On a day off, I am strolling around the vast internetwork, looking and listening. I feel sorrow on finding that the wonderful guitar player Rod Poole was killed in his adopted home of Los Angeles last week. I have been listening to his masterpiece The Death Adder on and off since it was [...]
Walking home under this afternoon’s blanched grey sky, I followed two jaunty drunks from parking meter to parking meter, their pockets jangling with coins extracted with some sort of wire contraption. Outside the AMWU office on Elizabeth Street, a union lackey sat with his feet up on a collapsible table, bottle of VB in one [...]
I have lately realised that I am spectacularly ill-disciplined with respect to the various everyday tasks required to organise a life. Meditating on writing something about this, I was distracted, as often, by a fly flitting about in the middle of the room. Recently, with warmer weather, the apartment at daybreak has almost invariably contained [...]
Realising today the Russian anarchists would have killed me for being too old. Though I still have some time before reaching Dostoyevsky’s immoral, vulgar, bad-mannered age of forty.
Learned how to watch people, but don’t want to write novels? Why not become an entertainer instead…
Just to make sure nothing passes beneath my bibliophilic gaze, I subscribe to my university library new titles email list, which is sent out once a month and contains roughly 400 new books each time (for the Dewey numbers I’m interested in, at least). The following, for all I’m concerned, may as well consist entirely [...]
Not sure what moral to draw from the fact that the first (attempted) comment on the new location of this weblog is a weblog spam trying to sell something or other. I’ve not seen this form of spam before; the interesting thing about it is that the comment itself tries to be a regular text [...]
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The number of times I have read love poems or sex scenes in novels that say something about the snap of bra-straps: uncountable. I am going to start a list, though. Might make a good coffee-table book one day for shy literary types who are too afraid to have books of nudes around the house.
[...]The city is beautiful at twilight on a day when a rainbow hangs in the sky like a frame and old men walk with serrated movements along the crisp edge of the future. After braking to avoid an accident the bus-driver shrugs his shoulders in a performance for an empty audience flashing past in an [...]
“Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because [...]
The glass is scattered, shattered, on the road, being crunched and tossed glistening by the stream of cars passing. An accident slowly erased. Every day comes the sun through the small window in the corner of my room differently, as the universe unwinds. In the night when I wake up I hear the cars, and [...]
Woke up mid-afternoon and scratched some sleep off my eyes, wondered if the guy I’d met at the party next door had left the lounge I gave him to sleep on for the night, he had, made some toast with tomato and avocado and cheese on sourdough that looked like it might have been too [...]
Put my hands in the air and waited for signals
Saw control towers swaying in the wind
Wondered who was still and who was moving
If things will end or if they’ll begin
Heard a girl say what’s behind the blue sky mum
Heard a mum say it’s blue all the way in
Leave it to fate
Fated to leave
Fêted as left
Faded [...]
Virginia Woolf wanted it both ways when in The Waves she has one of her characters proclaim her words as only several of the myriad silver fish swimming in the ocean of her thought, and later proclaiming that speech is false.
Gruebleen
We are the intersection of everything that has passed through us:
Absorbed: Robert Musil, The Man [...]
I don’t know whether to find this amusing or pathetic, but last night I dreamed that I was at a garage sale and found a miraculously cheap hardcover English translation of Wittgenstein’s Last Writings. After I bought the book and looked at it more closely, I realised it was actually a translation of Spengler’s Decline [...]
Gender Relations: 1
Today I observed, as I drove up the hill towards my home, a little boy and girl sitting back to back on a skateboard, just sitting there on the footpath, on this skateboard, with their arms linked, each trying to propel the skateboard forwards with their legs, until they toppled, so slowly as [...]
Driving to the nursing home with nana, it looks like rain but so far only specks on the dirty windscreen of the van she has a little difficulty getting into, these days. I drive somewhat distractedly, drifting slowly back and forth between the edges of the lanes, and other drivers stay out of the way [...]
Last night I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s short manuscript Existentialism and Humanism, in which he set out to defend the existentialist philosophy against criticisms that had been made against it, particularly by Marxists, and particularly for its being (perceived as) overly subjective (amongst other things). I think there is a lot that Sartre says that is [...]
Television of the Day 1: Jesus Springer
Jesus used to hang out with the thieves and prostitutes, and dispense moral wisdom. These days we have Jerry Springer, who hangs with the scum of American society, dispensing moral wisdom in soundbytes at the end of each show. Except this time around we don’t know if the people [...]