runcible spoon

Blogging, writing, stuff

Blogging (excluding those among us with enough readers to sustain clickable ads or donation schemes) is a largely unpaid activity.  One of my friends took me to task about this recently.  She said, ‘why waste your time churning out words for your blog when you could be writing and trying to get that published?  I wouldn’t give my work away for free.’

The thing is, as I see it, blogging’s never going to make sense at this level.  The fact that no one pays me to do this blog is pretty much irrelevant to why I do it.

Blogging seems irreducible to such things as money.  It’s more akin entering the surf on a hot day and feeling it sting your skin.  Certainly, a bath is gentler, warmer (and nice in a different way and at a different moment), but right then the slap of sharply cold brine is brilliant.

I like the slap of the sharply cold brine of this blog.

At the same time, I think Ayelet Waldman’s take on blogging versus writing is interesting.  Waldman writes for Salon, as well as being a novelist.  She ceased writing at Bad Mother, her blog, when she started at Salon.  In an early column over there, she mused on the distinction between writing opinion pieces and writing a blog. She raked over her decision to leave the blog for good.

As far as writing goes, these words are what stayed with me:

At the same time, I was becoming convinced that all this blogging was having a deleterious effect on my writing. It was more than the hours I was spending posting to my blog, reading my comments page, reading other blogs, and checking my site meter. As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful. The fictionalized scene I ended up with was often unrecognizable from the actual event that had been its progenitor.

But in the months I had the blog, I was spewing as fast as my family was experiencing. My initial idea, that the blog would act as a kind of digital notebook, was not panning out. Once the experience was turned into words, I found that it was frozen. The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening.

I’m not certain yet what my own position will prove to be.  Some days I think darkly about my blog and its relation to my broader writing aims and goals.  Some days I hate the surf and long to climb into a bath again.  I begin to doubt that the blog-as-digital-notebook thing is working for me either.  I start to think it’s more a case of ‘write a half-assed blog and maybe write some other stuff if I have the left –over energy … dammit, I don’t.’

But then I remember the days that are spent writing and writing can be lonely and loom ominously large.  I remember all the things I like about posting here.  I remember in particular the Internet’s great seduction: it offers up people who will connect with what you’re writing.  The importance of that fact alone can not be overstated.

That’s the point at which I realise what I should have said to my friend, it’s just that the words wilted and died on my tongue. 

Perhaps I should have told her this: 

When I go online to post, I poke my face excitedly through the wormholes of the internet and into other writers' blogs. They each have a scent, a flavour, a certain, indefinable quality that hits you just like walking into a friend's living room and seeing the traces of her personality sunk deep into the space, its decorations and all its nooks and crannies. From these repeated sojourns, I know the faces of certain writers.  I marvel at the effortless energy others seem to invest their blog-space with.  I know the cupcake predilections and favourite flowers of others still.  Certain writers make me want to move to Melbourne ... and not just so I can dress my cat in clothes. Promise.

'06? I'm liking it already

Images can be generated here. 

I know, I know, it's sototallylike last year. Still, I reckon it's an oldie but a goodie - I stole it from the marvellous sorrow at sills bend.

Happy New Year all. Lots of fuzzy, white peaches and unctuously sweet nectarines and mangoes to you Southern Hemisphere bods and, I don't know, kick-ass snowmen and hot chocolate to you winter-bound people :)

What? No chopped liver?

It's wrong, I'm sure, to get offended by the results of an instant internet quiz.

But then again, it did say I was 'ordinary' and that people 'think they've had enough of [me].'

*sniff!*

You Are Chinese Food

Exotic yet ordinary. People think they've had enough of you, but they're back for more in an hour.

What Kind of Food Are You?

But really, the scarier thing is that a Chinese food designation is actually rather spot-on for me. Mmm ... roll on lazy January yum chas ...

Plush pigs and post-trip ennui

I was whining this afternoon about how little I’d managed to write of late. ‘It’s full-time work,’ I explained. ‘It’s moving house …’

‘Moving house? Surely you’re over that by now!’ came the reply.

But the thing is, I’m not. So not over it.

A definitive part of the whole RTW experience is said to be the moment when you confront all the hideous stuff you managed without for an entire year. I’ve read stories on other people’s travelogues of their opening up the garage door or the mesh grille of their storage space only to shut it again – quickly, and with a sense of horror. They say they were thinking all the while, What is this stuff? Why did I buy it? How the hell can I get rid of it?

In our case, this definitive moment has been somewhat delayed. We’ve only just ‘merged’ with our belongings again, having now moved out from Andrew’s parents’ place and back into our own apartment.

