Emilie’s Tarantula
Meet my cousin Emilie’s pet Tarantula.
His name is Jules.
Unfinished Master’s Thesis
This is the unformed foetus of my master’s thesis. It is beginning to feel more like a rubik’s cube or a sudoko challenge than an essay on the media’s appropriation of our inner lives. When it is finished, I am going to read an edited extract of it on a plinth next to a flowing bar. It will go like this;
‘I believe … therefore … perhaps … To the contrary … on the other hand … But … in fact … Actually … and yet … It would seem … because … The End.’
My Year of Reading
When I moved up north, I dedicated my first year here to reading. I wanted to write less and read more, as somewhere along the line the balance had gotten a little lopsided. In Melbourne, a moat of dusty books was forming around my bed and I was often awakened in the night by the sound of yet another tower of books collapsing as my cat tried to cross over to say hello. Not to mention that I found Colonel Sherbet, my rabbit, busy devouring Freud behind the bookcase, almost the entire Interpretation of Dreams was gone! Ten months in, and I have read over 56 books, not to mention actually reading the papers, magazines and getting addicted to podcasts, especially This American Life.
Here are a few of my favourite reads to date:
- A History of Love - Nicole Krauss
- Middlesex - Eugenides
- Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir - Lauren Slater
- Persopolis Volume 1 & 2 - Marjane Satrapi
- East of Here, Close to Water - Josephine Rowe
- No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July
- Night and Day - Tom Stoppard
- Complete Stories - David Malouf
- Elizabeth Costello - JM Coetzee
- The Journalist and the Murderer – Janet Malcolm
- Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion – Kevin Brophy
- Fraction of a Whole – Steve Toltz
- The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
- On Beauty – Zadie Smith
- Notes on a Scandal – Zoe Heller
- Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegurt
- Hystories – Elaine Showalter
- The Orchid Thief – Susan Orlean
- Whitefella Jump Up – Germaine Greer
- What is the What - Dave Eggers
- The Turning – Tim Winton
- Violence - Slavoj Zizek
- Swallow the Sound – Krissy Kneen
- Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag
A Birthday Report
My birthday for the 27th March.
Emilio rang me at 6am from Samoa and got his boyfriends to sing happy birthday to me. Then he told me he swam with huge turtles. I hung up. Mojito curled up next to my belly and we went back to sleep for some more. Opened package from Emilio. A porcelain head with all the brain stimulus points mapped out on it. Read some. Mum called and I asked her about when I was born. She said she couldn’t remember. I told her to remember. She said dad sat in the waiting room and read the paper. When the doctors cut me out they also found the missing IUD that she had done in order to not have any more creatures like myself. Read some more. Got a little bit cold so put blanket over my feet. Accidentally fell back asleep. Romy woke me back up.
More messages from around the world poured in. From Mozambique to Iceland.
I slept some.
Clare knocked on the door bearing a fluffy orange sponge cake. Is there a better woman in the world? Ben rang, Scott rang, Sarah sent a FREE sms. My brother texted and said he was in China. I thought he was in Fitzroy. I highlighted a few pars. The cake was beautiful but it blew up in me a fart the size of Hiroshima. Another package arrived. Kris Olsson sent me a scarf the colour of buddhist monks. The real esate agent called but it was a private number and I assumed it was my friend Jesse Marlow, so I picked up and yelled BANG BANG you bastard, but it was the real estate agent.
Ben picked me up and we went for a swim. I made him do an extra two laps on top of his usual ten. His poor little POW body almost collapsed. On the way home we both misread a road sign that said ‘no left turn buses excepted’ and tried to turn. People got irrationally angry. Thank God most Australians don’t have guns. Homeward to Scott and Ben’s where Scott made us Irish tea and mused about his first real cup of tea in sixth grade. The boys gave me a beautiful card (which I later found twenty more of the fuckers that they will slowly but surely also give away), origami paper without the instructions and a Jackie Marshal CD. Scott went to play music while Ben and I ate rice paper rolls while watching a hospital reality show where a little boy’s skull was too big and the doctors took off the top of his head, drew lines on his skull with black texta and filed it down with what looked like carpentry equipment.
Then Ben and I made origami cranes. Well Ben did. I got too impatient with it and crunched some up and said Look Origami Turds. Or Look Origami Venetian Blinds. And then I came home, passing four possums tightroping across the power lines, and Amy had left a big pink dragonfruit on my desk.
All in all, a good birthday.
Thank you
x o x
Another beautiful summer in Venus
Our fuselage. This is our summer home where the ocean is so close you can hear it rumbling hungrily like a lover’s stomach. The caravan used to be a WW2 aeroplane and you can still see the scars where the wings used to be. It was transformed by a man who owned a tractor business and then sold to an amateur tennis player who drove it around Australia with his wife and kids, playing Pennett tennis tournaments.
Inside the fuselage where everything is painted a different shade of pastel are a collection of shells, an abandoned nest that is lovingly padded with grey & green parrot feathers, emilio’s collection of porcelain animals, a lizard skeleton, books on rock pools, trees, how to collect specimens, as well as my favourite - J D Salinger’s short stories.
Over the dunes.
Jason’s whale bone
This is Jason’s drawing of a whale vertebrae. An old male sperm whale washed up on the beach. He was fifteen metres long. The vertebrae was too heavy to carry so a resourceful Jason slipped the handle of an axe through the hollow in the bone, and carried it home with a friend.
Dreaming of Bombe Alaska
My desk in tropical Queensland. Last night I hung up 3 mosquito coils around my bedroom. The cats and I watched a tawny frogmouth owl on the hills hoist while gekkoes smooched in the dark.