Love, music, sex and death

Never having heard of this delightful young woman, though I sure as hell have now, I was mesmerised by this song on the car radio this afternoon, on Adelaide's local ABC.

I used to listen to, and perform, a lot of folk music when I was in my teens and twenties. But I didn't have the analytical skills I have since acquired, in 35 years of reading and thinking about literature and society, to think about these kinds of songs in a way that any educated young woman would automatically think about them now. If someone held a gun to my head and said 'Write a 3,000 word feminist analysis of this song and its narrative structure in the next three hours or you will be shot,' there is no doubt that I would get out of it alive.

But never mind that for the moment -- and you will get the gist at a visceral level anyway. Just have a listen to Sarah Calderwood's filigree musicianship and this haunting tale of commerce and nemesis, impossible to tell convincingly in any but a minor key.

Headlines #2

You know how sometimes when you're dreaming there'll be a noise in the real world loud enough to impinge on the dream but not to wake you up, so somehow your dreaming brain comes up with a lightning-fast rationale for the noise and works it in to the dream narrative?

I got that feeling this morning, albeit wide awake, when my daily email from the Age arrived with the leading headline 'Train fix still to come: Kosky'. Hmm, I thought, what on earth would Barrie Kosky be doing with a train? Some sort of massive neo-Grand Guignol stage set, or maybe 'train' here is a metaphor? Why is it broken, and how come it's making headlines?

It actually refers, of course, to Victorian transport minister Lynne Kosky and all the Melbourne trains that melted yesterday in the heat. But the brain, she gloms onto whatever association is most familiar; she does it in a fraction of a second, and she weaves it into some logical, if utterly incredible, narrative shape.