Endings, Exes, and Exmas......

Awww gawwwd.......

it's a skanky night tonight and I'm not even in Adelaide - tho probably the closest I'll be for a while.

i'm heading up north to the anus for xmas and to introduce the Missus to excalibur's sword and the replica stonehenge... and my Mum. Renaissance girl will probably have the least culture shock of any of my exes.... she's even lived in a cnutry town so knows the code of socially acceptable closet baring...... and all the other stuff.

i'm not sure if I'm ready for it... I mean i was there only 12 months ago - and feeling kind of torn between having spent half my life there, and half in Sydney... and I still can't believe that i've actually left Sydney - or to be living somewhere that seems so strangely familiar and yet so different.....

and there's there's the tome - which I'm taking up with me to edit in corners......

We'll hang in sydney for a couple of weeks - to eat fresh seafood and sea real surf and cliffs and smell tropical flowers and feel sweat drizzle around suncream, and then it's back here for tome completion...

I'm really sick of my thesis at the moment. sick of writing, sick of having it hanging over my head, sick of not knowing how or what to do as a dole management strategy to ensure I have enough cash flow to keep me fed, and keep me sane till I submit. I'm sick of my own incredible inneficiency and the way it has bled into other area sof my life..... I ahven't even packed my bags for tomorrow! Everything has become a heaving chore of procrastination. Study is hell. I can't even enjoy a decent bit of theory anymore wihtout wringing my hands at potential footnotes...... and yet if I confine myself to lite words I go mad - ok not mad - just deeply deeply bored......

anywya - following Lauren's example - I'm going to include a summary year of 2008 - (also because i wasn't able to blog very much) . this year was a completely insane year for lots of reasons.... and yet really wonderful in others....

January
Fell in love with renaissance girl
drafted chapter 5
sensations: mangoes, ocean, couscous in pg-arc, quad at midnite

February
compound become disaster zone - horror horror horror
I fled to mates' couches
applied for a casual lecturing job
drafted a paper on bad drawing
started work on chapter 6
sensations: long phone calls at night in main quad, 2minute noodles in pg-arc, quad at midnite

March
found the mousecave and Moved out of the compound after 9 years
Started lecturing job at COFA. Read "the order of things" in an afternoon
turned 37. lectured in singapore
what Mardis Gras? what thesis?
sensations: renaissance girl's biceps, books on a the back of a truck, sore back, cockroaches, laundromats


April
scholarship OVER. terror! terror! terror!
compound being total arseholes: horror! horror! horror!
Lectured and tutored art history
no mobile reception, internet or phone in the mousecave, mousecave bloody cold and damp
brief holiday in melbourne
what thesis?
sensations: stripey shirts, cufflinks, pin striped trousers, ALFALFA HOUSE, buckwheat noodles, tamari, eggplant

May
Lectured in singapore again
bought glasses and electronica
Gave paper on Chapter 6 in progress
Moved my studio into a storage unit.
sensations: bourdieu, deleuze, podzilla, dumplings, sore back, acute financial stress, marking, COFA canteen cuisine

June
end of semester: marking, poverty, precarity
mousecave overrrun by mice
gave a departmental seminar on schappylle scragg
tutored blogging in penrith
did lots of marking at uni... scared essays would be eaten by mice
what thesis?
sensations: mousepiss, ratsac, mould, vacuuming, aircon, flouro lights, all-nighters at uni, scotch & stillnox

July
Mum's 70th birthday
Holidays with renaissance girl
Started working at ICE
Got the flu
Elizabeth Grosz's new book... hooray!
oh! thesis! if only!
sensations: pink scarf, black furry coat, damp lungs, manoush and potato scallops at Granville, green rat poo, vacuuming

August
Lecturing again, and working at ICE
finishing a rough first draft
when the going gets tough the touch get out: i gave notice on my flat
sensations: pgarc at night, the feel of 90000 words, manoush and potato scallops at Granville, bad corporate drag, COFA canteen cuisine

September
the return of spring! and Podzilla
filled the lanes with my kitchen, gave away/sold art, furniture, etc...
Nanna Madges Irigary singalong
Extreme sports tetris filling storage container with my books, art.... and that other stuff
garden party rained out and had to get friends to pack my house, shift boxes...
posted 10 boxes of notes to melbourne, sent 3 crates on a greyhound bus... I flew
sensations: white almond blossoms, sunshine, smiles, cuddles, not sleeping at all, then sleeping a lot, cat snores, black plastic, depot girl.....

