snap up a much-wanted present for jaqi now!

I know you love these rare opportunities…

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200358539996&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:AU:1123

With thanks to my inimitable research assistant Susan

damn censorship

I’m puzzled by the precise wording of the petition, or at least this version of it – “miss the vast majority of unwanted content”? – but I know what they mean; I’m aware of Government manoeuvres to introduce mandatory nationwide Internet filtering, and I can’t think of a more urgent matter for objection within these borders. From this widget, created by the marvellous people at GetUp, you can sign the petition, email your friends about it, or embed the little wonder on your own page. Currently approaching 88 000 signatures, they’re aiming for 95 000. Please take 10 seconds to sign the petition and protect your future access to information and resources – if you want more information on the Government plans and the GetUp campaign, just click through to the GetUp site.

……………………….damn technology

Bugger it. No matter what I try, the marvellous widget won’t come up: no doubt the fault lies with me rather than the boffins at GetUp. IT-minded readers are welcome to query the problem with me (after signing the petition, of course). Don’t let my technical limits retard you – just click on either of the links above. They open in a new window and will give you immediate access to all the necessary info and resources – as well as the chance to ensure the Rudd government doesn’t block our access to same (without even telling us what we’re not allowed to see).

Oh, and if you want a bit of neutral (ie, sans GetUp’s righteous moral outrage) reportage on the subject, here’s the Sydney Morning Herald story from December 5.

women travelling, women writing

I’ve been reading the Virago Book of Women Travellers and godsalive but I’ve got itchy feet. Fifty-two intrepid dames roamin’ an’ writin’ – indeed rewriting – the surface of the earth, from the early 1700s to the end of the 20th century. Some were prim, some were scandalous, some were ecstatic, some were sarcastic, but their combined visions and the concerted expression thereof have been an exhilarating read.

I picked that book up at a stall on the King Street footpath, Newtown, just as I was finishing another woman’s memoirs of a travelling life – Anything But Ordinary: the nine lives of Cecile Dorward, by the lady herself and journalist Ron Davidson. Cecile was born in 1911 to a European family in middle-class London, her childhood was happy enough though her education was sketchy. She married an English professor of philosophy, and they bought a canal-boat and traversed the inland waterways of England. But the professor left Cecile a childless widow in her early forties, and she spent much of the rest of her life in a succession of campervans, traversing several continents including Australia, where she settled in Perth, whence she made regular and gradually shorter excursions till her death in 2004 at the fine old age of ninety-three.

Unfortunately, the glow of her undoubted spirit, intelligence, wit, and charm is somewhat dimmed by rather turgid prose and occasionally downright flat-footed syntax:

“This amorous attitude by Italian men towards me, when I was just a few days short of fifty-nine, was extraordinary. It was not even as if I were wearing my chestnut wig which made me look ten to fifteen years younger and made some men in cars honk in excitement. Men are easily fooled I mused as I drove towards Rome, now only two hours away.”

See what I mean? Great material, clumsy arrangement. I turn back to the Virago anthology, to Margaret Fountaine’s reminiscences about her own travels in Italy, around 1880, catching butterflies and men:

“Almost like two children together, I and this dark-eyed youth would chase the glorious Charaxes Iasius… quarrelling and disputing sometimes in hot discussions, while the music of the beautiful language in which we always conversed would add power and grace to our words.”

Rhythm, romance, drama and precision. Likewise, consider a few lines from the delectable Maud Parrish, describing her unsuccessful attempt to get a divorce in 1890s San Francisco:

“As I rose to leave the courtroom, the fine old East delegation” – her husband’s family – “sneered a bit too much for my little five-foot-two mother who was born and raised in California. She knocked a couple of teeth down my still husband’s throat… Soon the whole courtroom was in an uproar… I heard a skull crack with a noise like a batted baseball. Even a heavy chair slid off a bald head in a way that made me wince as I held my hand over my eyes.”

Now that’s tone. Parrish ran away to the Yukon, where she worked as a dance-hall girl, so her story just gets racier and racier; by the turn of the century she was running a gambling house in Peking. Her memoir, Nine Pounds of Luggage, was published in 1939, and was the only book she ever wrote. I’d love to read it but it’s out of print. Amazon lists a couple of copies available for about US$150 – feel free to band together for my Christmas present.

In the meantime, there’s plenty more in the Virago. For example, the crisply sarcastic tones of a woman known only as Mrs F. D. Bridges (those would be the initials of her husband, with whom she was travelling), whose journal records a visit to Salt Lake City sometime around the late 1870s:

“Persecution is proverbially good for a Church, and the Mormons had plenty of it, and throve accordingly.” She is scathing about polygamy and the terms of a Mormon marriage: “”Till death do us part,” is easy of comprehension; but here you may marry for “Time and Eternity,” or you may enter into a matrimonial engagement for “Time,” or “Eternity,” or you may unite yourself in Celestial marriage to some defunct Saint; or a widow may, with the consent of the Church, arrange a marriage for her deceased husband with some eligible deceased friend; and at last I got puzzled and came away with the impression that in Utah a man may marry his own widow.”

Or Mary Kingsley’s droll description of an encounter with a crocodile while navigating a West African swamp in 1894:

“On one occasion… a mightly Silurian, as The Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance. I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew, and I paddled into the very middle of the lagoon, hoping the water there was too deep for him or any of his friends to repeat the performance.”

