Absurd Enticements

The dead seal

2012-02-18T22:48:00.001+11:00

Obviously it wasn't really a dead and desiccated seal lying along the fence by the building site on Broadway, the sand seeping out of the gash in its side, its fur grown sticky from the rain that runs until it drowns something, day after day after day, and then, just as fiercely, disappears.

Baker's Game Easy

2012-02-04T09:06:00.001+11:00

I have an addiction to playing Baker’s Game Easy on my iPhone. Actually it is not so much an addiction to the game itself or to the elation of winning or even the anticipation of winning, but an obsession with trying to locate the shift during a game when I know for sure either that I am going to win it, however mindlessly I play from that moment onwards – or lose; a moment that is experienced as much as a disappointment as a thrill.

Verlaine at the HR Christmas drinks

2012-01-20T18:04:00.003+11:00

When his name came up she said that she had just been reading Edmund White’s biography of Rimbaud, and doing what all of us do – that is, googling the protagonists, Rimbaud and Verlaine – and as soon as she recognised our colleague in that famous painting (short nosed, bald and overly upright with his lover Rimbaud on one side and a flask of red wine on the other), she had to re-evaluate what he had been saying all year about his wife and their ADHD sons, who had their mother’s sense of humour (noticeable pause) – and also that imitation of the poor woman in Customer Service, which always had us laughing, since he could do her shoulders and her way of clutching at the cup she’d emblazoned with all the names of her long deceased cats. My friend said it was clear how this colleague had survived through the centuries. First, he was obviously intelligent, and then came his cunning way of insinuating himself into every drinks event that went on in Human Resources, when he really worked in Accounts – as of course he had never done a thing for HR (and the sheer quantity of drink he put away should have made them wary of hosting their Christmas event on site ever again). He only did Accounts.

No ride home

2012-01-16T13:06:00.000+11:00

Of course, the moment it lengthened its end, straining to perceive what I was, I could see that the thick black slug which had burped its blood on the kitchen floor -- trailing it after itself as if feigning an injury or suddenly overcome with bilious despair -- that this slug was in fact a leech that had taken a one hundred kilometre ride from its bed of mud and, like a fat boy ensconced in a beanbag in front of an endless PlayStation racing car track in someone else's house, seeped tears as he played since there was no ride home.

Girl with the wooden walking stick

2011-12-29T10:01:00.000+11:00

When I asked her about the old lady that passed our house very slowly on her wooden walking stick every day, wearing a woollen beanie, long coat and thick gloves even though it was the middle of summer, she explained that the supposed old lady was actually a girl of twenty-two and that no-one had the heart, given circumstances that she really didn't want to go into, to question the girl about the kind of eccentricity that really wasn't all that rare in this part of the state.

An authentic flavour of Christmas

2011-12-16T10:04:00.000+11:00

After yesterday I can say for certain that it is possible to get an authentic flavour of Christmas from one and a half hour's exposure to commercial radio and the several, tasteful tinsel and LED light decorations at the local suburban hairdresser's.

At least intact

2011-11-17T18:01:00.001+11:00

At the station I heard them arguing about whether the man was homeless. Who else knits a narrow scarf with baby blue wool over a Coles green bag as he walks, she was saying, than someone who is clearly mad and probably homeless? You have to look at the shoes, the other was saying. He has trodden the ends of his pants but his shoes look new -- cheap but new -- or not entirely new, she then conceded: at least intact.

Differing obsessions

2011-10-27T16:16:00.000+11:00

In the class she had some trouble trying to explain to her partner that the work she wanted to do in the future was to design prostheses (she no longer liked ordinary drawing, she was saying, it now made her bored), but when her partner explained his own unattainable dream, she couldn't understand him either -- it being a question, not so much of English vocabulary, as of differing obsessions.

That was only last week

2011-10-14T19:05:00.000+11:00

It was a smell, she told me. She'd been standing in the shop, just waiting around because the afternoon had been slow, when a smell she had smelled at the time of the accident slid into the space -- whether in through the vents or the lungs of the change-rooms -- such a physical, palpable smell, as if thick with scurf from the tyres, the brakes, the airbags expanding, or even the rent in the dashboard as the hot metal dark had belched from the body of the car. She could no longer stand or sit or talk or think. The boss sent her home for three days, with no pay of course.

That was only last week.

Getting pulled from below

2011-09-25T10:47:00.000+10:00

At the very end of the concert a laundromat only a few paces away but around the corner from the building exploded into flame -- but this, as we all discussed afterwards, had happened without any of us noticing. Not even when a fire truck passed us, as we stood on the footpath delaying our departure from this, the final concert, did we think to expect that the fire was somewhere close by. No-one expects to see the actual fire, I heard someone say when we went round the back and our throats began to catch on the orange lit smoke that was funnelling upwards from where we had just been and then, in a matter of minutes, began to seep through glass and brick to fill our houses with a smell that should have been scalded shirt but instead impersonated the floury ash of a gutted gumtree that was nowhere nearby.

And meanwhile, quietly, white suds running down the gutters into the stormwater drain, quivering in a tower for several seconds and then getting pulled from below.

In a single, short experience

2011-09-25T00:37:00.000+10:00

It was a hot breeze, but it was also cold, I explained to him on the phone. The wind was blowing my hair all over my face and this made it hard to notice what it actually was. I need to be still and calm to distinguish a wind that's hot from one that is cold in a single, short, experience.

Clearly impossible

2011-09-06T12:20:00.000+10:00

I heard them disagreeing about the woman on the bench who was conversing in a loud drunken voice with a bearded man on a cafe stool: one saying the fact that the woman was without feet or hands and yet still able to smoke and even talk as she was smoking was something that, curiously, heartened her; the other that the continuing existence of this woman, who was also substantially toothless, and whom she saw week after week in a similar spot on the street, not so much depressed her as made her fearful because she often imagined the woman following her as she went up the hill to the station in the mornings and calling out her name -- and then wrestling her to the ground in that blank part of the underpass, which was clearly impossible, and vile.

