...and some of its principles:

1. There are indeed different kinds or types. Feminism is not homogenous; there's no uniform, no secret handshake, no one creed. It's not for me to tell you what kind of feminist you are, because...

2. Feminism is inclusive. A lot of things are feminist issues, even though they might not seem like it at first. Ultimately to me feminism is about redressing inequality and imbalances of power. Therefore, rape is a feminist issue. Racism is a feminist issue. Disableism is a feminist issue. Anything involving disempowerment and disenfranchisement is a feminist issue.

3. Feminism is not a competitive sport. Having recently found that a few of my real-life friends share a similar kind of feminism with me, as in we read the same blogs and share similar viewpoints, another friend has started saying, “You're better at being a feminist than I am.” Which, of course, I tell her just isn't true, because that's not how it works. This isn't a game at beat anyone at. It's about being who you are and about what's important to you. The positive aspect of this, though, is that my friend can say, “Check out Exhibit A. Do you find it offensive?” And I can say, “Not really, but I have issues with Exhibit B, for reasons X, Y and Z,” and she might reply, “Actually with regards to Y I think you have read too much into it.” Bottom line: alternative viewpoints are good.

4. It's okay to be angry. I'm always irritated when feminist writings are dismissed as angry screeds, or feminist themselves as angry man-haters. What is wrong with anger, anyway? Especially anger that is not misplaced, and is expressed in constructive, non-violent ways? Anger means you're passionate and involved, and you really care. I think the dislike of 'angry feminism' stems from some stereotype about women being laaaadies who must keep their emotions in check and not bother the men with their tears and feelings. Fuck that, obviously.

5. Everyone should be a feminist! But if you're not yet ready to call yourself one I'm not going to force you into it.

6. No hating on a sister. I refuse to give any credence to the stereotype that women cannot get along and sooner or later female relationships turn into bitchy catfights. It's simply not true. What is true is that we won't get anything done if we sit around distrusting each other and calling each other sluts. I might not agree with everything a woman says or does, but I don't begrudge her the right to say or do it, and you'll never catch me hating on Keira Knightley because she's so thin and got to kiss Johnny Depp.

Dear Matthew Newton,

I hear on the news that you trashed a hotel room. Now, look, either you commit to this whole bad boy thing properly, or maybe you should just grow up, hmm? This is probably not the best way to get your parents to notice you. Trust me, I'm a middle child.

Concernedly yours,
saffronlie

Dudes! I'm writing my Christmas cards today (check it, I'm so organised), but if you didn't leave your address on my earlier Christmas card post there's still time! Reply here or there, and comments are screened.

It's a hot one, but I can smell someone in the building cooking onions.

The end.

I recently decided that it was all very well whinging about how I didn’t read much for pleasure any more because I was busy and it wasn’t pleasurable and was like work and I’m in this years-long reading funk and the wine has no taste any more and blah, blah, blah, but if I seriously missed reading so much then why didn’t I just pick up a book and start reading?

So I did. The Picture of Dorian Gray was actually the second successful mission of this operation. The first was Emotionally Weird, by Kate Atkinson. (I am sticking with rereading old favourites until I am ready to attempt new books.) Words cannot describe how much I love this damn book. It is a hilarious campus novel, set at the University of Dundee in 1972, but interwoven with the present and the past. It is the story of Effie and her mother who is not her mother, the strange history of their family, and the eccentric staff and students of the university’s English department, with the Vietnam War and electricity strikes creeping in at the edges. It is almost impossible to describe the way the narratives are linked, but it’s very meta. Ostensibly Effie and her mother are telling each other their stories, but Effie’s has many twists and turns and includes the detective novel she is writing for her Creative Writing course. You just have to read it to appreciate it.

You all already know how I feel about The Picture of Dorian Gray. I said in an email to idle persiflage that every time I read the novel I find something different in it, and so I did this time around. To me it seemed a very beautiful, simple story about redemption, the capacity of the human soul to do evil, the evils of undue influence, and how evil can wear a pretty face. For all that, I am not convinced that Dorian Gray was truly evil, although perhaps that depends on exactly what his sins were, as most of them are not described in anything but ambiguous detail. Murder is bad enough, of course, but his portrait was ravaged long before he first committed murder, and I would love to know what he did to cause that. But I also understand that Wilde purposely left Dorian’s sins ambiguous so that we could read into them what seems most sinful to us.