October
moved into the brunswick love palace
unpacked boxes, started to work on the tome
sensations: smooth dry sunshine, skin on carpet, brown parks, Sydney Road, organza, muesli, coffee, holland blinds

November
More of the same
Moreland centrelink
lots of sewing, THE AGE

December
Rain, study, facebook, cuddles, cat, love

Anywhere but Here

I've had a funny morning of non presence today....

Started the day reading posts on a british list aksing if drawing is a form of performance and then I read a story about an artists' models protest in Paris yesterday.....

Reading the bits in french - listening to earnest frog - my mind did backflips and I wondered what the hell i'm doing..... here..... slowly clarifying comments, replacing commas, editing footnotes....

I really liked one of the quotes from a news article on the protest.....

"Quand on me demande ce que je fais dans la vie, il y a toujours un temps d'arrêt. Pour moi, c'est devenu aussi naturel que lorsque vous vous mettez nu dans votre salle de bain. Pour tenir la pose, je dois rentrer en moi-même. Poser, c'est méditer, cela me donne l'inspiration pour des poèmes."

roughly translated - it means "when I'm asked what I do in my life, there is always bit of a pause. fr me, it has become as natural as for you to undress in your bathroom. To take a pose, I have to go inside myself. to pose is to meditate, it gives me inspiration for my poems"

Hmmmm ok - maybe not the poetry bit..... and ..... actually I feel quite self conscious undressing before getting in the bat - mainly because I remove my specs and grope around in a blur - whereas I always wore contacts when I modelled.

Bloody Hell

After my last lite postings, I thought i'd better add something a little more readerly.

My favourite South Australians rightly observed that according to my wordle analysis - my posts seem to be punctuated with "bloody" and "Hell". i'm still a bit suss about the whole wordle thing - like why aren't prepositions included? Surely "the " "It" and "at" are important? not to mentioned pronouns?

Hmmm - maybe thesis editing is getting to me......

In the last 48 hours I've been struck by bloody hell of the painful variety. I was so proud of weaning myself off painkillers and chocolate, and feeling whole and hearty and sentient... and then the pain struck - in the back of my neck and left me tormentedly writhing and unable to sleep for 2 or 3 nights - save short bursts where I'd collapse only to be woken again by the pain.....the age bored me to a level of despair even greater than scrolling through the status updates of every single one of my facebook friends so I dug out Michelle de Certeau's the practice of Everyday Life to cheer me up.

It did... especially the bit about the brownian motion of tactics by which ordinary people embed a sense of agency and meaning in their negotiations with fairly large manifestions of institutionalised power. It made me feel happy about my own insistence on a stochastic framework for the analysis of power/culture/discourse/phenomenology/etc. in the TOME rather than a proper linear narrative.......

And then flipping through the blogroll I came across Jebni's latest post - whihc is more of a powerpoint-cast:
where things are at goes for 20 minutes but is worth every second,,,,, it is calm, mediated engaging delight......

Last Year

I'm into this wordle thing.....

Last Month

Maybe last month is more accurate.......

Word Salad

I'm not sure if this is an accurate representation of my most frequent blogged words, but it kind of matches the self referential theme....

click here to see the current wordle

ABCD DELEUZE A1

A bit of a contrasting view on the 'companion animals'

Donna Haraway. Companion Species Manifesto Lecture 2003 2/10

check this out.....

Rock n Roll!

I couldn't resist posting this image from Alan Jones's current show . Ah! another reason to miss sydney - like as if I'd be doing anything anyway..... I'd just be feeling guilty rather than just isolated......

ho hum. bloody hell.

I wrote to my aunt (who is a writer) whingeing about writing - that it's a stupid hideous horrible occupation. and this is a *good* week - apparently.... After lying around and banging my head against the wall all last week and most of the weekend - I finally had a breakthrough.... and have spent each day slowly and doggedly plugging away on this chapter........

It's shaping up to be good, but bloody hell! I'm sick of the slow stagnant drag.... the procrastination cycle, the crazy eating, lack of sleeping constant guilt detachment vagueness all the time......

anyway - I'm being subsidised by the missus and the rock n roll. I fill out my dole diary and compliantly trudge up the hill each second friday... I can *almost* survive on newstart allowance and hope that maybe they won't put the screws on too hard before.... before.... I can..... and then I wonder why I can't do this any faster?