Working

Sometimes if you're lucky there's a moment, when you're working on a first draft, trying to turn it into a second draft, that comes when you're slogging away at micro-level and suddenly, without warning, you see clearly and exactly what needs to be done at macro ditto.

It's not quite as heady as the moment when you look at a paragraph you've just finished writing and think Holy schlamoly, where did that come from. But it's pretty good.

Shoot me now

From today's Crikey:

'Iran's cover up. Baroness Ashton, the EU Foreign Minister, has been given a more modest neckline in Iranian newspaper coverage of the talks in Turkey over Iran's nuclear program. Who said that what women politicians wear does not matter?'

Taking the veil

This is Crikey's Video of the Day today.



As one of the many feminists around the world bedevilled by the question of Islamic dress codes for women, I was hoping, really hoping, that this woman was going to explain the rationale of wearing the whole enchilada in a way that I could understand and sympathise with. Because I've read a number of pieces by Moslem women on this subject and frankly none of them have made a lot of sense to me.

Most of this woman's arguments about why the French ban is wrong do carry some weight. But all she says by way of actual explanation of the wearing of the garment is that she wears the niqab 'because of my spirituality towards God'. Which means nothing to me. 'Spirituality' yes, no argument from me. Even 'God', yes, I at least get the idea. But it's the word 'because' that defeats me. How is one's spirituality towards God expressed by hiding one's body, hair and face, which one presumes she believes God to have made? Does anyone know?

A little faffing around online reveals among other things that the face veil is a pre-Islamic garment worn in the desert to keep the flying sand out of one's eyes (on a literal if presumably not a metaphorical level). Which is the kind of explanation that does make sense. But you have to wonder how often there's call to keep the flying sand out of one's eyes in France -- again, on a literal if not a metaphorical level; France has quite a lot of metaphorical flying sand when it comes to putting pressure on women about their looks or pestering them sexually in public, and two reasons often given for wearing any level of hijab are to prevent unwanted attentions from men and to be able to stop fretting about how you'll be judged for the new wrinkle in your forehead or the fact that you've put on a few kilos.

Goddess knows both of those things make perfect sense to me.  What I want to know is why it should be held the woman's responsibility to prevent them. And why you can't express your spirituality, whether towards God or not, just as easily by singing a madrigal or growing a tomato or cooking a meal for people you love.

You can do a feminist reading of anything

I just followed a link someone had put up on Facebook to watch the original trailer of Antonioni's The Passenger, a movie I've always loved.

Here's a quotation from the voice-over: 'The brilliance of Jack Nicholson; the beauty of Maria Schneider; the vision of Antonioni.'

That movie came out in 1976.

Discuss.

(Trollitude will be ruthlessly excised.)

JAN 25: UPDATE

Bits

are all I'm good for at the moment.

* Am up sharp pointy end of Adelaide book, lurching from one paragraph to the next as deadline looms. One's student days come back to one at times like this: have vivid memory of sitting on my bedroom floor in 1971 crying over Philosophy 1 essay requiring all-nighter (FAIL) and of the four other long-essay all-nighters -- on Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, American Southern Gothic, medieval church music and psycholinguistics (not together, though it's an intriguing interdisciplinary proposition), and all the all-nighters writing lectures over the years, and wondering why the bod won't do that any more, just because it's in its late 50s and I don't feed it properly or give it enough sleep and exercise. Text yesterday from younger sister: 'Don't make yourself sick. Better the wrath of your publisher than the wrath of Mother Nature.'

* Wonderful piece by John Birmingham on what the Brisbane floods are telling us about human nature here.

Delicate, porcelain-skinned little vegan girls in bonnets with flowers muscled their way into the thickest, filthiest torrents of river mud next to bogan footballers, Army engineers, and tough-looking tattooed lesbians. This being West End there were travellers, too. Three French backpackers somehow managing to make their accumulated filth look stylish. A couple of Americans who'd come to Australia to surf and instead found themselves running wheelbarrows of grey, stinking ooze down to the water's edge from where it had come.

Gorgeous.

* New post at Read, Think, Write on second-guessing the publication process if you're interested.

* Garden spider that spins its gorgeous orb directly across path from front gate to verandah every non-wet and non-windy night is twice the size it was on Christmas Day when my friend R came to dinner and as she was leaving I had to take the torch out to show her why she needed to avoid the path and jump off the edge of the verandah in order to get to her car. Goddess knows I too have put on a kilo or so since Christmas but doubling in size in less than a month is awesome. I know for a fact that the insect pickings in that part of the garden are pretty good; the other night the web snared an entire moth. (No doubt the spider equivalent of a tub of Sara Lee Irish Cream and no I can't believe I bought it either. I'm as shocked as you are.) It's all a bit red in tooth and claw out there.

