Saturday, October 30, 2010


This post is dedicated to a small and noble and utterly beloved beast who I have known since I was ten. Who would have thought such a tiny creature could wreak such havoc with a heart a thousand miles away? I wouldn't normally put this kind of thing online, but in this geographic inability to scritch behind her ears and will her through the night there's nothing much else I can do, besides dropping tears all over my essay notes.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Tatterdemalion

In honour of my newest favourite word, and of the sudden summer sun so recently unfurled from the steel-woollish flummery covering Melbourne for the past four months, and of all things superlative, I'm going to rip large and unnecessary holes in some old t-shirts and experiment with variegated sunburn all summer. Reason being, my very first day of not being cold has left me with an infuriating baby-pink bib around my neck and the same four options I have to stare down every spring: a) move to Finland until April, b) plumb a giant tub of sunscreen into the shower head until April, c) dress like a Mormon and endure heatstroke until April, or d) embrace the bib (and the sun-gloves, and the freckles, and the sandal-burn) until April. So this summer I'm going with e) carefully cultivate a collection of ripped t-shirts such that I am more or less evenly sun-kissed all over. Sun-kissed, not roasted: I spend most of my outdoor hours under umbrellas/parasols as it is (I'd rather be a mushroom than a spit-roast). I'm also kind of obsessed with fur at the moment (second-hand, before you start throwing things) which is somewhat unfortunate at this time of year; perhaps while I'm ripping the shirts up I'll make a dilapidated fur umbrella as well and start my own collection. Spring/Summer 2010: Tatter.D. by Penelop.E. Keep an eye on Vogue.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The bashed wife teaches best.

A wee shopping spree has left me somewhat of a beggar, but a beggar gloriously rich in (amongst other things) Russian fairy tales. I found a hefty tome lurking down the bottom of the children's section, and since I quite adore fairy tales and other bits of pre-modern literary ephemera I picked it up and opened it at random to find, in a delicious moment of irony, this:

HOW A HUSBAND WEANED HIS WIFE FROM FAIRY TALES

There was once an innkeeper whose wife loved fairy tales above all else and accepted as lodgers only those who could tell stories. Of course the husband suffered loss because of this, and he wondered how he could wean his wife away from fairy tales. One night in winter, at a late hour, an old man shivering with cold asked him for shelter. The husband ran out and said: "Can you tell stories? My wife does not allow me to let in anyone who cannot tell stories." The old man saw that he had no choice; he was almost frozen to death. He said: "I can tell stories."
"And will you tell them for a long time?"
"All night."

So far, so good. They let the old man in. The husband said: "Wife, this peasant has promised to tell stories all night long, but only on condition that you do not argue with him or interrupt him." The old man said: "Yes, there must be no interruptions, or I will not tell any stories." They ate supper and went to bed. Then the old man began: "An owl flew by a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water. An owl flew by a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water." He kept on saying again and again: "An owl flew by a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water." The wife listened and listened and than said: "What kind of story is this? He keeps repeating the same thing over and over!"
"Why do you interrupt me? I told you not to argue with me! That was only the beginning; it was going to change later." The husband, upon hearing this - and it was exactly what he wanted to hear - jumped down from his bed and began to belabor his wife: "You were told not to argue, and now you have not let him finish his story!" And he thrashed her and thrashed her, so that she began to hate stories and from that time on forswore listening to them.

After that, of course, my feminist hackles were bristling about my ears and I didn't know whether to laugh or scream so I just bought the book instead. I like how it's pretty much the story of Scheherezade in reverse: just think how many virgins would have been saved if King Shahryar had been a woman with an attendant man to bash her into submission. Or how terrible Scheherezade's stories could have been if only she'd been male. Anyway, a quick flick on the tram revealed quite a collection of similarly beleaguered ladies; they'll probably be popping up anon.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Call me Duck, or Lulu.

Let me rephrase the ol' woodchuck chestnut: how many blogs is too many blogs for one boggled blogger to have? ... three blogs, four? Six? Ten? I guess you have to weigh the relative benefits of having multiple discrete interests against the possible appearance of having multiple discrete personalities, the latter increasingly exponentially past point x where x = possibly too many blogs.

