Back in Oz

One year later. Now back for good (NOT mediocre!!) Au revoir, Canadia.

First few days




Now the World Cup is on




and am watching Damages, which will get its own post.

Reality TV by Susan Murray, Laurie Ouellette < Reviews | PopMatters

Reality TV by Susan Murray, Laurie Ouellette < Reviews PopMatters

Reality TV by Susan Murray, Laurie Ouellette < Reviews | PopMatters

Reality TV by Susan Murray, Laurie Ouellette < Reviews PopMatters

Australia: First Two Weeks

DAY ONE

Met some ladies on the flight from Canada and America. Slept. Made the mistake of watching He's Just Not That Into You, which spends 80 minutes telling us something and then 5 telling us the opposite. Arrived at Dave and Michelle's apartment in Ashfield - 'Monterey' is its name. Michelle had made muffins and we had tea. Felt spacey. Paul and Mum left to move house. The three of us went into Surry Hills to window shop while Michelle went to a dance class. Found six dollar greeting cards - does the originality of the design warrant this? Remember how expensive Sydney is. See hipsters everywhere, and some models. Boys in skinny jeans and thongs. Markets and we eat some gozleme. Then to a couple of pubs for some beer. We go home and I sleep for over 13 hours.

DAY TWO

Michelle is dancing in a Middle Eastern festival, so her mum comes over and we drive into Marrickville. Dave leaves to go to work and I enjoy meeting Michelle's Mum. We have a break after two of Michelle's dances and go to a cafe to have tea and cake. After her final dance we go to a Turkish restaurant and I have a delicious pide. The dancing is beautiful and makes me wish I could do it. I consider doing this instead of Indian dancing.

DAY THREE

Monday - I get keys cut. I go over to Roseville and meet Mum and accompany her to the grocery store. We then go to the amazing Jim Murphy cellars where I gaze at the splendid rows of Australian wine at reasonable prices. I buy Mum some chamgpagne for Mother's Day the following week. Am reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, a copy that I think might be mine that my brother now has. I also seem to have hay fever again and feel quite sick and sneezy. We have a lovely dinner of pumpkin and pesto pasta and wine, and listen to Gershwin, which makes me want to own Rhapsody in Blue. Mum and Paul are very sweet together and I'm really happy that she has found him.

DAY FOUR

TBC

Big movie post

No poems today, but three movies to comment on. Have been depressed lately and rather than keeping up with my impressive gym schedule, have been bingeing, purging, and watching movies. It's healthy.



Rachel Getting Married

After watching this I found The Silence of the Lambs on YouTube and watched the first half. Think I'll finish it tonight after reading the Bernie Madoff story in Vanity Fair. Finished my classes for this week. Well, I found Silence of the Lambs because it, like Rachel, is directed by Jonathan Demme.

1. Rosemarie DeWitt is gorgeous and note to self, FIND AND LOOK UPON that purple dress she's wearing when she tells them she's pregnant. She looks like a combination of Mary-Louise Parker and Elisabeth Shue (hey! both mentioned on this tiny blog already!)
2. Anne's rehab shag was hot. Wait, the man, not her hair, which some might call a shag.
3. Anne, who lost to Kate Winslet for Best Actress for this role, is a bratty self-obsessed rehabbed hellion who gets out of a clinic to come to her sister's wedding. The wedding is all kinds of gorgeous, but will hipsters start imitating it? Have they already? We learn that while 16 and stoned, she drove her baby brother into a lake and couldn't stop him from drowning. She can't forgive herself, so can't do anything else but get fucked up and make the family hate her more.
4. Bill Irwin, as the dad, was gorgeous. So heartbreaking.
5. Their mum was played by Debra Winger (terrifying! she and Anne have a bitchfight with real punches - it's horrible) and their stepmum by Nancy McNally from The West Wing - awesome!
6. It's shot in hand-held but not vertiginous, nauseating Robby Mueller hand-held, and scenes are 'captured' rather than set up for the shot.
7. warmth, family, love, pain, family, noise, love
8. The wedding cake! A masterpiece.

Synecdoche, NY

The DVD had a critics' round table with various bloggers: now two of them are on my Favourites: Filmfreak, with Walter Chaw, and Some Came Running, by ex-Premiere Glen Kenny. It was naff but also worth it for those two.

1. Did not know there was a place in New York state called Schenecdaty, but now I do.
2. Agreed with external reviewers that first half great, second half dr-a-a-a-ag-g-g-g-ed a bit.
3. Caden Cotard, Adele Lack. As she has for a while now, Catherine Keener scared the shit out of me. God, she's a bitch.
4. Basically, life's what happens when you're making other plans. Or something. Spend too much time trying to make authentic art and your life is over.
5. Why do we have to find men who don't know how to live romantic and charming and tragic? Aren't they just losers?