* Speaking of claws, the tortoiseshells are well, as is Papa Cat, who will be 84 on Feb 1. I'm told that for the birthday dinner we're having Chinese, which my adventurous ma taught him to like at the Silver Dragon Restaurant in Rundle St, Adelaide, circa 1955. Sadly she is now long gone, but his pleasure in Chinese food lives on.

Queensland: an ethics question

In a disaster situation involving both chaos and shortages, which is worse: looting, or charging ten bucks for a loaf of bread?

Why?

Why people have cats: an occasional series

I'm just starting to recover from a very nasty little episode a few hours ago that could have been any one of the following: (a) food poisoning, (b) caffeine poisoning, (c) codeine poisoning, (d) less than five hours' sleep, (e) a three-way dose of stress, or (f) (the most likely diagnosis) all of the above.

Anyway, as I lay there semi-conscious on my bed of pain, grateful that the room spins seemed to be getting slower, the neck knots looser and the head pain gradually less, I felt a thump and heard a 'Prrrrt?' as the bossy tortoiseshell hit the bed, and a few seconds later my head was enveloped in soft warm fur and my fevered brow was being rhythmically soothed by a rough and raspy tongue. Wash wash wash wash wash.

It really did help quite a lot.

Be Prepared

In the wake of assorted local, national and international natural disasters last summer, I was sufficiently freaked out to pack a small emergency kit. I think I was thinking mainly of unforeseen disruptions to infrastructure -- power, water, maybe roads somehow; what was mainly on my mind was fire.

Whatever it was, I assembled a zip-up carry-bag of the following: large plastic bottle of water, small first-aid kit, assorted energy bars and little packs of trail mix, tissues, wet wipes, small kit of travel-sized toiletries, candles, matches and a torch (and battery).

Somewhat to my surprise, family and friends were unanimous in their approval; obvs I'm not the only nervous Nellie in town. And after spending yesterday and today glued to the intertubes, I'm glad I've got that kit sitting there and will update it when I get a minute to spare. There are some things I plan to add: photocopies of essential documents (including prescriptions and cat vaccination certificates; nobody will board them without), two favourite novels, spare reading glasses and a large box of Nurofen Plus. A very large box.

In which Tony Abbott uses the bereaved, the unhoused and the traumatised for political gain

You've got to hand it to him though; he's 100% consistent. One relied upon him to make some response of this calilbre, and one has not been disappointed.

I have been giving some thought to Abbott's bizarre attitude to the NBN. I think it's to do with egocentricity and solipsism: with believing that if you personally don't understand something, then it can't possibly be important or true.

I am a woman, not a test mouse!

Don't listen to this at work unless it's all right for you to be LOLing at your desk.

Points will be deducted if your answer is based on neither faith nor prejudice

Today the national broadcaster makes its contribution to the ever-growing pile of human ignorance and stupidity by encouraging the populace in the belief that there is no difference between opinion and fact, and furthermore that everyone's opinion has the same value and anyone who says it doesn't is one of those horrid inner-city tertiary-educated latte-sipping leets. I give you the ABC's article on the mysterious mass bird deaths occurring around the world, complete with comments thread: 'What do you think killed the birds?'

It only took about two seconds for someone to turn up and say it was God's wrath, too, though this chap gets shot down in flames in short order and just as well. Fortunately quite a lot of the commenters aren't buying it, in fact, as you'll see. Suggestions as to the bird death cause include 'Stephen King' and 'Lord Voldemort'.

And look on the bright side: at least it wasn't structured as a quiz with opinion options A-D, or, worse, A-B, like those pernicious things all the MSM sites run from time to time that go 'Do you think [insert name of person involved in sub judice case here, totally inappropriately, destructively and quite possibly illegally] is guilty? YES/NO.'

Every time a mainstream media site asks one of these cunningly phrased yet inane questions the populace gets just that little bit more confused about the nature of truth and just that little bit dumber. What do you think blood is made of? What do you think NaCl means? Who, in your opinion, is the Prime Minister? What do you believe two and two adds up to? What colour do you think the sky is? Do you think it's turtles  all the way down?

Resolutions

1: Two of the nicest people I ever met live in a place called Gargunnock in Scotland. I'd lost touch with them, and a few weeks ago was idly googling Gargunnock plus their names as the quickest way of finding them. The first thing that came up was a notice to a walking-tour group that for one of their walks through the area, my friends had offered their house as a place to stop for a loo break and a cup of tea. That offer was what made me absolutely sure it was them.  Then, a few weeks later, up turned a beautiful little Christmas card from them. I remember them telling me that in Scotland, New Year -- Hogmanay -- tends to be a bigger deal than Christmas so one of my New Year's resolutions is to write them a New Year's letter.