Or, for contrast, the feverishly transcendent tones of Isabelle Eberhardt, who abandoned her aristocratic Swiss family to wander North Africa, a convert to Islam, dressed as a man, outcast, drug-addicted, paranoid and destitute. She died in a flash flood in 1904, aged 28, but during her last months she was keeping a diary:

“How long will I be able to hold out?

How can one explain the fact that at home, where I had warm clothes, an outstandingly healthy diet, and Mummy’s idolatrous care, the slightest chill I caught would degenerate into bronchitis; whereas here, having suffered freezing temperatures at El Oued… having travelled in all kinds of weather, while literally always getting wet feet, going around in thin clothes and torn shoes, I don’t even catch a cold?

The human body is nothing, the human soul is all.”

And savour this cracker of an opening line from Emily Hahn, writing for the New Yorker in 1937:

“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.”

Ah, they just make me want to toss my to-do list, give my real estate agent the finger, grab my laptop and jump in the Kombi.

tedia

I used the word ‘tedia’ in conversation …then paused, and said ‘I think I just made that up.’ We googled it: plenty of Tedia as company names and such, but no Wikipedia entry and when we added the define command it couldn’t. So, subject to whatever a more rigorous search may turn up, I hereby define tedia as: pl. of tedium, meaning (a/the range of) tedious things and/or events.

The sentence I found myself using it in went something like this: Paying those parking fines is just one of the tedia I have to deal with this week.

Please feel free to comment about your own tedia, so that the Wiktionary entry Stuart encouraged me to write can refer back here to more than one usage example.

modesty

A literature degree finished me for all forms of pulp fiction; it’s not much to be proud of but I absolutely can’t be bothered with romances, crime novels, airport fiction, etc… with one notable exception. I still occasionally, compulsively, reread my incomplete collection of Modesty Blaise stories. Disreputable of me, I know, but there it is.

She’s not plausible (despite author Peter O’Donnell’s best efforts); it only takes a little consideration to realise how impossible it is for such a creature to actually exist, but she’s one of the very few role models I have. Which likely means my own goals are not plausible either, but again: there it is.

lost links

This blog exists in a strange sort of limbo at the moment. I’m working on content for a new website that should be up and running in a month or less; in the meantime I’m journal-writing again but even my nearest and dearest are only just finding it, since the blog has moved hosts and is no longer feeding its former RSS clients.

I plan a big party for the website launch, and at that time most or all links should be re-established, but until then I send my thoughts out like space probes, into the great void.

appleseed criteek

You know, if you ever wanna figure what a character is written to personify, look at the logic of the character’s behaviour. If the way they act doesn’t have a clear internal logic – if, for example, they are one of the most feared and respected killers on the planet but possessed of a limpid sexuality so passive as to appear timid – this isn’t a person, this is an abstract value in a sexy-girl suit.

Cute as.

consistently publishable thoughts

You see, when you keep an open diary like this – putting yourself on the line online, so to speak – you have to have consistently publishable thoughts. And for a while there, mine weren’t even printable. Sometimes the mere thought of the effort required to depict the dark mountain you have to move just to get out of bed – well, you wouldn’t get up at all.

It takes a while to rebuild after a year that includes a de facto divorce, two deaths in the family, a hard drive burnout, a car crash, and a period of illness. But I had excellent support in my time of retreat, and I bless my friends for their unshakeable patience and love, my medics for their wisdom, and my enemies for making me laugh.

Speaking of un/publishable thoughts, the discovery of this frothing-with-hatred enemy brought it home to me what kind of risks one takes being honest on the ‘Net. I’m still giggling over being labelled a ‘drug nut’ (I’m an occasional weed smoker but I’ve tried to be brutally honest about the dangerous attractions of overuse). I think the carefully anonymous creator of Greenswatch, a hate site dedicated to destroying the Greens, sent me an email when he put up the entry about me, but I clicked on the link, read the headlines and a side box or two and simply went ‘ew – what fool would send me such a link?’ – and clicked away without finding my own name. I found it belatedly a week or two ago when googling ZenSiren in search of my then-dormant blog. It’s a shame, really, that it’s such a crap site – I wish we had a real (ie, balanced and considered) independent watchdog for the Greens.

At least it’s been useful in reminding me that my Greens membership isn’t paid up at the moment. I must rejoin… otherwise the mysterious Mr Greenswatch might take down his links to me, poor goose.

alright, i’m not stopping

I was going to do a wind-up post and not blog any more, on account of a new year’s resolution to get down to writing my novel, one third of which is a blog (not mine, a fictional one), so i figured i should stop this and do that. But look, it’s April, the fictional blog’s not advancing and I haven’t wound this one up. What’s more, I keep coming across moments and ideas that beg for just a quick entertaining entry… so far I’ve resisted, but now we have a massive continuity hole and still no final post.

So fuck it, I’m back. A fictional blog takes longer (ask me if you don’t see why) and I think the book will have to wait till I have that sort of time. In the meantime, I just can’t quite let go of this sexy technology’s spurious offer to make sense of my life.

It’s fitting, I suppose, that the thing that enticed me back to the blogospere was someone else’s blog about me…

go bookcrossing

Commit random acts of literacy and generosity…

Read & Release at
http://www.bookcrossing.com/friend/ZenSiren

I’ve just joined and haven’t registered any books yet, so feel free to explore the whole bookcrossing site. Bookcrossing is the practice of leaving a book in a public place for someone else to pick up and read and likewise pass on. The book’s journey can be tracked through registration on this site.