With only a slight bewilderment

2011-08-20T21:53:00.002+10:00

I heard how it was sad: how instead of interminable lectures about the Pritikin diet, Rife's discovery of excitable pathogenic spores, Jesus in India, the supposedly misleading Kyoto Protocol, the danger in fluorescent tubing, coffee, natural gas, pasteurised milk, the need to reverse and then eliminate poverty, droughts, osteoporosis, religious misunderstanding and to aim our nuclear weapons at the sky for the comets which are coming, he sits in his chair and listens with only a slight bewilderment to the kind of conversation he would never have understood in any of the past decades of his long long life, and when someone leaves the table, he shuffles on after them as if afraid to miss an occasion for something -- but at least, as she said, these days he is able to joke.

Two houses along

2011-08-05T18:17:00.000+10:00

When the rainbow lorikeet feeds its adolescent young in the tree two houses along, it's like a cat is hissing or someone with a leaking lung is trying to speak.

Five weeks on Facebook

2011-07-25T13:40:00.000+10:00

We'd all heard his joke: that out of his eleven weeks spent overseas, travelling from one city to another in Europe and the States -- reading in town halls, clubs, bars, festival tents -- and a month in a writer's residence with a Matterhorn view -- he wasted, as he put it, five weeks on Facebook, which was good for the rest of us at least, one of us said.

To be different to everyone else

2011-07-18T12:14:00.000+10:00

She told me that all through the first part of the concert at the studio she was distracted by a photograph on a cabinet: a wedding photograph that seemed to have a thick grey smear across the mouths of the young happy couple.

As the rest of us listened to Sondheim, Mozart, Cole Porter and Poulenc, she was so bothered that this photograph had a smear across the mouths as if deliberately placed there, as a sign of disapproval or even mourning, and therefore could pay attention to none of the songs. Had something happened to the photograph (such as mould) or was it a trick of what might have been a strong Sydney afternoon light in the park on the day that they had married -- a light that had also, she then noticed, cast a shadow across the bodies of the couple (perhaps a topiary, she was thinking, or thick cropped conifer on a rise on a hill)? It was just a wonder that someone had thought to place the couple in such a shadow for their photograph but, as she knew from bitter experience, so many weddings are photographed by well-meaning but incompetent (and unpaid) enthusiastic relatives or friends.

When the room lights came on for the break, and just as she was about to point out the grey on the photograph to me, she realised that the grey had in fact been a shadow that had been cast not by trees or mould but by the improvised stage lights that had silhouetted a narrow necked vase on the dresser and that the couple were actually a very ordinary looking couple and that the setting of the photograph no more remarkable or distinctive or strange than any normal looking photograph of a young couple in a park, and that this had disappointed her, strangely (as she said) because she had expected this singer with her Balinese puppets and cardboard Louis XVI mirror surrounds and Chinese vases to be different, she said, to everyone else.

On a winter's evening in Newtown

2011-07-08T18:25:00.000+10:00

I explained how at five thirty on a winter's evening in Newtown a magpie might carol in the brownish orange light of a streetlight and that the beggars near the station usually call you darling -- except the one on the upturned milk crate I gave two dollars to in an attempt to salve my irritated mind.

The one extra detail

2011-07-02T23:46:00.000+10:00

From his seventh floor student room, she heard, he could see the Eiffel Tower. He could also climb out onto the roof, although he had to be careful as he could slip and fall and die for sure -- whereupon she ruined the nearly Moulin Rouge image by a too detailed description of an eighth storey suicide over twenty years before: going into the context and the reactions of middle class Istanbul, as well as the thin red line from the mouth that the journalists had drawn onto the dead woman's photograph on page three of the paper -- this last the one extra detail that ruined the effect.

A functioning vegetable

2011-07-02T23:30:00.000+10:00

At lunch, after my colleagues explained to me how a young woman they had recently seen on television spent one lucid hour a day with her otherwise comatose boyfriend thanks to the administering of a sleeping drug which, among the non-comatose, has been known to prompt the users to assault and battery -- or even driving -- while asleep, Eliza who was eating a mandarin on a length of kitchen paper told us about her time on a neurological ward, where a young man who had suffered brain damage after a honeymoon ballooning accident spent his entire day wanking. There were endless meetings about what to do with him. She didn't remember what transpired. He was a vegetable, she said: but a functioning vegetable.

Sheets of humid acrylic

2011-06-17T14:31:00.000+10:00

Around a table only separated from the cold and wet of Blackheath by sheets of humid acrylic, he told us about the finger that someone he knew had found when he was clearing out the freezer. Admittedly it was a share household, and hence might have been lying in there for years, but no one seemed to know anything about it and so they just threw it out.

An odd enticing flower

2011-06-10T10:14:00.000+10:00

On the radio she explained that when the bee was attached by its head to a toothpick with dental glue, it was able to fly through a virtual reality, and from this they were able to learn how the bee could navigate the dimensions of this virtual reality which, for all we knew, could have been a featureless concrete plain with the odd enticing, or even very crudely imagined flower.

Very early to pray

2011-05-27T18:25:00.000+10:00

Although two of his fingers had been broken at work, and he still had a scar where he had been skinned by a circular saw, he told me that the only reason people in this country were so concerned for workplace safety was because Australian workers were drunk all the time and so got themselves killed, while he got up each day in the morning very early to pray.

Just slightly annoyed

2011-05-18T22:31:00.000+10:00

Several of us read how the police had no choice but to allow the teenage orphan to live for fifteen months with the suspected murderer after her father and mother and brothers and aunt had been killed. It was then we realised that the publicised effort the police had gone to hide the girl from a killer who, as we had read just after the event, must have so wanted to destroy the entire family one by one, bludgeoning them to death in their individual beds, their faces unrecognisable from the force of the blows -- going to such effort to hide the current location of this girl and to screen her face so that the murderer, as we were then being led to believe, would be unable to track her down where she was safe with family members -- that this entire, too elaborate effort had been as much for us the readers of the news as for the uncle the police had long suspected but been unable to prove anything against -- in fact more, said one of my colleagues. Just look at the photo of him. He is not surprised, just slightly annoyed.