Apologies to any mathematicians reading this.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm trying to confess is that I have four blogs, and, perhaps, therein lies the answer to my initial question: x + 1 blogs is too many blogs for one boggled blogger to have (I was trying to work a mathematical log into that, but it made my head hurt), where x = the number of blogs one boggled blogger can maintain single-handed, equalling, in my case, 3.

Apologies to anyone reading this.

Anyhow, my three other blogs might be described as 1) naughty; 2) nice; and 3) neglected. I guess what I'm trying to say is, 1) the tumblebug bites baaaaad (hence 3) above); and 2) after due consideration I have decided to let Duck and Lulu loose on blogspot for the briefest of moments; that is, if you were to head tumblr-ward via ducknostrum or lulu-legs, you might just find Penelope's sisters.

Meanwhile, week 6 is Judith Wright and Penelope-as-Class-Presenter week in my Australian literature subject. Strangely it was her short stories I discovered first, after appropriating a copy of The Nature of Love from my Mum's bookshelf, and I never really looked at much of her poetry - probably a high-school-ambivalence hangover thanks to Year 11 English. But there you have it: hair of the dog can work a treat. Particularly this one:


NIGGER'S LEAP, NEW ENGLAND

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.
Night runs an obscure tide round cape and bay
and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea
against this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark, O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.

Here is the symbol, and the climbing dark
a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning
over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells
sound for her mariners. Now we must measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See in these gulfs, how small the light of home.

Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tided up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.

Never from earth again the coolamon
or thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history
that has sunk many islands in its good time.


Chances are the lecture will uncover some vast postcolonial problematic to dull the sheen, but I'm happy to bask unawares a day or two more.

Excuse me. I have 97 tumblr updates to attend to.

Love Pennylop.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Two things novel

1) The tiny hordes of bacteria-eating warriors I've been swallowing three times daily are finally gaining the upper hand; my blood must be running with little white flags because I'm positively trumpeting with the feeling of Health stealing back through my limbs. The lead's gone out of my head, the jelly from my legs, and I can't wait for tomorrow because there's nothing makes you appreciate uni like being too sick to go for two weeks.

2) Meanwhile (because writing a poem a day for a year wasn't quite gimmick enough) I am now officially writing a novel in November. It's an online, international kind of gig (www.nanowrimo.org) preaching quantity over quality to the tune of 50000 words, which works out at 1700 per day. I'm apprehensive to put it mildly, so I'm reluctantly spreading the word such that, come mid-November when I want to put my little half-novel quietly to death and plant a rosemary bush over its grave, I won't dare for the glare of scrutiny by all my nearest and dearest. I'm not sure if anyone ever comes to this dusty corner of the universe, but if you're a person and you're reading this, feel free to bother me alllll November about that novel I was meant to be writing. I'll love you come December.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Penelopitis

A spectacular (I was going to say 'fluorescent', but TMI, right?) case of bronchitis has laid me off work for the day, and since my brain is MUCH too addled to contemplate two weeks of neglected Bourdieu readings, it looks like I'll just have to spend the afternoon in bed writing and sipping vegetable-and-barley soup. Bliss.

I started compiling a list of kick-ass ladies a while back; the criteria are fairly ephemeral (even tiresomely predictable) but could probably be summarised thus: Originally Nuts Ladies with a kickin' aesthetic, who don't give a fuck what the world thinks of them. So far the list (far from complete) looks like this:

Bjork / Vivienne Westwood / Yoko Ono / ?Dita Von Teese? / Madonna / Lady GaGa / Lydia Lunch / Kate Bush / Grace Jones

Not so sure about Dita, she seems kind of clean-cut/formulaic compared to some of them; then again, she did play a not insignificant part in bringing good ole-time burlesque back from the dead (AND she's a total babe), so let's leave her there for the moment. Also, I've restricted myself to still-living ladies for simplicity's sake, but I suspect Simone de Beauvoir and Anais Nin et al might slip in with fake I.D.s when I'm not looking.