The process has been excruciating. Moving is a nightmare, without a doubt. But it’s doubly painful when you’re looking at your belongings with a kind of estranged disregard. Your stuff seems clunky and weighty and massive. You wonder how it is  you thought all these things were necessary for living.

I have now discovered that prior to going away I amassed kitchen mixing bowls like they were going out of fashion. I made an artform out of aquiring graters and plastic chopping boards.

Strange themes emerge in your possessions when you see them afresh. I've suddenly realised that I own a plague of little Japanese ceramic dishes. Some are shaped like flowers, some are white, some are coloured, some are patterned. They’re all sweet and delicate and cute and BLEH – what on earth was I thinking? How many of these things did I imagine I could use? I can only conclude that one shop in Surry Hills, Mrs Red & Sons, must have taken half my pay packet for about two years running. And to think, all I have to show for it is a gazillion little bowls that can’t hold much more than a stick of incense or a clove of garlic.

One of my dear friends got married recently, and I will to admit to having a dark thought at the wedding. I took one look at the table piled high with gifts and I thought to myself, No, no, no! Imagine that much paraphenalia flooding into your home. The thought – given our present predicament – was quite unbearable.

Still, maybe I'm just jaded.  When my mother remarried in 1985, I was six years old. Even more than my hot-pink tafetta flower girl's outfit (accessorised with lacey white bobby socks and shiny patent leather shoes - oh 80s glam!), I loved my mother and step-father's collection of gifts.  I remember sitting in the kitchen watching them being unwrapped: joy of joys, a toaster! Another toaster! A set of placemats with pastel-painted orchids on them! A rack for cutlery!

I truly thought those presents were the bomb - especially the cutlery set. I never tired of the plastic handles with the hole punched through them to allow the pieces to hang on their little display rack. This marvel was surpassed only when my brother was born a year later, and gifts were duly brought to the hospital. Someone - in fact, a confirmed-batchelor, playboy barrister - brought along a giant pink plush pig. It was a sow, to be precise. A sow with eight small, pink, plush piglets hanging from its nipples courtesy of the magic of velcro.

Oh you piggy nipples! Rip! R-i-i-p! R-iii-iiiii-p! I never tired of detaching and re-attching those stuffed baby pigs.

Attack of the jitters

When I was in pre-school, I was extremely upset not to get the part of Mary in the end-of-year Christmas play. I understood that that was the plum job, but it went to some other, more photogenic little girl. 

One other girl and I were cast as angels, instead. We wore wings and white sheets as costumes, and our role was to sweep up the shreds of hay that had escaped from Baby Jesus’ manger. Just as we were meant to go out on stage, the other little angel threw up on to the kindergarten floor. I had to go out alone and perform the sweeping duties.

The past six weeks have been a little like that other kid’s sudden attack of nerves. At first, I wasn’t blogging because time simply got away from me, but soon the very fact that I hadn’t blogged was causing me to feel acutely self-conscious about the whole enterprise.

The week before Christmas 2005 seems as good a time as any to put the nerves aside and get back to sweeping onstage, metaphorically speaking.

 

Like eating custard in a public toilet

We were late back last night, and scored a lift home from the station as a result. When the car rounded a sudden bend, I had the strangest sensation. It was as though I could smell durian. There was something coolly pungent about the scent.  Fruity, but with a whiff of the obscene.

We were in the depths of Sydney's anglified suburbia. Moreover, we were inside a car.  I put it down as just another one of the vivid travel longings I'd been experiencing of late. I'll see a battered metal sign, and think of Delhi, or watch the way shadows fall across wet footpath and think of Bangkok. Doughnuts are Tokyo, rye bread is Helsinki, and palm heart salad is London.

We got home and walked into the kitchen. There was the strongest smell of gas in there. I panicked, and checked the stovetop. The burners were off, but the smell remained. It was elusive, but carried with it a certain sweet hint of death.

Odd, I thought. Maybe that scent I could smell in the car was actually gas? The two were awfully alike: cool and lingering and pervasive.

We began to eat. Esther, Andrew's mother, walked in and casually announced that she and Robert had been eating durian before we got home. The durian had cost $2 a kilo at Woolworths - it was overripe, but cheap. Esther's own mother, perhaps homesick for Malaysia, had bought two and a half kilos.

In unison, Andrew and I exploded: 'I could smell it in the car!'

'Then I thought there was a gas leak in the kitchen,' Andrew continued. I was just elated to think I wasn't crazy.

Some have described this gustatory experience akin to 'eating custard in a public lavatory,' while 'smells like hell, tastes like heaven,' is another popular saying. I don't know that the scent is 'hellish' or foul per se - it's just indefinable, and seems to carry more than a hint of all the things that scream to humans, 'eating this is not a good idea.'