The house of his dreams

2011-04-26T13:59:00.001+10:00

He explained to us that in the house of his dreams he is always alone -- the place is empty, desolate, disintegrating and filled with ugly, worn, disintegrating furniture; he is always alone in the sense that he has been abandoned by wife and daughters and nobody visits and the days pass by without anything happening, only eating and shitting and the sunlight travelling in long yellow shafts of dust along dark, warped floorboards he no longer bothers to vacuum.

He loves this term: the house of your dreams. His wife has the same dream, he has discovered, and these days they are powerless to avoid dreaming this dream unless they could stop themselves falling asleep or could force it so that they could sleep for a good six hours and never remember their dreams, whether they have them or not.

In the pose of a David

2011-04-13T23:23:00.000+10:00

On the way to the shops this evening, not wanting the man in the upstairs room without curtains to notice that I'd seen him from across the road, standing in the pose of a David (one hip up, one down) -- which these days connotes less an expensive threat to a neighbouring city state than an artist contemplating a canvas on an easel that he might have to change or destroy -- I only turned to look properly a couple of steps on, and so saw the flat screen television he was fixed in studying, and behind, in the Vermeer yellow light further back in the room, a small installation of sideboard, mugs, some cords and the oily black shine of some rock band poster on the wall.

A way of containing

2011-04-11T12:42:00.000+10:00

As he told me about how he had been called from class that day to drive into the city to find the brother of the nephew who, as the police were still surmising, had just murdered his girlfriend and step-son and then killed himself -- so he might tell the brother before a brutal and sensationalised version of the news could get to him through friends or even just the internet updates on his phone -- while he was telling me about the body which had now been flown into Sydney for the funeral and all the relatives who were coming to their house to drink tea and to mourn at all hours of the day -- he wore the same shy, even half embarrassed smile that, less than a month earlier, after the graduation of his son from Sydney University, seemed then only to be his way of containing an immensity of joy he was too shy of inflicting on anybody else.

A section of Japanese garden

2011-04-02T13:20:00.000+11:00

It was, as he described it, on ledge sticking out from the pedestrian bridge at Redfern station: years of southerlies blowing dust from Botany Bay had left enough soil for a section of a Japanese garden, with bright, lush moss and a Bonsai tree with yellow flowers, but it is rare that anyone looks at it because going up those stairs it's hard not to step on the heels of the person in front.

Not in the city but in the suburbs

2011-04-01T13:18:00.000+11:00

We laughed when we heard her say how it was impossible not to judge the figure of the overweight woman reading an article with the headline 'Fat and Fame Obsessed' in that free afternoon paper, MX, as she was walking along ahead of her the other evening, home from the station. She said she never read this paper as her work wasn't in the city but in the suburbs.

The lid

2011-03-19T20:10:00.000+11:00

All through the time she had been telling me what I had done wrong -- which dishes, containers and utensils I should have put in which configuration on the dish rack and how I shouldn't have said something particular (a something in particular which I always regret the moment I say it) -- all the time that I was listening to what she was saying and yet continuing with what must have seemed a dumb, persistent, even stubborn disregard for what should have been a self-evident washing up logic, I had been looking every now and then at an upturned lid that was stained with olive oil and the black, viscous remains of balsamic vinegar (which I was intending to avoid trying to wash in this load), and so when, the next day, I was looking for this lid to make a new dressing, I remembered the monologue about my illogical system -- the lid becoming a sign of this illogical system -- and so when it eventually turned up, I shouldn't have been surprised that it was even filthier than I remembered and had to be soaked.

Leaning from a window

2011-03-04T17:00:00.000+11:00

She told us during the break that she didn't usually remember her dreams -- and in fact this one seemed less of a dream than the experience of leaning from a window in a tower and looking down where, far below, her husband and the elder of her sons were running on the stone-paved quay by the steep undulations of a dark grey ocean, and chasing a turtle that was moving faster, she remembered thinking, than she ever expected a turtle to move. It was a very specific visual scene, with a minimum of elements, even a minimum of colours. There was nothing at all vague or elusive about it: just a leaning from a window and seeing them running and presumably then pulling her herself back to sit somewhere inside.

Envying the circle of dog youth

2011-02-25T17:01:00.001+11:00

When he came back from the park, he said he he'd never realised how many young people lived in Newtown, and primarily clean young people, as he called them, with very small dogs -- all Brazilian terriers, long-haired chihuahuas, whippets and pugs. There had been a large circle of these people on the top section of the grass. One of them had a black and white pug on a leash which was leaping in the middle of them, and the others were watching with those forced, sunny smiles that he remembered from when I was young and he'd taken me to the zoo with his sister and her friend -- all these overly, uncomfortably positive people, who seemed to assume by the way they were exclaiming that he, with his patched corduroy coat, must have been envying the youth that they were inordinately proud of -- and as well: that he had grandfatherly feelings for their dogs.

He also said that in the fenced off play area nearby, a young woman was sitting on the ground in front of a baby that had been clipped into a swing but was not swinging, and he could tell as he watched her (while he was waiting for me to return to let him in), that she was the one envying the circle of dog youth -- unless she was just staring at something else beyond them, say at the Moreton Bay fig trees at the edge of the grass.

At least she had done what she had to do

2011-02-21T21:30:00.000+11:00

At the coffee break our colleague told us how she had missed the start of the meeting because on the way to work she'd driven past a young woman in a short summer dress dangling at the end of a rope from a balcony railing over a garage -- not a real rope, as she said: more like a child's coloured skipping rope (which must have been hard to hold onto) -- and the girl had looked back at her as she passed; she had slowed right down and might even have stopped to ask if the girl was okay, but hadn't.