2: Five minutes' drive away from my house there is a lovely beach. I resolve to go and swim there in the early morning at least three times a week, as a way of waking up and getting everything moving, before I sit down at the keyboard to

3: finish writing this book about Adelaide. Which I am enjoying very much, but which -- as a New Zealander recently said about living in Adelaide itself -- is like trying to swim through treacle. And speaking of sweet things,

4: I am going to christen, at last, possibly today, the ice-cream maker, and make Fresh Cherry and Toasted Almond Ice Cream to go with the experimental (for me, I mean) Burnt Brown Sugar Ice Cream I also plan to make, from a recipe I like the look of very much but have never actually made, though perhaps bypassing the praline as it is much too hot to be faffing around with toffee, before I then

5: go on a diet of fresh fruit, raw vegetables, mineral water and peppermint tea for the rest of my life. Or at least until January 25, 2012 (this January being out of the question, because of #3), by which date I plan to have

6: finally got my act together and organised a Burns Supper, with compulsory singing and poetry recitation from all parties. Haggis optional; the haggis cowards can fill up on neeps and tatties and Tipsy Laird.

Happy New Year to all, and everyone stay safe tonight.

Housekeeping

Two apologies:

(a) Comment moderation has been turned on, I hope temporarily.

(b) A couple of regular readers here will have noticed that comments left some time back have never appeared. This is because Blogger developed a Spaminator that they never told their users about. I have liberated a couple of perfectly good comments from same.

Have a good one

9.40 pm and the presents are wrapped and the cards written on. The prawns have been cleaned and so has the toilet. The tablecloth has been ironed and so has tomorrow's outfit. The trifle has been made and so have the mayonnaise and the seafood sauce, the gazpacho and the salsa.

But why, oh why, did I not do the wretched vacuuming about eight hours ago, before my feet started to hurt?

Never mind. A little Christmas blogging before the last big housework push.

Cats and music, what's not to like? Many, many merries to all.

Shame all round, boys

Now I know that with the Great Big Non-Story of Nick Riewoldt's Willy (and of course that's what this is really all about: is it that he thinks it isn't big enough, or is he embarrassed about being caught in a pose that might shout 'wanker'?) we are back in the land of what my Facebook Friend Lord Sedgwick calls the Single Digit IQ Nuff Nuff, original ref to Brendan Fevola and Lara Bingle.

But does that time-honoured 'quality' newspaper The Age, which I'm old enough to remember as a once mighty power in the land, really need to get in on the act as well? Note to Paul Millar and Jared Lynch: It's 'stream of consciousness', boys. Not 'stream-of-conscience'.

(NB: also, Elizabeth Jolley has already made this joke. But she was doing it on purpose.)

Actually, I don't see any sign of any conscience anywhere in this whole story. Not even a trickle. Just infantile narcissism and total abnegation of responsibility for one's own behaviour as far as the eye can see. That and the tip of the iceberg that is the pig-dog ugly subculture of the AFL-and-women.

But I hope that young woman is enjoying her ten minutes of fame, because the AFL is going to swing all of its power and money into action and crush her like a bug. And more vain and misguided young women will swan in to fill the tiny gap she leaves in the AFL's neverending supply of stupid girls, and nothing will change. A plague on both your houses.

Music and memory

Fans of Jimmy Webb might remember his 1970 album Words and Music (so vividly recalled by the magnificent Ten Easy Pieces 26 years later) on which as well as his own songs, including the wonderful 'P.F. Sloan' which he later disowned after a spat with Sloan himself, he included a track on which he'd overlaid three different songs of the era in such a way -- because they had identical time signatures, similar tempi and similar chord progressions -- as to make it sound like one song with a great deal of interesting counterpoint in it. Let it Be Me, an adaptation of the French 'J'appartiens' from 1955 and best known in the Everly Brothers version, the Addrisi brothers' Never My Love, recorded by The Association in 1967, and Boyce & Hart's I Wanna Be Free, which they wrote for the Monkees (a group for which a very young Stephen Stills auditioned and was rejected for not being good-looking enough, PFFFT)

were all blended by Webb's arrangement into one fairly extraordinary track called 'Three Songs' which is not, I'm glad to say in this instance, sung by Webb himself, whose voice is an acquired taste. I'd post a video or sound file if I could find a postable or linkable one, but I can't; you'll just have to imagine it.

Jimmy Webb being the clever clogs that he is not just with music but also with words, even at the age of 24 when this album was released, the counterpoint extends if only metaphorically to the lyrics, which weave ironically around each other in their varying preoccupations with love ties and freedom.