Interview with the Vampire is another novel that had a profound effect on me in my teen years; however, in reading it this time, I did not find much that seemed new. It was more like catching up with an old friend, and being comforted by their not being changed. That said, it was easy to fall in love again with Louis and his searching soul, to be shocked anew by Lestat’s rage, and intrigued again by the ethereal, placid beauty of Armand. All these immortals, locked together in hatred, and of course in love.

You must remember that Anne Rice turned vampire stories around, long before it was fashionable for vampires to hate themselves. She was the one to ask, what if vampires are not actually evil? What if a vampire loathed his existence, how would he endure? Louis’ story of endurance and detachment and defeat is still heartbreaking. Oh, the angst! Only in Rice’s hands it is skilful and believable, and never maudlin. I never cared for vampires until I read this, and I still don’t really care for them if they are not Anne Rice’s vampires, nuanced and searching, just like ordinary humans only they live forever. I find the current crop of vampire/human romances basically the most boring thing on earth. Give me the ‘happily ever after’ instead, when immortality proves a bore, when the lovers end up loathing each other, when times change and the world changes but personalities don’t. Falling in love is easy; staying together forever is not.

What will I read next? It's a mystery!

Okay, so I finished exams today and have a small window in which to breathe before moving on to the 10,000 next things. And this window is to say: CHRISTMAS CARDS! If you would like to receive a Christmas card full of glittery joy from me, please leave your address in a comment. Comments are screened so only I will see your address.

Goodness, it's far too hot for 11pm. *wipes fevered brow*

Yesterday The Sydney Morning Herald broke a story about sexual assaults at colleges at the University of Sydney. The article is not an enjoyable read; it made me feel angry and helpless, but relieved that at least women had come forward and the issue had come to light. The bigger story turned out to be the existence of pro-rape Facebook page. This is the story that has the coverage, this is the one my friends passed around in outrage. However I feel that to focus on the Facebook page (which no longer exists) is to obscure the real issue. The sentiment apparently expressed by the Facebook group is a symptom of the culture of rape and sexual assault that exists on campus and in the men's colleges. At a guess, I'd say the Facebook page is getting the attention because it is tangible. People saw it. It's much better evidence than the anonymous voices of victims of assault and rape, who cannot name themselves for fear of the shame that society likes to heap upon survivors. The words of would-be rapists would seem to carry more currency than those of rape victims.

The fallout has been wide. There are follow-up articles. Many more people have spoken up to share their story and condemn the behaviours involved. But as a student of the university, I am not satisfied with the university's response. The warden of St Paul's College has made statements to the effect that he didn't know what was going on, didn't know about the Facebook page, and will discipline the students involved if possible. That's not enough. There needs to be a concerted effort to change the attitudes of men who see women as holes to be filled with sperm. Maybe that means breaking up the College altogether -- who knows? But there needs to be some serious thought given to actual problem-solving, and not just putting a band-aid over it because they got caught by the media. Similarly, while the Vice-Chancellor sent a thoughtful statement to students, staff, and the media, it does not promise change, simply regret. Regrets are easy, and the status quo is easy. This problem requires change, and I'd like to think that the University of Sydney, considered a frontrunner when it comes to academic excellence, will lead the way here, too.

I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray when I was sixteen. It had a profound effect on me. The central concept was like nothing I had read before, the characters carefully etched, the language intensely beautiful. It was the beginning of my love affair with Oscar Wilde and his works, which reached its grandest highs (and lows) when I wrote my Honours thesis on the novel. I hadn't read it since that year, but I've wanted to. With the new movie coming out, I picked it up.

'The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses,' it begins, and I am transported at once into this wonderful portrait of late-Victorian decadence. There is Basil, the earnest painter, and Lord Henry, his flippant friend. And then the beautiful Dorian Gray enters, fresh and unspoiled. I want to warn him of what lies ahead. Don't listen to Henry, Dorian. Don't make that wish. Things go badly for you and then in the future your story is torn to shreds by people seeking their own reflection in the text. They want to find gross indecency, obscenity, subtextual sodomy, evidence of authorial intent and character. They write articles and books and theses about it. They begrudge you your beauty and you suffer for what the gods have given you.

The novel is the perfect combination of the biting wit and satire of Wilde's plays, and the mournful lyricism of his fairy tales. I have always felt that one of Wilde's unexpected and greatest strengths is his ability to break your heart with a sentence of unparalleled beauty, and then shatter the illusion instantly by following it with a witty sentence of cutting flippancy. Perhaps these lines from "The Happy Prince" best illustrate what I mean:

At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost.