She told us that her first thought, actually, was that she had caught the girl in the middle of trying to break into the house, but the shortness of the rope and the ridiculous colours -- the sparkles she thought she had seen, or tassels even -- made it look as if the girl had been trying to get down from the balcony rather than up, and it was this puzzle about what the girl was doing or trying to do that occupied her as she turned into the car park when she arrived at work. But as soon as she got out of her car, she knew she couldn't go on to the meeting. The girl could have dropped from that balcony and broken her arm or her leg or fractured her skull. She could have come to in a hospital bed, with the one clear memory of the woman who had driven by in her car and hadn't stopped -- this woman who had looked at her full in the face only moments before her fall -- and she would have been able to describe this woman to someone -- if not to the police, who wouldn't have cared, but to her mother or her boyfriend, who would have kept his eyes peeled from then on for this bitch without a heart in a three year old Holden Astra with her initials on the plates.

And so she had to go back, she told us. She knew she'd be late for the meeting but she didn't have a choice. How would she ever be able to live with herself if something happened? She decided not to drive this time -- the car was too obvious -- but just to walk the few blocks, retracing the journey she only ever took in her car. She had to see if the girl was still dangling from the railing and if she was, she would offer to call someone -- such as the police, the girl's mother or the boyfriend. She would say to the girl that she'd been worried about her ever since she had passed in her car and so she thought that she should come back straightaway to see if she was all right, and the moment that she thought this thought about what she would say, she calmed right down. Then all the way down the street and around the corner, she prepared herself to see this girl and her house from much closer and from another perspective; you drive past somebody in a situation like that but it is different when you are in the street itself, and so she prepared to see that girl either dangling still or on the ground in a bleeding, summery mess close up.

It was then that she said that the girl had been fleshy and blonde and so couldn't possibly have been doing exercises in that dress as somebody else was suggesting -- the kind of girl that she would normally have nothing to say to -- and in fact, it was the thought of the other's blonde and probably insolent youth that made her hesitate to cross the street near the house in the end. The driveway was sloping and so she couldn't see the ground from where she eventually stopped on the other side of the street, but she was sure she could see that there was no one dangling from the railing on the balcony, and that the rope had gone; after all, if the girl had fallen, the rope would have still been there.

As she walked away and back towards the meeting which was now nearly twenty minutes in, she was glad that at least she had done what she had to do.

Of course just as she was turning into our building, she heard a siren go by -- it was either an ambulance or the police -- and for a moment her heart started to race, but as she said (and the rest of us agreed) we are always hearing sirens like that in the streets around here. It's not exactly a dangerous suburb but still, for many reasons, most of us prefer to drive to work rather than to walk or to catch the bus or train.

It's my house not yours

2011-02-18T18:04:00.001+11:00

It's not your house, I heard her shout at her six year old child in Stanmore: It's my house not yours.

The hysteria of the internet

2011-02-04T12:03:00.001+11:00

After we killed the wolf spider -- first attacking it with spray until it was white and then flattening it under a brick (since I had read on a website that it could kill a dog in three hours) -- I learned from the Australian Museum that the symptoms of their bite are usually minor, restricted to local pain or itchiness, and so lay awake for a while, thousands of kilometres south of the cyclone, pondering the hysteria of the internet and other related subjects.

So she shouldn't run out of staying power

2011-02-02T20:24:00.000+11:00

When she rang from a nearby Sydney suburb she told me how she had been watching the live streaming of the early stages of Cyclone Yasi on some website, where she saw a red towel lashing around in a palm tree through somebody's window -- and how she had been following the Twittering, was addicted to the Twittering -- but now thought she should call me so she shouldn't run out of staying power. And how terrible it was; it was one of those terrible things.

As fans

2011-01-26T15:43:00.001+11:00

I demonstrated how, even though Samuel Beckett's First Love and Other Stories, is in fact taller and wider than my Livre de Poche edition of Nerval's Sylvie, the latter being thinner makes it a much better fan in this weather, and that The Cultural Cringe by A. A. Phillips, although very slightly taller than the Nerval, a fraction thinner and much the same width, loses what it gains in height and loses in depth by a textured cover that bends less easily and must trap the air.

Knocking Wagner onto the floor

2011-01-26T13:00:00.000+11:00

She maintained that she only held on to her assertion that Wagner was kitsch, quoting from Kundera here -- in fact quoting Kundera's definition of kitsch which was the kitsch that mattered, as she said, in this culture of ours which pretends that kitsch is only the tooth bling of the TV characters Kath and Kim, when in fact it makes grow all our most noblest bad lines and seemingly moving endings -- only holding onto this assertion about Wagner even if she didn't know anything about Wagner -- since she was seized with an urge to destroy. And besides, against her admittedly more knowledgeable friend's flat dismissal of everything she had to say, it was always preferable to knock Wagner onto the floor than do anything else.

Writing the treatise

2011-01-24T18:15:00.000+11:00

Although I actually said: every time I pick up Gitta Honegger's biography of Thomas Bernhard, a mosquito circles around me, trying to bite my hands, she thought I had said Thomas a Becket, and from this evolved an entirely different conversation from the one I might have had about this writer that nobody around me has read -- or entomology, of course, since mosquitoes have formed the one long plague of these past several weeks, and to think otherwise, as I harangued her later, you would have to have been living in a fridge or the very interior of an abandoned lime works, merrily writing the treatise your companion, at the point of homicidal mania, has been trying to write for years.

A woman cogently arguing with no one

2011-01-14T10:45:00.000+11:00

Just to list them: first a woman cogently arguing with no one, unless it was the toddler, who wasn't answering; second, a woman in a long-sleeved glittering top in the heat pulling along a young child who pulled along with him a flowering plant that was soon pulled out of the soil; third, an elderly golden retriever trailing a long black udder in the lawn.

Finally: when crossing the park, is it better to walk in the grey rut that everyone has worn in the grass or to walk, as I do for no clear reason, about a metre parallel?

