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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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