Anyhow, said ladies might be making cameos at times like these when there's not much going on besides bronchitis. And since YouTube and me are onto such a good thang with Lydia at the moment, here's a lil more. Perfect for sultry days in smoky, dim-lit rooms.


gloomy sunday

it must be time for some words from my namesake and divine-woman-of-the-moment, lydia. and just fancy, i'm gloomy AND it's a sunday. take it away, grrrl.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Penelope's Medicinal Potion aka Mud Tea



After spending the day at work feeling like a hedgehog's died inside my throat, I've resorted to desperate measures inspired by my friend the witch who dosed me so well last week I sweated garlic all the next day. So,

1/2 lemon, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
an abundance of ginger, sliced
pinch or two black tea leaves
fennel seeds, to taste

Simmer in a saucepan of water until it reaches desired muddiness. It all slips down pretty easy given the somewhat ghastly stench, though a nip of brandy sure wouldn't go astray.

Love Penelop.

Monday, August 2, 2010

lipstick laksa

i lost my laksa virginity yesterday; i lost it wearing bright red lipstick on the greyest windiest drippiest day of winter yet, and i will never complain about being cold and damp and cramped again if only there's a bowl of laksa at the end of it. the whole experience might have been a little more enjoyable without the lipstick - if i hadn't been aiming each mouthful with military precision to avoid looking like i'd just been making out with one of those rotating meat pillars you get in kebab shops - but hey, my lipstick survived, and now bowls of laksa down cobbled lanes on days where the sky is dribbling down window panes and the wind gets at all your corners is my new favourite thing in the world.

on the subject of lipstick, my beloved bubble tea shop has this mystery flavour, "lipstick black tea". i bought one once; it tastes a lot like black tea and not very much like lipstick at all. then i thought maybe i'd missed the lipstick essence the first time, so i bought another one. then i tried googling it, all to no avail. it remaineth a tasty mystery.

and on the subject of weather, en route to the laksa i called it 'bleak'. bff had a dictionary definition to hand: devoid of hope, ie, this weather is devoid of hope. it also means (for useless knowledge and general edification) a european freshwater fish, alburnus alburnus, possessor of silvery scales used in the production of artificial pearls.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

peppermint love

take 1 tsp dried peppermint leaves or 1 peppermint teabag
lovingly add 1 cup boiling water
allow to infuse 3-5 mins
remove leaf/bag
add 2-3 tbsp (yes TABLEspoons) sugar
stir
= liquid sunshine.

love penelope.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

toad-in-a-hole

... this is why Me and Home Internet should never have met.

i've been sitting here, window open, slowly chilling like a toad going into hibernation at the bottom of a pond, crossing and recrossing my legs to alternate the pins and needles, looking and clicking and not writing the essay that was due a week ago tomorrow, dressed like an american cheerleader in summer in a room i can see my own breath in, so paralytic with shivers i can barely move, for the last five hours (minus one-hour Masterchef and curry-making interlude). this is why i need to be a hermit with a parrot on my shoulder and a beard. this is why i need to live in small hut at the end of the earth, at least until next week. gawd.

meanwhile, there's this daffodil growing in a pot on my windowsill. it only sprouts at night when it thinks i'm not looking. it's so cute, i think it's trying to surprise me with some flowers one morning soon.

Monday, May 24, 2010

The Slug

How long have I known the word? Ten years? Fifteen? Sluggish: adj. slow, indolent, torpid. And there I was, walking to uni one day and thinking, gee, I feel so slow, and indolent, and torpid. Like an upright slug dragging along the pavement. Slug-ish, I thought. I feel slug-ish.

And then it hit me. Sluggish: of or like a slug. From Middle English, slugissh.

Un-believable.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

The Boyfriend

So the banshee went one fury too far and suddenly I could never spend another night in that place where she lived, which just happened to be the place where I lived too. So I spent the next week in my bestie's bedroom, hunting for houses and stealing his clothes. I guess I've been dabbling in the giant shirt/jumper + hypothetical skirt look for a while now, but by the time I left (with a bottle of his cologne, a Westwood Man jumper and new banshee-free accommodation to boot) I had to admit to being a newly-converted, fully-subscribing practitioner of the 'Boyfriend' look. The moment of truth? I opened my wardrobe. Skirts, dresses, things I'd been missing all week, but "I have nothing to WEAR," I moaned, and ran to the nearest op-shop to find a giant mens' business shirt.