Happiness from a rascal

2011-01-12T14:38:00.001+11:00

When I told her that I would never give money to the particular busker we saw pocketing the gold coins some people had given him, presumably so that the contents of his guitar case might continue to look pathetic, she said how, when she'd given him two dollars a week ago and he'd thanked her and told her she'd been the first to give anything all morning, even someone saying that he had just said the same thing to her had failed to erase the stupid lightheaded happiness she was experiencing -- the kind of happiness from a rascal, as she said, you'd like to see cuffed.

Misplaced imitations

2010-12-22T09:17:00.000+11:00

I've often heard how his mother, once a promising young artist, was so thrown by the observation, in a review of her first solo exhibition, that her paintings were thoroughly in a realist tradition (Canberra Times, 1969), that she has spent the subsequent decades in ever increasing despair and obscurity as she works on her misplaced imitations of Remedios Varo.

This system for herself

2010-12-11T19:07:00.000+11:00

My neighbour described how from being initially scornful of the way, as she said, this young girl who lived in our street walked along -- swivelling her hips in her slender, long jeans, the pale of her wrists turned forwards and her arms moving loosely alternately with her legs -- the whole effect, as she said, of a model stepping out in casual attire -- how, from feeling annoyed by this girl who never seemed to carry any kind of bag (as if she never had any errand but her walk along the catwalk of the street), this neighbour two doors along from my house (near the park) had taken to copying the girl's way of turning the pale of her wrists forwards and swinging them loosely as she walked since she could attest it had already begun to improve her posture -- already she felt years and years younger; much taller; even slim -- and so now she could see there was a system in the walk (no doubt a secret of the catwalk) and that she was pleased that she had begun to learn this system for herself.

Curious and interesting facts

2010-12-01T18:53:00.000+11:00

My colleague recalled how she had once given offence to a young waitress at a café near one of the more exclusive beaches in the Sydney region when she had observed the 'curious and interesting facts', as they were called, that decorated the menu (and were researched by the owner, the waitress had said, on the internet) reminded her of the trivia that was printed on Libra sanitary pad wax paper strips, but once said, she told me, you couldn't take it back.

No way of knowing

2010-11-28T00:59:00.001+11:00

As I walked past a young couple sitting out the front of a cafe in the early evening I heard the girl say, I have Crohn's disease, do you know what that is? and the boy said, yes he did, but I kept on walking and so had no way of knowing how their conversation developed from such a beginning.

Deus Ex Machina

2010-11-24T13:01:00.001+11:00

Although we laughed when we heard how she had overheard some people on the bus as they passed the cafe and motorcycle shop on Parramatta Road, Deus Ex Machina -- with one of them saying, what was this thing from China, this thing about eczema from China, and the other saying it was only the name of a website (which was how it was written in fact, the words running together, and the dot com dot au) -- the thought that this was what they made of such a sign, and such a sign outside such a shop, was as bizarre as it was also depressing, as one of us said before standing up to leave. For her the word sex had stood out most of all.

And yet

2010-11-17T18:52:00.000+11:00

And yet, she added, whenever she has seen identical twins together - or at least people she has taken to be identical twins - it has never been the similarity that she has noticed, but only the near similarity; the difficulty in ascertaining whether it is the similarity or in fact the lack of similarity that she is noticing.

Only an aunt

2010-11-12T23:21:00.000+11:00

She told us today about the twin grandmothers she sees with a stroller in her street in the afternoons - that the slight differences in hair length and shirt prints only serve to emphasise the identical cut and colour of their hair, the identical cut of their shirts and even their swaying way of walking, and she can see that their lives until this point have been led in completely different places (their differently printed shirts give this away), and how therefore it is a miracle that two otherwise very separate beings, through the strange workings out of luck and choice and geographical distance, can nevertheless come to this: one of them the grandmother, surely, and the other only an aunt.

For the letting of blood

2010-11-10T08:38:00.000+11:00

When it came down to it - out of the two alternative careers that others were suggesting in the wake of the collapse of our industry - two careers we could take up after only a very short period of training - one of us admitted to preferring the real estate option, and the other: phlebotomy, the practice of opening a vein for the letting of blood.

Excellent work

2010-10-31T21:45:00.000+11:00

The whole year they were in the U.K., she told us, their son kept getting D school reports from Australia for 'not handing in his assessments.' And yet, not long after their return, one of his teachers at the parent and teacher evening said that, as long as he kept up the excellent work he'd been doing in the first half of the year, he should continue to do very well.

Now wearing a muzzle

2010-10-31T21:39:00.000+11:00

He told us that he would never have remembered the dog which had bit him over a year ago, drawing blood, had the owner not approached him recently while he was crossing the park, so she could show him how her dog was now wearing a muzzle.

It could have been the building

2010-10-20T17:33:00.000+11:00

We heard how the crowd in The Butterfly in Shanghai went wild when his jazz trumpet soloing touched on the tune of Frère Jacques - how at first he couldn't believe that the simple notes could have this effect - how then he let rip, as he put it, with this nursery revival. Even when he learned, that evening, that the tune had a particular association with the student rebellion in Tiananmen Square, he couldn't help thinking that his solo had stirred something more fundamental in the audience; of course it could have been the building, he thought, which was cuter than cute.

A kind of radiance

2010-10-17T14:59:00.000+11:00

Aurally, she said, the flu had given everything around her a kind of radiance. That was one way of thinking of it. The other was to notice how this everything dispersed as it tried to get in to her past the over-whelming loudness, the ringing thick white, of her own ears.

Maybe like

2010-10-14T22:25:00.002+11:00

He told me about how the primary school boys I'd just seen leaving buy the same things from his shop every day in the afternoon and how one of them often has hundreds or even thousands of dollars in his wallet, but all in fifty or a hundred dollar notes - never less than fifty - and how once he'd asked the kid if he loved the father who gave him the money, and the kid had said: no, not love, maybe like, and he had then told me how his own father had beaten him when, playing as a kid alone in the park across the road from the shop, he had yelled and yelled for his dad to come over and watch him on the swings.