Dorian Gray is awash with Wildeanisms, including some of his most famous. I grow more and more impatient with Lord Henry's constant quips, especially the most sexist ones. It's hard not to feel like it's just Wilde showing off, and I want to grab him or Lord Henry and ask, would it kill you to say something true? All this wordplay is ultimately meaningless, just another part of the Wildean facade. What a facade that is, what an image, what a vast web of Wildeana. What is it about Oscar Wilde that has everyone so eager to quote from his works and attribute by name only, as if all art reveals only the artist's true thoughts? Some quotes are so woefully overused, and keep being inserted into adaptations of texts as if it's not a Wilde work without trotting out that old standby about stars and gutters. Although Wilde does plagiarise himself dreadfully. And then there are the misquotes and misattributions, and the sport of making up Oscar Wilde quotes. One of the games I used to play with my drama students was to read a quote and ask "Oscar Or Not?" It's harder than you think.

I can't help but feel that Wilde would be pleased with his legacy, for all that. Image was everything to him; those who look beneath the surface do so at their peril. He cultivated his image so carefully. What does it matter if he didn't say it? He will. He might have, if he'd thought of it. And to say something witty, well, that is one thing, but to convince everyone that you had said it, is quite another. I sometimes want to think that the "real" Oscar Wilde is the one who writes of selfish giants and weeping statues, heartbreaking lines about what it is to be human and the ways in which we suffer, who is concerned above all with love. Of course it doesn't really matter which is real; the Oscar Wilde I love is the one I need. He wrote the Yellow Book of my youth and changed everything.

And now, a Sketch Show Oscar Wilde sketch:

I saw STC's production of A Streetcat Named Desire on the weekend, and I really wanted to gush about how brilliant it was, but it wasn't. It was very good, but it wasn't completely AMAZING. Possibly I expected too much. It's probable that the fault is all mine -- somewhere in the second act I realised that I just didn't care too much what happened to the characters. Meanwhile, the woman sitting next to me was crying.

Cate Blanchett was wonderful as Blanche, of course. I was surprised by the depth of her voice, although I shouldn't have been; I've long admired the complexity of her voice on film. But it was a shock when compared with her slim figure and the daintiness of Blanche's costumes. I think her voice was too strong for Blanche, and not fragile enough, although that fragility came out in other aspects of Cate's performance. I was also pleasantly surprised by Joel Edgerton as Stan. His accent was flawless and his characterisation powerful.

I also had yet another experience in which everyone in the audience seemed to find much more humour in the show than I did. It was surprisingly, genuinely funny at times, but often people were laughing at lines that to me seemed genuinely tragic, and if funny in any way, it was unintentional humour or the humour that comes out of awkwardness, i.e. being unsure of how else to respond.

I think the fault, if not with me, is partly in the script, which felt a little outdated, and in the traditional staging. For all the talk in the program about the incidental music and lighting design, artistically the production values come nowhere near those of When the Rain Stops Falling, which remains my favourite piece of theatre out of the very few that I have seen this year. That's the play that I keep thinking about, not Streetcar, which just could not match its lyrical intensity. It's becoming apparent that I'm into high emotion but without melodrama.

In looking at STC’s 2010 season it seems I might be in for more of the same. There are lots of revivals and classics, and the only production I can get really excited about is Spring Awakening. There's plenty that I will be interested in seeing, but I feel like there should be more Australian plays in the lineup, especially more new Australian plays.

Standing ovation check: About a third to half the audience stood during the bows. I did not. Cate very cutely kept forgetting the order and running offstage early and having to come back on and bow again.

In film news, I saw Whip It and absolutely loved it. It is a very smart, funny, feminist film. It’s about female roller derby, and if you’ve never heard of that, don’t worry. I’d heard of it, but didn’t know how it was played – for some reason assuming it involved a ball and/or hockey sticks – but the movie clears things up early on. It’s ridiculous how refreshing it felt to see a movie involving women being awesome and kicking butt without resorting to stupid stereotypes. These women talk to each other! About things that aren’t men! It’s awesome! The requisite love interest storyline failed to hold my interest so much so that it almost seemed like a parody of other similar tacked-on romance subplots. And the best surprise was Alia Shawkat, playing the oddly-named Pash, best friend of Ellen Page’s character. Pash’s name is nowhere explained, but I’m assuming it doesn’t have anything to do with the Australian slang term for KISSING.