(Seriously, this guy (the bestie) should open a business or something. A B&B-cum-Tupperware-Party kind of thing, where you go stay at his house with minimal clothing and unlimited access to his wardrobe. He'd make a killing.)

Anyway, so there I was in this op-shop, avoiding the womens' section like small boys avoid girl germs, and damn was it good. Racks upon racks devoted to all possible permutations of shirts + trousers: short-sleeved/legged, long-sleeved/legged, in-between-sleeved/legged, summer-sleeved/legged, winter-sleeved/legged, overalls, singlets, suits, finito. So easy. So simple. None of this short-medium-long-dress/skirt/shorts/slacks/trousers/jeans-button-up-button-sideways-zip-down-zip-up-high-neck-low-neck-turtle-neck-jackets-coats-cardigans-teacosies-too-baggy-too-tight-too-floral-too-bright-everything's-perfect-but-for-THIS. Nuh-uh. It's all too big and it all don't fit and I love it.

I liked to think I was being a touch ironic at first, given the prevalence of the 'Boyfriend' in marketing campaigns of late, but it's so easy to be all superior and think you're mocking a 'look', isn't it. I mean, in the absence of a boyfriend, it's probably the look that's mocking me.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Puss-in-Boots

This post is dedicated to my poor, innocently bystanding feet, upon whom a classic case of Girl vs Boot was inflicted this morning. It happens every year: some summer garage sale yields a miraculous pair of damn fine, perfect-for-winter and EVER-so-slightly-too-small boots for the price of a coffee or two. I try them on and strut around, casting admiring looks at my ankles in every available semi-reflective surface, figure my feet'll shrink in winter anyway, and take them home, where they sit smug and good-lookin' by my wardrobe. Then winter comes. It's their time to shine. I crack them out, build an outfit from the feet up, and limp home two hours later with giant blisters where my heels used to be.

It's not as masochistic as it sounds because I'm pretty sure I have the world's most blisterable feet. A pair of carpet slippers once put me in flip-flops for a week (and then I got blisters on my toes, just to balance things out). But these boots were their own particular variety of hell. They're (too) solid, (too) well-made, and lined in sheepskin. "That'll cushion things nicely" I thought when I bought them. It didn't. So I spent most of the morning lurching around on my toes, like I was wearing high heels after two too many drinks, wincing and staggering every time I had to stand up. In Round One of Girl vs Boot, Boot was the outright winner.

Normally under these kinds of conditions I'd give in, you know? I like my feet. I spoil them with the occasional massage and lick of toenail polish. I wear orthopedic shoes almost every day. I'm only prepared to inflict so much on them in the name of fashion. But these shoes are amazing. They're hot. They're everything I ever wanted in a boot, and then some. They're not the kind of boot you'll ever find anywhere again, let alone in a half-size larger. They were made in Italy at least twenty years ago and they look like they'll last another fifty. Substitute Brisbane for Italy and the same could be said of my feet. So we're even, right? Let Round Two begin.

In maybe a month.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Man/Girl

So I realised recently that I'm just a grumpy old man trapped in the body of a twenty-one-year-old girl. "Oh, you don't know grumpy," said Forty-Two at work the other day, "you just wait."
"You don't live with a psychopathic witch," I grumbled back at her, and it was true, she didn't. She ceded the point. And so doth youth ever deny age the wisdom of experience.

In honour of this new self-recognition, I'm smashing some last lingering youthful ideals. I figure the grumpy old man in me's gotta die at some point, I mean men only live so long, don't they? And assuming some kind of karmic regeneration process it follows that I'll probably end up as a six-year-old kid in the body of a thirty-year old or something, and that suits me just fine. So there'll be time to be all young and reborn later on. In the meantime I'm cultivating a doughty pessimism, pronouncing drearily on everything from the weather to sex shops, making an art form out of daily glasses misplacement, and lingering over-long around tobacconists. I'm also THAT close to buying a kitten, but I better not. I'd probably trample it or something.