Slumdog Millionaire

Tired now so will return to this later.

Short Story

Here's the idea for a short story that I woke up with this morning:

A man (i think he will be known as 'the man' throughout the story) has a dog. Its breed, appearance, temperament, personality and other attirbutes will be described in great detail. The man sees another dog in a park one day, a dog of a different breed, appearance, temperament etc. He goes home and starts thinking about and wondering about the other dog. His dog responds to its owner's change by alternately moping, begging and acting out for attention. The man starts to wonder what having this other dog would be like. He watches his own dog become sick from the lack of love and attention, and wonders how much suffering it can take. He has bad dreams about being a bad dog owner and feels guilty, but he wakes up and keeps on neglecting his dog and thinking about the other dog. Eventually he breaks the dog's paw to see what it will do, then goes out and acquires the other dog somehow. (That dog? A dog of its type?) I'm not sure what will happen to the original dog or the man in the end.

The level of detail about the dog comes from DFW; the tone will come from Herman Hesse and James Joyce, and the structure will come from how much I want to play about with the short story form. Not sure yet.

movie

http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article/files/sarris_0.jpg

Moody malaise means movie madness.

1. Hamlet 2
Wanted to be lifted up by Steve Coogan. (Would also like to be laid down by Steve Coogan, if anyone knows him). Steve didn't disappoint himself, but the movie was embarrassingly awful, on the whole. Catherine Keener can shrink balls with the lines she has. I wonder what drama teachers think of this?

2. The Strangers
I had to watch most of it on fast forward, because I am a total wimp. The Exorcist is the only horror film I can watch, and then it's only because I've seen it so many times. On FF, it was okay. Except that I agree with...AO Scott? Andrew Sarris? Whoever it was who said that the director, Bryan Bertino, is all kinds of skilled, but has used his powers for evil instead of good. It's such a nasty film. Who gets 'inspired' by the Tate/LaBianca murders and actually follows through? I mean, it's not really a cultural touchpoint for us anymore. Not that it should be forgotten, because as seemingly random post-hippie acid-induced cult slayings go, it is the benchmark, but we've had Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Columbine, bodies in vats, feet in harbours, and Paul Bernardo since then. I know we're supposed to fear the idea that people can kill not because they're sick or disturbed, but because they can, or they're bored, because that's not something we can contain or treat. But has that been borne out yet? Do rapists and murderers really go that far out of ennui and apathy and a kind of vulgar curiosity? Is this a post-Prozac movie? People need to stalk and stab total strangers in order to feel a spark of life? Seeing the masked killers push and twist the butcher's knife into the couple's bodies was really disgusting, gross, and hideous. It did suggest a clinical interest in the proceedings that perhaps the characters were supposed to have, but the audience isn't. Apparently there's a sequel already in the works.

3. The Dark Knight
Heath Ledger's Brando-sounding Joker is another soulless killer, although he has a touch more thought going on in the form of a love of anarchy and chaos. Did Bale's Batman always talk like that? Thank God for Maggie Gyllenhaal and the absence of Katie Holmes. Gary Oldman looks like an...oldman. Didn't realise Anthony Michael Hall was in it until the credits. Oldman has a terrible, rambling, melodramatic speech at the end. Ill-advised use of a small child.

I'm going to have mashed potato for dinner tonight and watch Lars and the Real Girl. I am this close to getting a mannequin myself.

End of 2008

Here's one selection out of the many sweet, painful verses on this breakup blog I found:

Choosing your words
Is incredibly daunting
When you say what you mean
But they hear what they're wanting

The blogger's name is LonePen.

Terrible Fish has been suffering the loss of her own relationship over the last few months. As well, she endured some blog bullying. Or whatever it's called (bullying might be too strong a word and sound too self-pitying) when you don't toe the party line and get flaming, snarky comments from other self-righteous commenters.

The relationship suffering is worse, I think.

DFW

What a terrible bummer this is. Writers like David Foster Wallace do noble work on behalf of the rest of us. They walk the treacherous paths, encounter the demons, and suspect the truths that we less skilled humans are unable or unwilling to do.

That's one way of looking at it anyway.