This is not the sort of thing I usually write about, and I've been debating making this post for a few days, hence its lack of timeliness.

Remember the time that Hey Hey It’s Saturday, a show that I watched when I was twelve because there was a disproportionately high chance of Hanson making an appearance, had a reunion special and aired a skit involving blackface?

And Harry Connick jr. was a guest judge and was rightly appalled?

And so the host and everyone else involved in the show was embarrassed that an American had caught them doing something particularly dumb.

And it’s possible that some international media seized upon this incident as proof of what they might always have secretly believed, that down under we really are just a bunch of backward ex-convicts.

And in the Australian media, debate and discussion focused on whether Australia as a whole was racist, and is it okay to do blackface if we don’t have a history of minstrel shows or black slavery, and how can we offend American people if we are just minding our own business on national television?

Remember that?

Here is what I know:

1. I haven’t watched the Hey Hey specials and probably never will, should there be any more. I didn’t think anyone was watching Hey Hey, but apparently the ratings have proved otherwise.

2. Dressing up as a black person is never funny. Dressing up as any race for the purpose of lampooning them is not funny. You do not have to be a doctor, Indian, Daryl Somers, or a television producer in order to realise this.

3. The lack of a pronounced minstrel tradition in Australia does not invalidate point #2.

4. Australia does, in fact, have a significant history of enslaving non-whites. But many Australians do not realise this because...

5. Australia has significant racial issues, and not just because of a bit of poor-taste ‘comedy’ on television.

Instead of talking so much about this irrelevant TV show and how it offended the big-shot American guest star, we should be talking about the sorry state of race relations in this country. The fact that so many people would have had prior knowledge of this sketch and still let it go on is surely living proof that a large portion of the population has absolutely no clue about what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s not "larrikin" spirit or "all in good fun". It’s symptomatic of a much deeper problem within our society that goes far beyond cameras and makeup.

So the world’s gone mad and decided that apparently rape isn’t really rape, and even if it is, it doesn’t count if the rapist happens to be some kind of public figure. A few weeks ago when Kyle Sandilands was in trouble for one particular transgression out of his daily acts of vileness, he gave us this jaw-dropping quote, “Unfortunately, rape happens in society.” This quote is, to me, symptomatic of a widespread misunderstanding of rape, as well as a desire to place responsibility anywhere but with the rapist.

Rape does not just happen. Rape is a crime, perpetrated by rapists, who are criminals because they have broken the law and had sexual relations without the consent of their victim. The victim is not to blame in any way. It does not matter what the victim was wearing, whether they’ve had sex with the rapist in the past, whether they said yes first and then changed their mind. It even doesn’t matter if the victim doesn’t care about the criminal proceedings and would rather it didn’t go ahead. If consent was not obtained, or the victim said no, and the other person continued, then it’s rape.

And it doesn’t matter who the rapist is, they’re still a rapist. You don’t get a free pass because you directed a movie. What the hell is wrong with people?

In less serious matters, someone at Kraft foods must be feeling very smug over all the attention gained for the Vegemite brand in recent months. They created “Vegemite, but different” (Vegemite combined with cream cheese, which sounds vomitous to me but is apparently popular or something) and held a lengthy contest to choose a name from suggestions from the general public, as they did for naming the product the first time around. However, people are more stupid these days than they were back then, and the winning name was iSnack 2.0. Among the many things wrong with this name is the fact that there was no iSnack 1.0, but the most irritating thing is that Kraft couldn’t even stand by their own ridiculosity. After a few days of public outrage over the epic Vegemitefail, they recanted and said they would look for a new name. Something smells like a yeasty, cheesy publicity stunt. It’s possible that the entire thing, including inventing a new product, was just a tactic to stir patriotic love for our beloved Aussie yeast spread, so that we would forget how it’s now owned by an American conglomerate of stupid. Why not combine both brandnames under the Kraft stable and call it VegePhilly or whatever? I mean, I don’t even care, but iSnack 2.0 was at least fun to laugh at, but now we have to be all serious and take it back. The message here is not that Kraft/Vegemite listens to its consumers, but that they are either wildly out of touch, or poorly skilled at PR manipulation. I don’t know which scenario is worse.