Friday, March 19, 2010

build 'em up, cut 'em down

one of the inherent functions of being young and female, apparently, is to be unwitting instigator/audience member of the comments flung from car windows, pub huddles, construction sites and so forth by (mostly) men you've (mostly) never met in your life. i mean, it's just an educated guess - i've never been old and female, or male of any age - but in the meantime, i live in eternal hope of hearing something truly original amongst the generic babble of wolf whistles, "show-us-ya-tits" and critiques of various parts of my anatomy. the best i've gotten so far was the slightly perplexing "i fuck chicks!!" back in 2006 (implication: he'd fuck me? or a spirited defense of hegemony?) and today, when two cars sidled up to the intersection i was crossing on my way home. the guy driving the first car met my eye, whistled deliberately, said, "fiiiine legs, lady," and turned the corner. the guy in the combi van behind him pulled up and yelled, "fat bitch!"

Friday, March 5, 2010

In Back of the Real - Allen Ginsberg, 1954

railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.

A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
- the dread hay flower
I thought - It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus' inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage for a year.

Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Of (Mark) and (Anne)

I had a book binge last week, which included a second-hand copy of 'Winter Trees' by Sylvia Plath. It was SUCH an unnecessary purchase, seeing as I already own her complete works in a single volume, but there's something about a novel-length collection of poems that I find endlessly daunting. Not to mention the way it seems to obliterate the individuality of each separate collection. So it looks like I'll be making up the complete works a second time.

It's a nice-looking book. I was pretty happy. What I didn't notice in the shop was the inscription. It's written on the first page, in loopy blue biro.

(Anne) to the most adored, loved, mentally bejewelled person this side of anywhere - with lots of frog-freckled love, not to mention hugs, kisses, smooches, cuddles, the odd rummage and so forth - Mark xxxx 9/11/81

The romantic in me wants to believe they had some star-spangled giddy love affair culminating in the untimely death of Anne (Mark) and the dispersion of all her worldly goods (given her by Mark) to the winds by her (his) grief-stricken lover. The cynic in me suspects they had a star-spangled giddy love affair culminating with graduation and disillusionment with the real world, followed by a period of cold unnecessary bickering and painful drift. Then they would've parted ways; Anne probably found some lover in the corporate sector, got engaged, and came across this slim blue volume while cleaning out all her old junk in preparation for moving into her fiancee's sleek inner-city digs. Preferring to disavow her romantic/literary/bohemian past, she chucked it on the 'out' pile along with some Ginsberg, Kafka, Beauvoir et al. Not usually one for sentiment, she couldn't quite bring herself to throw them out; instead she bundled them up and left them outside a second-hand bookshop in the dead of night. She drove off slightly flustered and stopped for takeout on the way home.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

There is a particular term, Valerie, which strikes terror in the heart of small Penelope:

early-onset Alzheimer’s. Does that not send chills of the highest order down your spine? Now as you surely know dear, I have always been one of the more scattered of brained beings, but not so long ago I was beginning to have serious doubts about whether, in fact, this affliction were less incidental than pathological. Take, for instance, the time I accidentally booked a flight to Bangkok instead of Brisbane. Or the way I consistently confuse tomatoes with potatoes, cherries with grapes, washing with shopping. Or any one of the several times last year that I accidentally made saucy little hatinators for staid old biddies, and giant feathered monstrosities for the high-at-heel and young-at-heart. Or the way I can never seem to remember what I did yesterday. Or what the book I just finished reading was about. And then there was the mortifying confusion of Susans Sarandon and Sontag at a dinner party once.

I was spiralling into a full-scale panic about my mental faculties until I read an editorial by a lady who is prone to leaving books in the vegetable crisper. She could trace her absent-mindedness right back to her grandmother, who one day was chopping soap for the copper and vegetables for the soup at more or less the same time. Needless to say, the soap ended up in the soup, and the laundry turned into minestrone.

Until such an occasion eventuates, darling, I think I can relax a little.

A learned woman I met once had been reading a book about the human brain. She told me that the brain is plastic: in other words, mutable. When parts of the brain sit disused, they are trimmed away to allow development in other areas. What worried her was the state of education in relation to our cranial development. When she was at school, she said, students were forced to memorise large chunks of poetry, Shakespeare, the Bible. Most of it was irrelevant, of course. Whoever quotes tracts of Hamlet in everyday speech? What counted was the process. The act of recall. How are younger generations supposed to gain the capacity for sustained, concentrated thought, she asked, when memorisation is reduced to an English oral with palmcards, television is presented in bite-sized chunks of entertainment and advertising, and the internet is a tangle of hyperlinked info-bytes?