So anyway, there I was a week or two ago, mucking around with iTunes as you do, and came up with this lovely Christmas song from the Indigo Girls. (Ignore the visuals.)



One of the reasons I liked this song so much was that it sounded very familiar. This familiarity nagged at me. And then last night as I was bringing in the washing before dark, wooden clothespeg in one hand and knickers in the other, it hit me with the proverbial blinding flash:



I think you could get an astonishing effect if you gave these two songs the Jimmy Webb treatment and glued them together. Not least because of the way the refrains both open up into an affirmation of possibility: of surviving some terrible loss.

Oh, that does it

When a friend asked me last week how I felt about the whole Julian Assange thing, the best I could come up with was 'conflicted'. Wikileaks good, treating women like sh*t bad. Worse, everything I'd seen or read suggested to me that a reckless disregard for consequences seemed to be one of the things that his political activism and his sexual behaviour had in common.

I spent an hour yesterday in the Rare Books room of the Adelaide University library (stay with me, this is germane) reading the journals of one of South Australia's unsung heroes, Robert Gouger. Gouger died at 44, after suffering what his contemporaries call 'a mental malady' for some years, with steady deterioration of his faculties. If, as they argue, it was a total mental breakdown brought on by the stresses of his life, then goodness knows the stresses of his life were more than enough to do it.

But as anyone who's read The Fortunes of Richard Mahony knows, when men in the 19th century went mad and then died, there was always a chance that the reason was undiagnosed, untreated tertiary syphilis, contracted years earlier. And when it comes to tertiary syphilis, going mad is one of the less unpleasant symptoms.

So if a man has unprotected sex with (at least) two different people inside a week, it seems to me reasonable to be concerned that he might be spreading something icky. When he dismisses that concern as just a couple of silly women 'getting into a tizzy' and then being stupid enough to be 'bamboozled' by police, it severely undermines whatever confidence I might previously have had in his judgment.

A meme with a difference

Even if it were a meme without a difference, I haven't seen or done one of these for ages and right at this very moment am grateful for the displacement activity. So:

'Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't'

1. Sat next to Hilary Mantel and opposite Dorothy Dunnett at dinner.

2. Rolled and wrecked a brand-new car and came within micro-metres of breaking my neck.

3. Lost my wallet at Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence and then didn't realise at first that someone had picked it up and handed it in because the announcement on the PA was of course in Italian and the pronunciation rendered my name unrecognisable, though much improved.

4. Collected eggs laid by semi-feral chooks in and under stacks of hay bales, leaky sheds full of shed stuff, old farm machinery and new farm machinery in 40+ degree heat.

5. Negotiated the tram-infested Royal Parade / Flemington Road / Elizabeth Street roundabout at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon in the middle of a thunderstorm, including lightning and downpour, with Elizabeth Jolley in the passenger seat.

6. Fell off a cantering horse onto some rocks. It hurt.

7. Sang in opera.

8. Got a divorce and an Honours degree in the same week.

9. Found the long-lost grave of my great-grandparents and great-aunt Jessie inside a ruined church in Aberfoyle, Scotland, though strictly speaking it was the intrepid Dan Smith who found it, not me.

10. Gave a talk about Australia to a classroom full of terrifyingly sophisticated multilingual Austrian 15-year-olds.

Joan Baez sings Woody Guthrie for our times

He just keeps on living his life

Eighteen years ago, when my parents were mere spring chickens of 65, the most recent in a long line of family moggies padded off to the big litter tray in the sky, and they swore off cats, they said, for good. 'No, no,' my father said when it was suggested they might get another. 'We're too old to start another cat.'

Shortly thereafter my sisters trundled back to my folks' place from the RSPCA with a large and rather scared grey tabby who'd been brought in by a man whose father had died and left his cat, then age 2, to be dealt with. 'Ah,' said my friend D when informed of this new development. 'An adult cat. With habits. And eccentricities.'

Tiger saw my mother through her last six years, and my dad through three bedridden months after he fell off the roof, then widowerhood, then remarriage and finally divorce before he and one of my sisters finally took her off on that last sad trip to the vet a couple of months ago.

I went to visit him today. 'Come and see the Christmas present I bought myself,' he said, and opened the door to his bedroom. A small, lithe kitty, cafe au lait, chocolate and white with bright blue eyes, leapt up off the bed and came to meet us, twining and purring.

Cecil is a rescue cat, who'd been brought in as a stray and had had a hard time before that, brought back to health and condition by the dedicated people at the Animal Welfare League. He's a snowshoe cat. Cecil is seven. My dad will be 84 in February.