The other things I was going to complain about seem even more trivial in comparison to the above (eg. what is up with Josh Thomas' accent?), so I’ll hold my tongue. FOR NOW.

Last night a rainstorm, today a duststorm. I CAN'T BREATHE. (And yet student politics stops for no freak weather effects, and the campus is full of kids harassing me to vote for their stupid campaigns when I'm just trying to get to the chemist because today of all days is the one where I ran out of antihistamine tablets. It's real cute that they still think they can change the world, but it's also incredibly annoying. I have no time for your undergrad political shenanigans!)

I have to stop getting my online news from news.com.au. Not only are News Ltd's papers the home of really terrible reporting, but every day the front page is filled with ridiculous, salacious stories, many of them about women but written so as to objectify women and question sexual freedoms and body image. I mean, there are plenty of stupid stories about all kinds of topics, but it's the trashy ones that I dislike having shoved in my face and presented as 'news'. Today alone we have:

‘Plus size role models “not good for our health”: fat fad fury’. This is an opinion piece whose actual headline reads ‘Plus-size models doing big girls no favours’. The piece itself says, “few women over a size 14 are in a healthy weight range”, and the author thinks that larger women shouldn’t feel that it’s okay to be fat. The editors are clearly expecting a giant shitstorm on this one, as they've given it pride of place on the front page with some pictures of pretty 'plus-size' women. I won't be played that way, News Ltd! You'll get no outraged comment on your site from me, and no link, either. Controversy for controversy's sake is boring. Speaking of which...

‘Star in new sex toy controversy’. This is about a football star (I think), and the teaser reads, “AFL bad boy Brendan Fevola has been caught again making gestures with a giant sex toy.” Oh, what a naughty, bad boy! I refused to actually read this story and don't really care what he did, I just resent the 'lads will be lads' tone of the teaser. If the story was about a woman she'd be cast as a sexual deviant.

Meanwhile, ‘Mum “sacrificed kids to get out of debt”’. What sounds like a heartbreaking story about a woman on the edge is illustrated on the front page by a file photo of canelloni, in a rather bizarre move. Nothing says ‘dark heart of domesticity’ like a plate of pasta, am I right, sub-editors?

‘Secret’s out: why women really have sex’. I’m guessing the fairly obvious answer is because they want to, but the Telegraph has other ideas and gives currency to a really stupid-sounding book that claims women have many motives for having sex. Oh, those evil, conflicted women. Being fat and poisoning their kids and having sex without a good reason. I don't know what the world is coming to.

No more, news.com.au. NO MORE.

At dinner the other night I tried to tell a story about an article I had been reading. The article, without going into too much detail, is a Freudian reading of a children's film. It's funny and well-argued, but the point of my story was the initial absurdist nature of the topic. But I chose my audience incorrectly, for the first comment was, "Why would you analyse a children's film?"

What kind of a question is that? Why not analyse a film? I mean, what does this person think I do all day? I analyse things for work, and as I don’t believe in privileging one genre or type of media over another, then analysing a film is just the same as analysing a poem or a novel, whether contemporary or not. To me, from questioning the validity of reading a children's film it is a few short steps to questioning why we should analyse contemporary literature, or any literature, let alone weird poems written thousands of years ago, and then, oh look, my career choice is devoid of meaning and funding to the arts is cut by another few percentage points because some economist who plays with fake numbers all day doesn't see its value.

I know when my friends and family talk like that they don't see themselves as devaluing my profession, I'm the one who is making the connection, but I think that if they did stop to think about it, they would come to the same conclusion. Deep down, most of the people I love don't understand what I do and don’t respect my profession, and that both scares and irritates me. Anyone who has to ask, "Why analyse a film?" will never think critically about an advertisement or note the dangerous subtext of a book. They'll accept things at face value and never question anything. That's fine, they don't have to if they'd rather not, but they shouldn't roll their eyes at me for doing it. The fact is, everything is a text, and there are several ways of reading a text. If you don't ever look beyond the obvious, if you don't ever think about what you're reading or seeing or hearing, then, well, what is the point? Life is too short to consume all the crap that the mass media throws at us daily and not question it in some way, or at least apply some sort of value judgement.