I have heard a similar argument put forward in relation to literacy in ancient societies. Someone once told me that some civilisations preferred to maintain illiteracy amongst the general populace so that their memories would remain supple (amongst other, less noble reasons, I’m sure). Now, I haven’t been able to verify this yet, darling, but it is a fair point: writing something down immediately gives us license to forget it. Why bother remembering when your Blackberry can remember for you?

Really, Valerie, I ask you: is it any wonder our memories are getting worse by the day, when our brains are trained to receive and dispose of morsels of information within the same heartbeat?? Like the time I walked through customs on my arrival from an overseas trip, chatting merrily on the phone to one of my dearest friends. An official kindly informed me that I could earn a $250 fine for having my mobile on. Hadn’t I seen the sign? Of course not, or if I had I'd forgotten: I was jet-lagged, and blinded by the posters promising duty-free delights around the corner. Another time a railway official roundly abused me for taking my suitcase up the escalator. I was meant to use the lift; hadn’t I seen the sign? Of course not, or if I had I'd forgotten: it was obliterated by ads for Frangelico and a forest of whipper-snappers waving copies of MX in my face. Valerie, we are simply glutted on a neverending smorgasbord of textual fragments which are so small that we cannot help but read them. Most of them, of course, are useless, so what happens? We become trained forgetters!

I went to Taiwan not so long ago. I don’t know a word of Mandarin, and I can’t begin to tell you the relief of not being able to understand a single sign in the city. It had its navigational disadvantages, of course, but oh! The serenity! The sense of calm that comes from not having words flashing into your head wherever you look! The luxury of following a train of thought from A to Z without the distractions of inane, unrelated text (shop names, ads, slogans, news headlines, latest offers, menus in the window, today onlys, bargain buy now cheap cheap cheap)! I came home and almost began to wish I were illiterate, just to enjoy the freedom of a single uninterrupted thought.

Darling, I think I will pretend to be blind. I’ll walk around with my eyes shut wearing dark glasses and swishing a cane at people’s ankles. I will starve myself of all written materials save those that I expressly choose to partake of. I will take control of my cerebral diet once and for all! And just think what will happen to my intellect!

Yours in imminent genius,

Penelope.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Literary Orgasms: A Brief Footnote

… so I wasn’t reading erotica. And I wasn’t hunting down once-banned books. But I was still pretty surprised at how hard actual orgasms are to come by in your average novel. Most authors seem to draw a tactful curtain over that particular aspect of existence. It reminds me of a letter I read in a newspaper once, from an old lady complaining about the explicitness of sex scenes in the movies nowadays. And she wasn’t being prudish. Things were way more saucy, she said, when the hero and the heroine shut the door on you and left it up to your imagination.

She had a point. I’m endlessly intrigued by the seen/unseen divide. The ways the hinted-at can be so much more erotic than the explicit. Maybe the Victorians were onto something with their floor-length skirts and oft-elevated necklines. In the absence of cleavage and acres of skin, apparently, the humble shoe achieved unprecedented erotic significance: the merest curve of an instep or glimpse of a shapely ankle was enough to make a Victorian gent cream his woollen drawers.

So in the spirit of the gently seductive, I’m widening my search. Expect metaphor, innuendo and plenty of drawn curtains. But in the meantime, here’s a little gem I stumbled across in the course of my summer reading -

“then he pulled his fingers very slowly down my face, lightly tracing from my jaw to my throat and then all the way down to my waist. My eyes rolled back into my head a little.” – Stephanie Meyer, New Moon

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Have you heard of the Rushdie Affair, Valerie?

If not, I’ll condense it for you: Salman Rushdie published a book that angered a far-away man and many adherents of a not-at-all-far-away religion. Then, in an utterly ridiculous twist best contained within the bounds of awful fiction, a bounty was placed on his life.

Now I don’t want to quibble about his suspect innocence here – although personally, I think he could have been a wee bit more sensitive – but you have to feel for the man: the state stepped in to keep him under armed guard, sleeping in a different hotel every night, staying away from the windows lest someone catch a glimpse of his infamous head. People in the publishing industry were stabbed, shot, killed in the name of a novel. Imagine the weight on his shoulders, darling!