After dinner, the remainder of the durian was produced. It was nestled in a clear platic take-away box. The pale, fleshy segments looked like hunks of cheese, but the smell was something else. It was so heavy, so loaded: sweet in the way shit and rot and things that have decayed or turned are sweet. Sweet-bad. Sweet in a way where the smell worms inside your brain and sinks into your pores and membranes.

Yet there was a pungent, tangy savoury note as well. A sharp cheddar. Or onions. Or garlic. But bitter. Something biting into that sweetly rotting flesh. Hard like the sting from a slap.

Esther muttered darkly that the fruit did not taste as good to her as when eaten by the roadside in Malaysia or in Singapore. Something was lacking.

I ate a little, but my stomach didn't want to know. It was 11 at night, I'd just eaten a fish dish and I was desperately tired; my body seemed completely uninterested in inclining itself toward this fruit. My brain and tastebuds were in revolt. They could not agree on what this thing might be. Was it pleasantly sweet, or was it just a bad idea?

The kitchen smelt exactly like Tops Supermarket in BKK. It was like being back there. Esther put on a fan to try to disperse the scent. It was hanging thickly over the table, saturating our clothes and skin.

When I went back down this morning, the smell was still there.

Just don't

52 projects has a list so pertinent, it scares me.

It's a not-to-do list:

Do not check your emails ...
Do not go to nytimes.com ...
Do not decide to make yourself an elaborate lunch ...
Do not start going through all the papers on your desk ...
Do not start perusing your own bookshelves ....
Do not start going through your photos ...
Do not start thinking about how your project is lame ...
Do not decide to start a screenplay (unless, of course, that is your project) ...
Do not get up and keep getting yourself a glass of water ...

And, natch:

Do not post to your blog.

Born blonde

There's something amusing about standing at traffic lights waiting to cross only to look over and see that the woman next to you - yep, that one, with the french-fry coloured hair - is carring an absolutely enormous shopping bag that's filled with box after box of hair dye called Born Blonde.

Kinda shatters the illusion somehow.

Hello Kitty sky fantasy

As brought to my attention by my friend Liz, I now present to you: Hello Kitty Air.

Actually, it's EVA Air, but they're launching an Airbus that's 'painted nose-to-tail with super-sized characters from the charming world of Hello Kitty. '

On the right side of the aircraft, identified with “Hello Kitty EVA Air,” Kitty and her friends greet passengers with welcoming smiles.   Daniel Star, his aviator glasses perched on his forehead, stands nearest the cockpit with Kitty by his side.  Tim and Tammy, the mischievous monkeys, sit over the wing.  Joy, the blue mouse, is poised on the engine.  And Mimmy White, Kitty’s sister, joins parents Mary and George White, near the back of the aircraft.  On the left of the aircraft under “EVA Air Hello Kitty,” Kitty stands nearest the cockpit beside her friend Kathy, the white rabbit.   Rory, the yellow squirrel, frolics on the engine.  Tim and Tammy and Kitty’s family are featured in the same positions as on the other side of the aircraft.

Is it possible that the inside of the plane is even more disturbing? What are 'Hello Kitty meals'?

EVA repeated the livery theme inside the cabin by creating a Hello Kitty fantasy with sweet Hello Kitty paintings on the walls, and by outfitting flight attendants with Hello Kitty ribbons for their hair and Hello Kitty aprons.  Passengers booked on EVA’s Hello Kitty Jet will get pink Hello Kitty boarding passes and luggage tags.  Onboard, they will enjoy a series of inflight Hello Kitty service accessories, Hello Kitty meals, and have access to exclusive EVA Air Hello Kitty duty-free shopping.

You know what this means, though ... I have to fly in this Airbus. I just have to.

Check out the kitty-flavour fantasy for yourself.

What's new, pussycat?

I was fortunate enough to get the gig as an editor of the forthcoming UTS Writers' Anthology, so it's definitely shaping up to be a busy summer.

The 2006 edition will be launched at the Sydney Writers' Festival in May next year, which is very exciting. It's daunting, however, to think that in such a brief timeframe a bunch of unsorted manuscripts will have to be transformed into a book.

The anthology - which takes a different title each year - is a published collection of prose and poetry by students in the writing programme at Sydney's University of Technology (UTS).

The 2005 edition was called Nine Tenths Below, a reference to the nine-tenths of any story which remain submerged below the obvious surface of the words. It's available from the venerable Gleebooks and can be shipped worldwide.

The 2004 edition, Loose Lips, and 2003's Taste are also still available.