The next topic of conversation proved this point. For some reason, someone brought up Twilight, and more than one person told me I was reading too much into the book by declaiming the unhealthiness of the central relationship, and the book's anti-feminist sentiment. I am so sick of giving that speech, by the way. For the fiftieth time: Twilight is a poorly written novel about two deeply uninteresting people who fall in love the way only tiresome teenagers can, and one of whom happens to be a vampire, not that that has any real bearing on the plot whatsoever. It depicts codependence and stalking as the height of romance to vulnerable teen girls who don't know any better, and to a lot of older women who should. The female is constantly told to curb her sexual desire, and warned by the male that if she doesn't stop "tempting" him then he won't be held responsible for his own actions. And sure, I’ll stop talking about Twilight – when everyone else stops talking about it.

If I took Twlight at face value, as a harmless love story, say, then that would be my prerogative but I would also be wilfully turning a blind eye to a dangerous sentiment. Make no mistake: there are messages, meanings, and multi-textual readings to everything.

I know it gets same-old same-old to hear me declaim some of my principles sometimes, but there are some things on which I will not compromise. Yes, not everything needs analysing, and I do find it difficult to switch off and just enjoy a text these days, but so what? If you think that films, TV, and books don't have any effect on people's thoughts and behaviour, then you are either a hermit or at the least don't remember your adolescence. Sure, it's just a movie. It's just a book. It's just a story in which women are stripped of all power and reduced to waiting on the sidelines for a strong man to save them.

See, I could have been talking about pretty much any film or book just then. Maybe I think too much (even though there is no such thing), but that's a hell of a lot better than thinking too little.

Ergh. I'm so listless these days. Partly because I'm incredibly busy, something that I still find laughable, because honestly, what am I doing in my life? Nothing much, not compared to high school and my first degree, when I spent years doing fifty things all at once and being stressed out all the damn time. I am now much more careful in selecting extra commitments, and am enjoying not being as busy as I could be, but I still don't know where my time goes. I lack energy for all but the most vital things. I keep having ideas for LJ posts and starting to write them, then abandoning them. I go to leave a comment for someone, and then I can't finish it or the browser malfunctions and I can't bring myself to go back and complete it. Anyway, here's some stuff that happened:

An epic Jane Austen adaptation marathon with teh girls. And our knitting. I finally watched the 2007 Persuasion, and can't believe I waited so long, because it was crap. What'shisface makes a yum Captain Wentworth, but the script is terrible. Just awful. So poorly written. Instead of condensing the novel artfully, it removes all the good scenes and replaces them with long and boring expositional dialogue. I was so disappointed. Also depressing: realising that I am closer in age to Anne Eliot than to Elizabeth Bennet or Catherine Morland, and that Persuasion and its "elegiac tone" is more applicable to my life now when I am single and waiting for my last chance at love. Fucking Regency drama.

I remembered that Nick Earls had a new novel coming out this year, and was delighted to discover a couple of weeks ago that it was already out. Such a treat to have a new book by your favourite author to look forward to! I devoured it in a matter of hours. The True Story of Butterfish is about an ex-rockstar retreating to Brisbane to deal with the aftermath of celebrity and attempt to build a new, more normal life. Naturally this put me in mind of Savage Garden, but Nick writes in his acknowledgements that while Savage Garden showed that it was possible to come from Brisbane and be very successful, he didn't actually base the story on them. Despite the total fan fiction nature of the plot. *ahem*.

Anyway, one of the joys of being a long-term Nick Earls fan is that he doesn't repeat himself, and he's always trying new things as a writer. Butterfish is particularly good in its portrayal of modern-day celebrity, and what it does to those who, unusually in this day and age, haven't courted fame but been unwittingly thrust into the spotlight. This is a theme that he first picked up in The Thompson Gunner, but it plays out differently here. And while Nick tries out new things, there are, of course, certain themes that repeat throughout his books -- to me, they seem to be a kind of exploration of what it is to grow up, even if you don't grow up until you're long past adolescence; what it means to live in contemporary Australia; and what love and desire can or cannot do for you. Often the relationships that he depicts are new and tiny, at the delicate stage of formation; there's always a sense that the story continues after the final page.

He wrote The True Story of Butterfish as a stage play simultaneously, and it's being produced in Brisbane in October. Yes, I'm considering travelling to see it. The first-person intimacy of his novels makes for surprisingly good theatre.

Lastly, gairid tagged me for a meme:

Who sleeps in bed next to you?
My three teddy bears Bailey, Baxter, and Oscar. Don't look at me, I didn't name them.

Have you ever lied to a teacher to get out of a deadline?
I don't think so. I always make deadlines.