Now the salt in the wounds of the offended, dearest, was that before he defected to England, Rushdie grew up in India, immersed in the very culture that he criticised in his book. What was he thinking? they cried, and, how dare he?! and, he should have known better! And as if that weren’t enough, people in his adopted country started griping about the cost of his protection. Turn him loose! they cried, and, let him fend for himself instead of wasting taxpayer’s money on his room service (he wasn’t, incidentally. Being a famous author has some financial perks). Now, it probably didn’t help that in said novel he’d referred to their – his – prime minister as “Ms Torture” and described a nightclub where her lifesize waxen counterpart was ritualistically nuked – amongst certain other unfavourable comments upon the English. Nevertheless, darling, the poor man was caught in quite a remarkable bind unique to the emigrant: first you get criticised for turning your back on your birthplace, then you get eaten up for daring to make insinuations about the culture that has so graciously accepted you as one of its constituent citizens.

It makes me sick, Valerie! The very concept of emigration is predicated on a myth: the myth of nationhood. Firstly, we don’t get to choose where we’re born. Secondly, we have never met about 22 million of the people we share our vast continent with, and we never will. Yet this myth is perpetuated to make us think we have something in common with every one of those 22 million others (except the paedophiles. And the rapists. And the serial killers, street artists, crack addicts, shoplifters, armed robbers, gang bashers, gang bangers, child pornographers, photographers of naked children, and Collingwood supporters). The myth says: this is what Australians value! You live in Australia! Therefore, this is what you and everyone you know values!

Do you know, I used to think I was immune to that myth? I refused to attend Australia Day celebrations, I scoffed at overt displays of patriotism, I even donned a jersey with the stars and stripes when everyone else was wearing green and gold for some sports-related hoo-ha. Then I went overseas. It is interesting how subtly nationhood insinuates itself. The only times I’ve ever felt Australian, dear, were when I wasn’t in Australia. People say, Oh look! An Australian! and, Say something in your accent! and, We bought kangaroo steak because we thought you might be homesick! And it’s all fun and games laughing at people’s stereotypes of us until someone says something critical. All of a sudden you become staunchly loyal. It’s like the bathmat wars of 2000, dearest. Have I told you about them? It happened like this: my mother was away and a relative stayed over to keep me company. Now, I am a solemn believer in leaving the bathmat on the floor after use. It is, after all, a mat. She, however, preferred to drape the bathmat over the towel rail. I was, at the time, very defensive of my household systems. On finding the bathmat on the towel rail, I would immediately lay it flat on the floor. On using the bathroom after me, she would immediately pick it up and pop it back on the rail. This continued for some time. And don’t think it was a twice-daily occurrence, dear. That mat would have shifted fifty times a day. It was a case of all-out passive-aggressive bathroom warfare that only ended with her visit.

What did I learn from that little episode? Simply that we are outrageously defensive of our own little systems and outrageously incapable of weighing two methods impartially if one of them is our own. Now, if I had decided to hang the bathmat on the towel rail, I could have left it there all day. I read a little editorial the other day by a man who had just returned from England, where ATM withdrawals are free. He complained about his accumulating $2 fees to a friend, and do you know what his friend did, Valerie? He defended those pesky little fees, just because the alternative was to acknowledge the English way over the Australian.

See? This is what we need writers for, Valerie: the dissemination of perspective. A reprieve from the political, national-mythical biases of the popular media. And we need to give the poor writers a break. Calling them ingrates for critiquing their culture, or their adopted culture, or somebody else’s culture – so long as they do it with balance and sensitivity – is just one step away from censorship and propagandism.

Yours from a very high horse indeed,

Penelope.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

I have recently finished reading a certain quartet of books with red-edged pages and decidedly vampiric content, Valerie dearest.

I am sure you know the ones to which I am referring. In case you were wondering, the writing – need I say it? – is execrable. Occasionally nauseating. There are only so many times you can hear about the neverending bliss of eternal vampire sex without feeling just a teensy bit irritated, my dear. And yet they are outrageously, obscenely, addictive. Example: circumstance required me to lay the first book aside for a day when I was only halfway through. And let me tell you, I had my very crankiest pants on for every minute of that blasted twenty-four hours, darling. Excuse the French. The other three I read in a single night each. And they are not slim volumes, dear. I was snuggling down to sleep just when the birds were stretching their voices for the morning.

