two great pieces of news. one: my brother has a book out. it's a good year for my family and publishing! he was always the clever one, and an unrelenting winner of logical arguments. well done bro.
two: i have been shortlisted in this year's blake prize for poetry! that's the religious one that goes with the art prize. very exciting, even for a cynical pagan/atheist like myself. granted, the poem has god in it. but you'd kind of hope they all did.
plenty of time to contemplate proto-divinity from the porch swing since a truck drove through our internet cable and the island has been cut off from our post-divinity civilisation. i am blogging from the library again. it's not so bad to be away from all this online verbosity and able to knuckle down to focus on the work i'm doing... well, i'm trying. the break from the Piece of Cake is going well, but my brain thinks it is on holidays, encouraged by the amount of camping that has been going on. good food and starlight and reading and love are much more enjoyable than work, and taking their position in my priorities accordingly. since my tasmania residency got postponed until february i am in for a much cruisier couple of months than i had thought.
it helps that it smells like summer: humid, eucalyptic, the stink of emerging wattle (that's wattle applying for a professional development grant while it tries to get published). on the way out to the airport this arvo i almost hit a bearded dragon. generally you spot a few of these in town, but not til october. and out past trephina gorge where i spent the weekend there were clutches of very early cicada shells in the trees. it's been thirty-two, thirty-three degrees (and the pool's still closed for winter!). i'm oscillating between summertime laziness, with its early encroachment of beer o'clock, and apocalyptic climate change nightmares.
it's a pretty winning combination, given the b-grade quality of my nightmares. i quite like the idea of the roads in tourist season being carpeted with the spiny backs of confused lizards. it sounds like a lame horror movie ("drive carefully... they just woke up") but combine it with a nuclear waste dump/uranium mine sandwich and you might have a half decent reptile-mutation scenario.
instead of writing hilarious monster screenplays, i'm laying on my porch swing (did i mention i have a porch swing?) with an icy pole, wondering how anything gets done in the tropics. the NT's latest shambolic political crisis kind of proves that it doesn't, or if it does, the results don't get to us south of Up North. i'm interested to see what comes of the autonomous Yolgnu leadership and Maurie Ryan's new party. In light of the SIHIP bullshit coming from Canberra, autonomy seems overdue. And now the government is hurrying their red tape labyrinth along by cutting back on consultation! if you want a job done properly, don't point it anywhere near the NT.
my personal political engagement remains shallow. i wrote a letter to the paper about the proposed council by-laws which want to turn our council rangers into rent-a-cops with licenses for all kinds of civil liberty violation (no ID, homeless person? here's a $130 fine and we'll throw in a free ride to the watch house). we're just playing catch-up with the rest of the world i guess, but it is hardly early nineties new york around here.
country life is otherwise pleasingly unapocalyptic. the weekend before last my ladyfriend and I went to the old timer's fete in our new roles as members of the country womens' association. there was such a crowd outside, it was like a michael jackson concert. well, maybe john farnham. i did wish i had a badge to flash to get through the line; lucky the cakes did the trick. never have i seen so much homemade baking, and it all sold out in about half an hour. the mission to infiltrate the local CWA chapter is proceeding according to plan. mwahaha! oops, i mean good-oh.
two: i have been shortlisted in this year's blake prize for poetry! that's the religious one that goes with the art prize. very exciting, even for a cynical pagan/atheist like myself. granted, the poem has god in it. but you'd kind of hope they all did.
plenty of time to contemplate proto-divinity from the porch swing since a truck drove through our internet cable and the island has been cut off from our post-divinity civilisation. i am blogging from the library again. it's not so bad to be away from all this online verbosity and able to knuckle down to focus on the work i'm doing... well, i'm trying. the break from the Piece of Cake is going well, but my brain thinks it is on holidays, encouraged by the amount of camping that has been going on. good food and starlight and reading and love are much more enjoyable than work, and taking their position in my priorities accordingly. since my tasmania residency got postponed until february i am in for a much cruisier couple of months than i had thought.
it helps that it smells like summer: humid, eucalyptic, the stink of emerging wattle (that's wattle applying for a professional development grant while it tries to get published). on the way out to the airport this arvo i almost hit a bearded dragon. generally you spot a few of these in town, but not til october. and out past trephina gorge where i spent the weekend there were clutches of very early cicada shells in the trees. it's been thirty-two, thirty-three degrees (and the pool's still closed for winter!). i'm oscillating between summertime laziness, with its early encroachment of beer o'clock, and apocalyptic climate change nightmares.
it's a pretty winning combination, given the b-grade quality of my nightmares. i quite like the idea of the roads in tourist season being carpeted with the spiny backs of confused lizards. it sounds like a lame horror movie ("drive carefully... they just woke up") but combine it with a nuclear waste dump/uranium mine sandwich and you might have a half decent reptile-mutation scenario.
instead of writing hilarious monster screenplays, i'm laying on my porch swing (did i mention i have a porch swing?) with an icy pole, wondering how anything gets done in the tropics. the NT's latest shambolic political crisis kind of proves that it doesn't, or if it does, the results don't get to us south of Up North. i'm interested to see what comes of the autonomous Yolgnu leadership and Maurie Ryan's new party. In light of the SIHIP bullshit coming from Canberra, autonomy seems overdue. And now the government is hurrying their red tape labyrinth along by cutting back on consultation! if you want a job done properly, don't point it anywhere near the NT.
my personal political engagement remains shallow. i wrote a letter to the paper about the proposed council by-laws which want to turn our council rangers into rent-a-cops with licenses for all kinds of civil liberty violation (no ID, homeless person? here's a $130 fine and we'll throw in a free ride to the watch house). we're just playing catch-up with the rest of the world i guess, but it is hardly early nineties new york around here.
country life is otherwise pleasingly unapocalyptic. the weekend before last my ladyfriend and I went to the old timer's fete in our new roles as members of the country womens' association. there was such a crowd outside, it was like a michael jackson concert. well, maybe john farnham. i did wish i had a badge to flash to get through the line; lucky the cakes did the trick. never have i seen so much homemade baking, and it all sold out in about half an hour. the mission to infiltrate the local CWA chapter is proceeding according to plan. mwahaha! oops, i mean good-oh.
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5 Comments:
Your brother is a lawyer published by Cambridge Press! Incredibubble. And congratulations on the short-listing. How can you be a pagan and an athiest? Don't let the CWA ladies know, they are shape-shifters and fit very nicely into your monster screamplay.
Blimey. Don't think I'll be reviewing that one anytime soon, Jen. Enjoy that porch, it sounds all right to me. And go get that prize; or as Roy and HG would say, 'go you good thing'.
it's easy paul, you don't believe in god but you pray. and yes, i am waiting for the face-mask-tearing a la doctor who. they seem nice... TOO nice.
thanks g!
You're way too kind, sis! (And I don't remember winning half the arguments...) I'll have to check your blog more often, I can't keep track of all the prizes you're winning!
hi bro! note i stipulated *logical* arguments - i occasionally won the more irrational ones.
hope you had fun in Darkest Africa... nice photos.
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