Tonight's poem is T.S. Eliot, because I've just read a piece on concentration and distraction that quotes him. I worry about that sometimes. There are mornings when skimming and scanning becomes so compulsive that it makes my regular anxiety bubble up (like the frozen beer in our kitchen) and explode. My interest in an article wanes long before it should. One of the books on this phenomenon/moral panic that the author cites is Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'll get it so that I can prohibit my students from surfing in class.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot - extract
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy.
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

First,
eructation:a burp! Nice.
tumid: adjective 1 (of a part of the body) swollen or bulging. 2 (of language) pompous or bombastic.
Oxford Dictionary

I'm not even one of the people Eliot was talking about (although, I supposed I really am...) and I feel ashamed of my

Le weekend

Went to see the Whitecaps on the weekend. Right now I can hear the Guantanamo Bay interrogation video playing. What a bunch of c*nts. OR good investigators - time will tell.
I hate mascots.

The Best Awful

So since last time I've had something to really be depressed about, as they say. It's not funny then and it isn't now. Mr. Fish finally decided to answer one of my queries about things being wrong or not (since he was making it plainly plain that they were) and it seems his unhappiness has reached the stage where even he is going to do something about it. Fast-forward through a few days of swollen eyes, drunkenness, cigarettes, and awkward talks, and it's decided: we're going to spend some time apart, him going back off into the wild to recapture the feeling he had earlier this year before suburban ennui and midlife crisis derailed him; me going to my homeland for 3 weeks to see family.

I intended to write right away, demanding to know what was so awful about his life? OK, I'm not that comfortable with this suburban child-having, hardware and homeware-loving culture either at times, but as I said, I felt it would be ungracious to complain too much.

At first I was bereft, shower-sobbing, vodka-swilling, moaning bereft; and then I made a mental list of "People Who Are/Were Worse Off Than Me" in the relationship stakes, which I'll now reproduce here digitally:

1. Mary-Louise Parker.

Hottie longterm boyfriend hooked up with ingenue blonde while she was 7 months pregnant - who the FUCK bounces back from that? (Her, of course, and I am aware of the fact that she is one of Mr. Fish's favourites).

2. Mia Farrow

It is not possible for me to discover nude pictures of my adopted daughter at my partner's house; nor will the world's media gain possession of all the sordid details.

3. The woman whose husband took her to the Grand Canyon and pushed her off because it was cheaper than getting a divorce.

This is true; see 'Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon' by Michael Ghiglieri.

It must be time for some Anne Sexton, or maybe some Plath?

Killing The Love

by Anne Sexton

I am the love killer,

I am murdering the music we thought so special,

that blazed between us, over and over.

I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.

I am pushing knives through the hands

that created two into one.

Our hands do not bleed at this,

they lie still in their dishonor.

I am taking the boats of our beds

and swamping them, letting them cough on the sea

and choke on it and go down into nothing.

I am stuffing your mouth with your

promises and watching

you vomit them out upon my face.

The Camp we directed?

I have gassed the campers.

Now I am alone with the dead,

flying off bridges,

hurling myself like a beer can into the wastebasket.

I am flying like a single red rose,

leaving a jet streamof solitude

and yet I feel nothing,

though I fly and hurl, my insides are empty

and my face is as blank as a wall.

Shall I call the funeral director?

He could put our two bodies into one pink casket,

those bodies from before,

and someone might send flowers,

and someone might come to mourn

and it would be in the obits,

and people would know that something died,

is no more, speaks no more, won't even

drive a car again and all of that.

When a life is over,

the one you were living for,

where do you go?

Monday

Depression ain't no picnic. The production of this and other 'no shit!' insights keep me from falling into a stultifying stupor, although last night I stared at the ceiling unable to move in a mini-version of the catatonic paralysis states I used to get into (for fun, in a weird, anxiety-releasing, akin-to-cutting way) in my early 20s.

Depression isn't now nor has it ever been singular and exotic. Even your doctor will refer to 'garden variety' depression, a tag that I feel should only be applied to snails.

POEM: Sylvia Plath's Mirror.

Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful-

The eye of the little god, four cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Having now reached my 30s, I see that the terrible fish might be lurking. Fuck that fish! I'll eat it before it eats me. Not having prolific beauty to lose, I'm perhaps less scared of the old woman than Plath was.

The words 'in me she has drowned a young girl'...reaching this age allows me to feel the irony of them. Just as Plath realises that she has spent too long searching the mirror and condemning the person she finds there, who is now dead and gone, I realise this too.

So: you've drowned (i.e. killed) the innocent, non-self-loathing you that perhaps once existed. It's a tragedy because killing young girls is wrong, especially if there's no clear motive. It's also banal - but does that make it less of a tragedy? If evil can be banal, can tragedy also?