( Read more... )

I have purchased a new computer and all is well. My new laptop is ice blue, cold and fair, like a morning of pale spring, or a lily wrought from steel or touched by frost. There can be no name for her but Eowyn II.

Anyway, so fifty million years ago I had an idea for a VC fic, and then I worked for ages writing it, and then the computer broke and I didn't lose my drafts but nor did I have a lot of time to work on it more, and then finally I finished it and posted it and OMG it's over here at my fic journal for anyone who wants to read my VC fic and isn't subscribed to the comms that I spammed with this news. I would not have made it through were it not for Placebo. Now please allow me to quote the lyrics that I kept typing into Word but couldn't, of course, put in the fic itself:

Every time I rise I see you falling
Can you find me space inside your bleeding heart?

I'm coming up on infra-red
There is no running that can hide you
Because I can see in the dark
I'm coming up on infra-red
Forget your running, I will find you
Because I can see in the dark

You are one of God's mistakes
You crying tragic waste of skin
I'm well aware of how it aches
And you still won't let me in

Since I was born I've started to decay
Now nothing ever, ever goes my way

One fluid gesture
Like stepping back in time
I'm trapped in amber
Petrified
And still not satisfied

There. Feels good to get out all that angst.

I have ordered a shiny new computer but it won't be arriving for a little while. Woe. In the meantime I am off to Brisbane this weekend anyway for family time and interrogation about my love life and career prospects. Usually a big family gathering would require a lot of drinking, but I have still not recovered from My Worst Hangover™ many weeks ago, so that will be interesting.

While I am gone please enjoy this new episode of the Kevin Bishop Show. My honey is funny!

I'm stressed and busy and spending most of my time working at uni, and then last night my laptop power socket/cord goes and breaks AGAIN, for the third time if you're keeping count. I had to pay some exorbitant prices to get it fixed in England, and I'm fairly sure it's not worth getting it fixed again, however, buying a new computer with my just-arrived tax return means having to delay again some much-needed furnishings for the flat. But Eowyn's been such a good little laptop... well, aside from her many, many problems. I feel she was on the way out anyway, but I would have liked to keep her longer. It really bothers me how computers aren't built to last anymore. Manufacturers seem to assume everyone will want to upgrade after two years, so they don't make them to last beyond that. Eowyn wouldn't have made it two years without her first repair, and now it's only been three and a half years since I bought her.

Also, if I get rid of Eowyn, then Faramir, my iPod, will really miss her.

So a few days ago I was staring at some Vampire Chronicles fanart that I'd stumbled across, and I thought to myself, "My, this is very good, why do I not seek out more fanart?" The answer is that I am terrible at being in fandom, and very lazy to boot. I thought, "What if there was a community where people could post art and icons and fun things and it would all be right under my nose?!" I voiced the thought to rebness and she promptly made the community and did all the work for me, validating my inherent laziness but making me a happy VC fan. So I invite you all to feel free to join vc_media for lots of Vampire Chronicles fandom fun. :D

W. B. Yeats

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
     Cast a cold eye
     On life, on death.
     Horseman, pass by!

While I'm laid up in bed with yet another cold/flu seems like a good time to talk about William Butler. My love for the poetry of W. B. Yeats comes down to three things:

1. His desperate unrequited love for Maud Gonne, which makes him seem so charmingly vulnerable in the many, many poems where he brings this up. When I was a teen with a lot of hopeless crushes, it was nice to know that my pain was at least good for poetic inspiration. Yeats never misses a chance to make a dig at Maud. Oh, sure, we can't always guarantee that he was talking about Maud, but I think most of the time you can't go wrong in assuming a line is about her. He makes her a Helen without a Troy, asking "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery". OH SNAP. His prayer for his daughter is basically that she not turn out like Maud, in being too pretty or opinionated or choosing to marry a fool. (His prayer for his son, by the way? Is for him to get a good night's sleep.) "When You Are Old" is a nice admonishment to a woman to remember that a man loved her, but then "love fled". In "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" he says that he would happily live all of life over again, even the painful bits, even:
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

It's tempting to hate the woman who resisted Yeats' entreaty to "Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams", but he proposed to her like five times and then also proposed to her daughter, and that kind of obsession can be really kind of creepy. As ever, Kate Beaton has a handily appropriate comic about "Yeats in Love". And yet somehow Yeats stops short of being wholly pathetic. Maybe it's the classical references, or the fact that he did eventually marry another woman and they seemed relatively happy together (and he had some other affairs and was generally unexpectedly frisky while being all rejected and dejected), or because he didn't just write about Maud, but explored spirituality and nationalism and many other themes.

