? Why did I need to boil dried seaweed until it felt pliant and gelantinous? Why, for the love of God, was the highlight of my day seeing thick, spongy tofu become soft and slippery in its miso-and-mushroomy blanket of broth?

I don't know. I just don't know. So I made the goddamn Japanese eggplant salad, and I had three bites of it, and then I went to a friend's for dinner.

Anyway, if you ever develop this specific compulision, here is what to do:

1) Put some dried seaweed and shitake mushrooms in a pot of warm water and bring to the boil. When I did this yesterday, I added some shitake mushroom stock, but I have no idea how such an item appeared in my cupboard to begin with or where you'd go about purchasing it. It's blatantly unneccessary, anyway - just the mushrooms will do.

2) Cut a shiny purple eggplant and a few waxy potatoes into very thin slices. Cut the slices into slices. Set aside.

3) Crush a shitload of garlic with the back of a knife and dice. Chop up an onion, trying not to cry. Add half a not-too-hot chilli, also diced, and for the love of God do not touch your eyes after you've chopped it up, or then you'll really have something to cry about.

4) Saute* the garlic, onion and chilli until the onion is caramelised, and then add the eggplant and potato.

*Imagine this word with an acute accent. An accute accent that I can't figure out how to make on this computer.

5) Drain the seaweed and shitake broth into a bowl, keeping the re-hydrated seaweed and shitake mushrooms. Add in some miso, mirin, and soy, and then add it to the eggplant/potato mix with a ladle, spoonful by spoonful, as with a risotto. Keep doing this until the eggplant is mushy and the potato is just cooked through.

6) Turn down the heat and add cubes of spongy tofu. Boil up some noodles in a seperate pot - I like sesame noodles, because of the texture, but soba would work - and then drain them in the same colander as the seaweed and mushrooms. Add to the pan, toss, then let cool before transferring salad from pan to bowl and letting cool in the fridge.




Ta da! It's your free Sunday recipe/exploration of my quirks and neuroses. It's a Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad. Enjoy!