Seemed to be alive

2010-10-02T23:07:00.001+10:00

On their last night of the residency, they said they had gone for a walk in the rain and heard a distant party, or the music of a distant party - impossible to believe, they thought, after these weeks of rural quiet, and yet, every night so far, in the dark flanks of the Boydian cliffs - visible from so far away, on the other side of paddocks and trees, and a river (invisible) - they had always seen a single luminous stripe, and if they watched it they could see faint shadows moving inside it: how in fact this single stripe of light seemed to be alive.

Already old hands

2010-10-01T14:19:00.000+10:00

As if already old hands at this kind of country living, I heard them tell the others that they had only four rings of water left in their tank.

The sign

2010-09-28T20:46:00.002+10:00

The sign says that Bundanon is closed even though the gate is always open. Even when Bundanon is open the sign always says it is closed.

Perspective

2010-09-28T11:54:00.002+10:00

On the rocky hill, among the Cycas, we had a strange perspective on the river – as if we were tilting over it and the calm, seaward ripples were running under us, as we should have known.

Listen

A painting sized slit

2010-09-26T18:47:00.004+10:00

We heard how Boyd cut a painting sized slit in his studio with a chainsaw while the photographer was having a cup of coffee so that the painting might be got out and a photograph taken from a better distance.

His studio - perhaps because it is still being used by his son - smells of turps and oil, which is to say of limitless ambition.

Figures of eight

2010-09-26T16:43:00.000+10:00

She told us that, according to Google, the wombat's mating chase is in figures of eights.

Human-sized cage

2010-09-25T11:25:00.001+10:00

We watched her walking along the road inside the tall human-sized cage she had been making during the last several days outside our bathroom window. Necessarily she had to walk slowly.

Furred water

2010-09-24T08:31:00.006+10:00

She observed, later, that down at the Shoalhaven River at dusk, you might have just entered a gallery with all the lights turned off, and across the smooth water, continuing to be reflective of the rocks and leaning trees that Boyd had placed there, a defined shape of furred water runs at you in a silent, maniacal fury, and this was the bit that she wanted to paint.

Listen

Hiatus

2010-09-23T10:59:00.005+10:00

While we were looking with white gloved hands at the more deteriorated and fragile parts of the Arthur Boyd education collection - a piece from the Nebuchadnezzer series, flaking if it flexed on perspex, drawers of oil soaked canvases cut, by the artist, from frames and left in a ship's container - I heard her say that nothing had caused such a hiatus in her work as when a gallery director had pressured her to stop using children's textas and student quality oils.

Farm association

2010-09-22T21:20:00.002+10:00

How was it, I asked, that I thought the smell came from the cows - the cows that had to be hundreds of metres away from us? Although I had known there were wombats under the house, and had even related this fact in an email, just to see one grazing in the late afternoon, its head moving back and forth as it tugged, like a cow or a horse, reminded me of the wool shop in Newtown where, once, I had held the owner's baby wombat, and how a single smear from it on my jacket had infused our house with a pasty green stink and gave my city-bought acrylic wool a farm association.

Art works

2010-09-22T13:02:00.004+10:00

On an artists' residency, even the branches and leaves that have fallen in certain ways across a bush track, on any of the walks that radiate out from the site, should not be assumed to have fallen there 'naturally'.

Listen

Amphitheatre

2010-09-22T12:50:00.005+10:00

A 'natural' amphitheatre, such as this one at Bundanon, should not first put me in mind of the decayed concrete remnants of the fascist era amphitheatre, with its rows of backless post and lintel benches, that used still to be inside the ancient fortress of Yedikule, along the Theodosian walls of Istanbul - rather, it should, as it does with some conscious effort, recall the scalloped bush amphitheatre of my primary school and, again by conscious association, the eucalyptus fringed amphitheatre of Miletus, which was equally hummed around by insects when we saw it in 1990.

Ordinarily, you would think it would be the sensuous associations of the insects and the trees which stirred my mind and not these simple benches, made of log sections and planks.

In my place

2010-09-22T11:02:00.005+10:00

All the time, sitting here looking out at the quiet of the country, I could be easily convinced that the beings there (the cows, the birds, the flies) are looking in at me, or if not (because they have so many better, more important things to do), have at least looked at me, heard me or smelt me once, and in a single, short moment, dismissed me.

Communicating with the outside

2010-09-21T17:59:00.003+10:00

I wrote in the comments that the first thing you need to do at a remote artists' residency out of mobile reach is to do all you can to find ways of communicating with the outside.

A number of ways

2010-09-02T10:08:00.003+10:00

Yesterday, I passed two different rubbish removal utes many streets apart, with two different teams of workers removing their rubbish.

As a sign this can be interpreted in a number of ways.

Theory of language

2010-08-28T16:43:00.007+10:00

She told me her theory of language: how most languages distinguished the informal you from the formal you - had at least two yous - and how the formal and the plural form were generally the same. She also said that English had lost the informal you (the thou), not the formal one as most people thought, and that this must have happened as a result of a deliberate rejection - a rejection that was occurring right now among the more pretentious of the middle classes in France; how those families in Versailles who wished to seem smart (she had heard) were instructing their children to address them with the formal you only - with vous, rather than tu - and if this rejection had successfully occurred in the English speaking world, where the thou had been banished from everywhere with the exception only of the pubs of Yorkshire, new editions of the King James Bible and collections of old poetry that nobody read - these viral middle classes whose feeling for language was blunt in the extreme - it was only among the supposedly uneducated in Australia that it had slipped in sidewards through a sleight of words, since the plural form youse was being used, she had noticed, not only for the you in the plural but also for formal situations in the singular - a choice of language, she said, which was both intelligent and shrewd. Last week, she was walking along a street which a team of workmen were digging up when she was asked, could youse just cross over to the footpath please? and as far as she could recall she was alone at the time.