Thankfully, dear, I am not alone in my obsession. By Christmas 2008 the whole series was temporarily out of print. Bookstores had been bled dry. Teenaged boys began buying copies to keep up with their female counterparts. Movies began to be made. Collectors’ Editions appeared. Fans proudly admitted to being twihards. Nor were they limited to the ranks of the young. The kind lady who loaned me one of her four different editions (five if you count her audio books) was middle-aged. Husbands were sheepishly buying for their wives. I even saw an old man reading one once.

Have I mentioned, darling, that the writing is atrocious?

As you know, Valerie, I get cranky when I don’t get my beauty sleep. Lord knows I need it. So I was very keen to understand how these books were keeping me up past breaking dawn (apologies) when other works of far superior literary merit can sit meekly by my bedside whilst I snore.

Or snuffle. I’m sure I don’t snore, dear.

Now, Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird (to which I have committed the injustice of reading only half a page, and offer my sincerest apologies if I misremember it) opines that true plot, literary plot, emerges from characters. The more complex the characters, the more naturally plot will emerge. After all, plot is what happens to all of us everyday, simply through the interactions of our differing selves. Questionable writing, she says, occurs when an author sketches out a plot and then tacks some underdeveloped characters to it.

E.M. Forster would call such underdeveloped characters flat (as opposed to their more complex round counterparts). Now before you have me on toast, Valerie, flat is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it is essential to almost any work of storytelling. Even in real life, darling, the people we casually encounter and judge on a handful of personality traits could be called flat, simply by virtue of us not knowing them. Look at any work of literature, darling, and I’m sure you would find at least one flat character amongst all the carefully-developed Forsterian rounds.

But I think you will also find, darling, that the most popular genres of movies and fiction are comprised entirely of flat characters. Think of the old Italian Commedia dell’arte characters you still see in every sitcom ever made. Think of the characters of romance, crime, adventure, comedy, war, thriller, sci-fi, mystery, fantasy, pornography, western, mid-western, sou'western, middle-eastern. Think of Edward, Bella, Jacob. Flat! All flat!

And why would this be, dear? Simple: escapism. The less complex a character, the easier it is for us to identify with them. Now, in a work of serious literary intent, where the characters are impeccably rounded and just as complex as they please, pleasurable character- identification can be damn near impossible. What if we don’t like the protagonist? Being dragged through the intimate psychology of someone we normally wouldn’t talk to on a bus, dear, requires a certain amount of sticking power. Not many people are too comfy about living through someone whose thoughts, desires and morality are utterly foreign to their own. Commercial success depends on the simple characters. The flat ones. People with enough humanity to capture the reader, but not so much as to alienate him. Or her.

But darling, this worries me to no end. If I am correct (and you know, dear, that I am always correct) in saying that the vast majority of commercial storytelling (literary or cinematic) depends on the vicarious pleasures attainable through the use of simplified characters, then the stuff of popular culture must therefore be built upon and limited to the experiences shared and shareable by the majority of society.

Now this, in itself, is no problem. Indeed, it is the basis of all human interaction: stepping off your individual perch and finding common pecking-ground with others. What worries me, darling, are the unprecedented methods of mass-production and dissemination available to us now. At what point do texts cross a line between entertainment and prescription? At what point do all our possible ways of being become limited to those that we are shown by the mass-market? Typical ways of being a mother/father/teenager are beamed into our loungerooms every evening. Typical mums spruik "You'll Love Coles". Typical beauty is prescribed in film, music, books. Typical characters say typical things to each other amongst typically tangled plots.

We are agreed, Valerie, that we seek to emulate what we admire; also, that emulation is made easier by simplicity of character; also, that the dissemination of stereotypes has reached an unprecedented high. We have seen the devastating impacts of propaganda in countless wars; is mass-production its insidious counterpart? Does the mass-marketing of flat, prescriptive character roles inform the creation of mass-produced personalities? Is society beginning to lose value in individual thought, experience, insight? At what point does mass production become homogenisation?

Yours in unusual flummox,

Penelope