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.