The suited man's smile

2010-08-11T17:11:00.005+10:00

Just now I described how, as I approached Yaama Dhiyaan and could see the television vans parked on the raised part under the Carriageworks sign, I reasoned that there must be an event going on and, since it was less than two weeks before the election, an Aboriginal political event, or at least a political event that attempted to connect itself with things Aboriginal, and when a suited man smiled at me as he passed me on the path, I decided that this man had smiled because, either as a politician or as a journalist, he had assumed that he would be recognisable even to someone who never watched television – and how, while reflecting on these kinds of thoughts I went to cross the road and, happening to look back in the direction he had gone, I saw that the suited man was talking to someone who would have been behind me on the path at the moment he smiled, and I could see that there was really no way of telling whether the suited man’s smile had had anything to do with me at all.

Backtrack

2010-08-04T16:32:00.005+10:00

We have been told that the six-year girl who was supposed to have gone to bed at nine thirty, twenty minutes before the end of a screening of The Golden Compass on Saturday evening, and been found missing twelve hours later has not been seen by anybody apart from her mother and stepfather for nearly a month. The police have said: It’s important for us to try to backtrack if we can to establish her last movements.

What trees could do

2010-07-26T21:58:00.010+10:00

We heard how, after one of her students had broken his golf club swinging at a ball under a tree near Dural, the broken piece had ended up piercing both his liver and his inferior vena cava - an accident that might have been fatal if it had not been for the vascular surgeon who had been putting nearby - and how after this freak accident on the green, she had become quite a bit scared of what trees could do.

Failed to do anything

2010-07-13T17:34:00.015+10:00

As soon as she got back this afternoon she told us that on the escalator down from the shopping centre she had been standing behind an old man who was carrying a green parachute silk shopping bag that was identical to hers.

Since she was standing directly behind him, she couldn't help noticing the way the tanned skin at the top of his skull was surrounded by soft white hair, and it was then (having noticed the skin and the hair - and the way that the burden in his green silk bag seemed so light, so inconsequential) that she could imagine leaning forwards to address the old man as her friend Kate would have done: remarking on their identical bags and, perhaps, their similar contents, making a joke of it; using the bags as a pretext for making contact with someone.

But even as she imagined doing this - and at the same time becoming convinced that she would never do such a thing - the man turned a little to one side and, from the nose and the glasses (from above), she could see that he was the famous writer that she had often seen in the centre, either buying rice, or at the dry cleaners or reading a paper near the light well - and she couldn't help thinking of all the times when she had been close to speaking to this famous writer in her life - when, for various reasons (the wrong digit in a phone number, an importunate question from somebody else that had prevented her approach at a particular moment), she had taken advantage of her helplessness and actively failed to do anything.

At any cost

2010-06-30T15:32:00.000+10:00

All through the interview she kept using this phrase: She wouldn’t go back to Japan, she wanted a class, she wanted to keep studying English at any cost.

When she was a child she drowned

2010-06-25T22:06:00.010+10:00

Every morning, she told us, she gets up early to clean her brother-in-law's pool even though she never goes swimming herself. When she was a child, she said, she drowned.

The job of her dreams

2010-06-23T14:19:00.006+10:00

I learned how, all along, the terrible smell in the classroom that my colleague had taken for a Chinese concoction – and I for the evidence of un-flossed teeth – had in fact been emanating from one of our very best students who, despite her cancerous abscess, had been coming every day in an effort to improve her English and get the job, as she had written in a class survey, of her dreams.

Wing

2010-06-16T16:47:00.007+10:00

The grey pigeon's wing I saw in the dirt at the base of the tree made me think of the two white wings that were the only remnants I had found in the chook house of the pink-legged, grumpy, flightless, fan-tailed pigeon that used to lord it over the cat and the rabbit when I was a child - only this wing in the dirt was far less accusing.

Relief

2010-06-10T09:06:00.004+10:00

She described the relief in the dream when you go back to the pub after it's closed, to find the book that you photocopied there - the book that doesn't belong to you and which you have to return and which, in the chaotic office that is the pub, you are unable to find - the relief, when you return a possible second or third time after that first search, as you realise that there is no necessity of finding it after all because, surely, this book that you are looking for is only a dream.

The ice-cream excursion

2010-06-09T09:16:00.008+10:00

I heard how, twice a week, those in the dementia unit were driven to Manly for ice-creams and that they were not allowed to get out of the bus - and so they had to consume their ice-creams while sitting in their seats.

I also heard that, during one of these excursions, the driver of the bus had informed a patient named a'Beckett that his ancestor had killed the other's ancestor, and that he had proof of this connection if he wanted to look.

Going to Fisher

2010-06-06T21:26:00.007+10:00

When she rang today she said that, just as it didn't seem surprising that her cousin, who usually lived 357 kilometres west, should ring from 5 blocks north from her on this, the very same day that she had been mentioned twice (once regarding her stance on religion and the other to do with her commerce in spelt wheat) it was also in keeping that she should begin to read Ghosts by César Aira and go to Fisher Library - the place of her first employment, where she had once learned Spanish from her Argentinean, Chilean and Uruguayan fellow workers (only to forget it completely a year or two later) - going to Fisher, as it was called, to borrow books, with her daughter, on Akhenatan and Pinochet.

Three references to Troy

2010-06-04T23:50:00.012+10:00

She said that the first was when the security guard told her that Virgil didn't say to beware Pommies bearing gifts as he gave her a block of chocolate; the second was hearing The Chasers delivering and attempting to deliver a wooden horse to consulates all over Sydney (in another room, on Youtube); the third was hearing someone say it was what the Greeks done at Troy on a film - Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - that was playing on television.

This happened today.

The hairdresser and the Jew

2010-06-02T14:27:00.005+10:00

As he cut my hair he talked about the recent incident with the Turkish boat and the Israelis - saying that the Turks in the boat had been provocative and that Hamas was just a bunch of terrorists - until the man sitting next to me intervened in defence of the Palestinians, and so all the time the hairdresser was cutting my hair, the comments went back and forth and I could hardly say a thing.

Even when his own haircut was over, the other customer chose to stay to continue to talk. He was a Jew, he said, but he did not support what Israel was doing. A lot of his family in Europe had been killed by the Nazis and still he believed that this did not give the Israelis the right to do the same themselves. The hairdresser then said that he had grown up with Jews and so he understood what the Israelis were feeling. They had warned that boat, he said. It was like a puppy dog being surrounded by dobermans, and: what would you do if your neighbours kept slapping you in the face?