2. Many of his poems have an air of nostalgia and longing, such that he often seems old before his time. There is something so extraordinarily painful to me in the lines, "And now that I have come to fifty years / I must endure the timid sun." (from "Lines Written in Dejection"). I think "The Wild Swans at Coole" is one of his best-known poems, and it feels instantly familiar even the first time you read it: the autumn setting, the knowledge that "all's changed", the contrast between the migratory patterns of the birds and the sedentary figure on the shore, even though both are enacting their own cycles. In a similar vein, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" celebrates the places that we feel "in the deep heart's core", even when we're not there.

I think Yeats is the only one of my major literary loves for whom I didn't make some form of pilgrimage while overseas, mainly because I didn't get to Ireland. Next time! However, the British Library had some audio of Yeats reading his own poetry, but I was somewhat disappointed by his blustery old-man voice. It was not the youthful Irish voice pregnant with romantic longing that I might have imagined. Nonetheless...

3. He's pretty.



Fun fact: rebness once sent me a card with a portrait of Yeats, and I framed it.

There's yet another Sam Neill red meat ad. Still with the orangutan. Sam Neill tries to convince me that red meat is vital to cognition. Here's a thought: instead of paying Sam Neill to do these ads, subsidise the cost of meat so I can eat a steak every day and improve my brain function.

In The Word Meme That Wouldn't Die, rebness gave me some words she associates with me. I remembered just now that I had yet to write about them.

1. Chocolate. Someone once said to me, "You solve all your problems by throwing chocolate at them." It's almost true. I just love chocolate. A lot. Early on it was a fun treat for the whole family to share a block of Cadbury Dairy Milk with each other and with the dog. (Our old labrador, and no, he never got sick from eating it. He could hear the tearing of foil on a chocolate block from the other end of the house.) My father is a chocoholic, and his father before him. When Grandpa died they found something like thirty blocks of Nestle Club stashed in his cupboard. I used to know all my father's hiding spots, but in recent years he trained himself to eat dark chocolate with 70% or more cocoa solids, because none of the rest of us like it. He keeps it in the freezer. I like dark chocolate more myself too, but not that dark. I also really don't eat it as much as I used to. I mean, when I had to study for exams or write long essays chocolate was my 'study aid', and it's a comfort food when I'm down, and I still enjoy good chocolate for its own sake, but by eating well and keeping busy I have less of a need for it. I'm also probably more inclined to bake with it -- I made a killer batch of brownies last weekend. Yum. I also really resent the relentless feminisation and sexualisation of chocolate in advertising, but that's a topic for some other time.

2. YEATS. I love him! Full-length entry on this topic coming soon. :D

3. Sock puppets. So there was this woman who wrote some well-received books about vampires. A whole series of them, in fact. However, the books began to deterioriate in quality. The author seemed to go a little crazy. Then she began using her main character as a mouthpiece to abuse the fans who didn't like the previous novel/s, in fiction. It was funny. I made the sock puppet analogy. squishypeanut made me the sock puppet. I took him on adventures. It was, categorically, good times.

4. Leeds. As most will recall, I lived there for a year while studying at university, and it was one of the best years of my life. I had an absolute blast and will always have fond memories of Leeds. It has an undeserved reputation as a boring or industrial city, but it has an ancient history and some quite beautiful nineteenth-century architecture. It's not dirty or gritty anymore, but full of shops and bars and restaurants. Marks & Spencer was founded in Leeds. It has three tertiary institutions and so a bit of a student vibe, but the students don't overrun the city or anything. I will admit that there's not much of a reason to visit, but it is a wonderful place to live. And, it's been nearly a year since I returned to Australia from Leeds, which I can't quite believe. I still really miss it a lot.

5. The lovers survive. WARNING: Atonement spoilers follow! This is from one of the final lines of Atonement: "I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish." In the context of Atonement, I am the reader who desperately wants that happy ending. In my head, the lovers survive. The novel was ambiguous! They could still be alive! Briony is an unreliable narrator and this is just another lie!

However. Deep down, I know that they are dead. There is no atonement, and to believe that they live on is to deny the basic themes of the novel.

I also know that the lovers never existed in the first place, because they are fictional. This is perhaps the cruellest cut of all.