This last question he directed to me through the mirror and, in the nature of the situation (since I was stuck in the chair), I had to look back.

Repetition

2010-05-26T16:17:00.007+10:00

To illustrate her theory of repetition and disaster, she described the way her walk that morning had contained several features that were a precise repetition of the day before: how she had approached all three sets of lights at the exact same moment in their cycles that she had approached those lights on the previous day - how she had passed a woman near some trees whom she had passed near those same thin trees on the previous day - and how when meeting a person she hadn't seen for a while, this person had smiled and spoken with the same bright, cheerful intonations of sarcasm that this person had used many times on many previous occasions and so, during all of the other more immediate repetitions (which actually followed on from this meeting in the course of the walk), she was unable to enjoy the repetitions for what they were and could only brace herself, as she said, for worse to come.

Suicide isn't news

2010-05-26T15:45:00.002+10:00

As she passed me in the park, talking into her mobile, I heard only this: but suicide isn't news.

Prose couplets

2010-05-05T12:29:00.006+10:00

She showed me photos of her tiny, purpling, premature twins in their plastic beds.
Later, I saw a woman in high stiletto heels at the doors of a flat. She was holding a baby.

As I watched him run across the road, dodging the traffic, I couldn't help noticing that his artificial leg had affected neither his stride nor his confidence.
Less than two minutes later I was jay-walking myself.

As a friend on Facebook

2010-05-02T21:29:00.003+10:00

At the reception a woman approached and said to my friend that she recognised her, that she had just added my friend as a friend on Facebook; my friend said she thought she recognised the other woman too, and so they began to chat.

You're beautiful

2010-04-28T17:46:00.008+10:00

She told me that she'd grown used to the noise of her neighbours through the wall. One played Michael Jackson all the time. The other cabaret, and when he played James Brown's You're Beautiful over and over - end to end, as she said, all day and all night - she assumed he was feeling low.

Only three removes

2010-04-17T15:17:00.010+10:00

Today I am only three removes from Kafka, having talked to someone who has talked to a concert pianist - a Holocaust survivor - who used to know him (and didn't think him nice).

Listen

Abcde

2010-04-02T22:59:00.001+11:00

She told us that, in her work as a doctor, she’d seen many young patients whose first names were Abcde. One patient might have been accidental, perhaps, or the first random find on an internet search; perhaps it was a joke, we thought, like the names Zoe Bowie and Telephone Booth, or a situation where migrants who didn’t speak English wrote the only five letters they had ever been taught. But the fact remains that there is more than one child called Abcde – and all of them white, she said, with Australian born parents. It had to be the fashion, we decided: la mode. Le chic.

The pronunciation, of course, is not straightforward.

In Africa

2010-03-10T18:14:00.004+11:00

In Africa, he said, he didn’t have to wonder what to do with paper in the way he had to wonder what to do with it here – carrying it around in his bag, mostly – sometimes his mother carrying it – they all were carrying it – sometimes one of them carried the paper that the other person needed but couldn’t get until that person returned; he had missed appointments because the paper he needed was in somebody else’s bag; in Africa, he said, if anyone had paper, you took it and sold it for food.

Pens in their pockets

2010-03-10T18:08:00.001+11:00

The night that Qirkz was closed down, it is said that the people who had been sent from the council to turn out the audience were identified by the way they wore shirts with pens in their pockets.

Nostulgia

2010-03-10T18:02:00.002+11:00

At the conference, as soon as she pronounced the word nostalgia with a blunt ‘u’ in the middle – saying nostulgia, in this way, at least five or six times – I became too distracted to follow what she was saying.

About the birds

2010-02-10T19:52:00.005+11:00

He was amazed, he told me, about the birds – about their complicated calls and the way they fly fast towards each other but never seem to collide. It was the first of a new kind of conversation with him. In all the years of my life until this moment, I was thinking, my father has never talked to me about the birds.

The first evening back

2010-02-10T19:52:00.001+11:00

The first evening back, the house was menacing and close, and the sounds and the humidity pressed in through every crack in the building.

When I travel

2010-02-10T19:49:00.001+11:00

When I travel, I kept saying, my brain works differently. It stops being able to follow a thought. It watches itself watching or else it gapes.

Dada

2009-12-30T09:45:00.005+11:00

On the way back from looking at a house that Lenin had once lived in, we saw a Dada house, or at least a house in which, according to a plaque, the spirit of Dada had been revived in 2002. Two young men smoking at a window upstairs for our camera. Downstairs, the skin of a black and white cat on a wall.

Sweeter and sweeter

2009-12-08T00:14:00.001+11:00

She explained that the substitute sugar in artificially sweetened drinks and lollies not only passed through the body intact, but also through the sewerage processors – which meant, as she said, that our water was getting sweeter and sweeter – all the water on the planet becoming sweeter and sweeter; an idea that not only turned our stomachs but depressed us all quite a lot.

Cut

2009-11-14T12:49:00.000+11:00

Yesterday, on my way to the station – to a concert, as it happened, of Brazilian percussionists – a woman walked out from the hairdressers a few paces in front of me – from under a roller door that had been partly pulled down – it was nearly six, I remember, the hairdressers were closing. She stopped for a moment and put her hand to her throat. Her hair was wet, I noticed, and newly cut.

Wireless

2009-11-03T22:15:00.000+11:00

We learned that fast wireless networking was invented by an Australian astronomer who was on the look out for mini black holes in space and that the astronomer never found those mini black holes.

Roundabout

2009-10-08T19:44:00.000+11:00

As I was crossing right over the top of the roundabout in the middle of the intersection, a woman with orange make-up approached to say, can I ask you something? At my awkward reply that, yes she could ask me, but I had to be somewhere quickly, she turned aside to speak to herself: nah, I’m not going to say something quickly. I’m not saying something quickly to you.