Rrrrnnnngggghhhh...

The iphone, much to my dismay, has proven itself complicit in the seemingly ever-increasing trend towards confusing, conflating, or simply ignoring the fact that there is a difference between its and it's, insofar as every time you write its, it turns it into it's if you don't notice in time and tell it not to. Agh! Why?

On the French!

From Sacked French workers take to boss-napping:
'That explains, he said, the impressive performance of Olivier Besancenot, the 34-year-old leader of the newly-founded New Anti-Capitalist Party.
A recent poll said an almost equal number of French thought his policies were as credible as Sarkozy's.'

Solanum laciniatum Ait.

Commonly known as Kangaroo apple and was introduced in India from Russia. It is a perennial shrub but mostly grows up to two years. It is about 2 meters in height with long trifurcated dark green leaves and purplish stem and branches. The flowers are purplish blue. Berries are borne in bunches of 5-7 with dark green colour but turn to yellowish orange colour at maturity. Seeds are small flat, round and brownish in colour. Part used are leaves, stem and berries. Leaves contain solasodine content to 1-3.8% and berries (unripe greenish yellow) contain 3.5-4.0% of solasodine on dry weight basis. Solanum khasianum and S. laciniatum are worth considering for foliar production of solasodine.

Uses: Solasodine is used in production of sex hormones and oral contraceptive pills.

Curiously, I have never heard of kangaroo apples being grown commercially in Australia, despite being native to Victoria, and despite being the basis of a huge contraception industry in Russia and now it would seem India.
You'd reckon a hardy native crop which yields contraceptive hormones would be fairly lucrative in this day and age, hmm?

From Chaos erupts in crowd at 'Top Model' auditions in The Age today;
'Banks has said she created the show to counter stereotypes about beauty, and Saturday's auditions were open only to women no taller than 5-foot-7, which is shorter than the industry's conventions.'

Oh, for pity's sake. As though people in the real world give a shit about whether or not you're taller than 5'7". As though this is breaking down stereotypes.

Ooh, it's dangerous to do these ridicule-the-media posts. One could get sucked into a vortex...

Lovely day

Today was so pleasant that I am compelled to put its sequence of activities on the public record, so I can look back on it and sigh a sigh of happiness.
Saskia stayed over, we woke around eight, lounged in bed until around ten, got ready, rode out for breakfast, did the crossword, a storm began, rode home and got saturated by the rain, threw off soaked clothes, put on cosy clothes, lounged in bed and watched a film, put on waterproof-ish clothes, walked to Gertrude Street in the drizzle and mentally composed fiction, bought Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food, met Andrew, had a cup of tea, was given the best scarf ever in the world by Andrew, who knitted it for me (a greyish juniper green with cream end-bands, in seed stitch, of the most perfectly considered dimensions and heft for the ideal scarf, to my reckoning), walked to Australia Galleries, GCAS and Utopian Slumps, and had considered discussions about the art in each venue, listened to the fat rain hammering gloriously down on the roof at Utopian Slumps, got rained on some more, went and ate Japanese vegetables and drank gen mai cha, went to Conical, had more discussions about art, walked home, and will spend the remainder of the evening writing fiction. A handsome Saturday, if ever there was such a thing!

Feuchtgebiet

I read Wetlands by Charlotte Roche a couple of weeks ago, and am disappointed to opine that it was utter rubbish.
I was intrigued by the discussions surrounding this book, the first novel by an ex-newsreader with a tragic past who is, it has to be said, a total fox; being the 'biggest selling book on Amazon ever'; the discussion of whether it was feminist porn, thinly disguised run-of-the-mill porn, or a poorly written novel with interesting content, or simply a crap novel.
It's a read-in-an-evening type of book, and the only thing I can attribute its success to, other than its wonderful title and cover-image, is cultural obsession with hygiene, and the titillation of shock value. It was like listening to a fifteen-year-old trying to shock the adults at their parents' dinner party, so desperate to gain attention, so earnestly trying to transgress, but in the end so two-dimensional and contrived. The character development in this book is non-existent, and of course one could argue for this as a Beckettian strategy of whittling down to the barest elements, but it struck me as a matter not of intention but either as neophytical oversight, or deliberate presentation of a blank-slate central female protagonist to be projected upon by aforementioned titillated hygiene obsessives, though what befuddles me in this regard is that the book, for all its viscerality and bodily explorations, was, to me, sexually uncompelling throughout.
The other thing which suggested the lack of characterisation as shortfalling rather than strategy was the attempt to thread the plot onto the reunification of the parents over the daughter's hospital bed, but because you didn't know them, and knew almost nothing of their prior relationship other than that it was unhappy, you couldn't empathise, and therefore couldn't care a fig whether they reconciled or not, though I concede you could feel a bit sorry for the daughter for her delusions.
I found myself questioning what could be identified as making this book feminist. The abjection, and acceptance and wielding of that abjection by a young woman, sure, but to what end? Smearing bodily excretions around public places as act of feminist empowerment? There are little traces of shit, piss, cum, spit, snot, discharge etc. everywhere, throughout public spaces, and if there weren't we'd probably all be as sick as dogs due to atrophied immune systems. Wetlands didn't even go so far as to enter into a discourse on why too much hygiene is unhealthy.
Perhaps it is inherent to my narrative-driven nature that I found it disappointing that the main character Helen (yes, my namesake) was so lacking in personality, or if one wants to give Roche more credit, so incapable of conveying her own personality, of characterising herself beyond descriptions of her haemorrhoids and so forth. She doesn't seem to self-reflect, she is never described in terms of her outward appearance. And then a sudden walking-into-the-sunset type of ending, betraying any possibility of Helen's shortfallings being a clever pathologisation by the author.
Ugh! Maybe it's better in German. The translation into American english certainly didn't do it any favours.
The characterisation in Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap was unsatisfying to me because it struck me as a host of variously shaped and sized vessels all filled with the essential elements of the same (probably Christos') personality, they all had pretty much the same degrees of drive, bitterness, vengefulness etc., there was very little variation in temperament between the characters. But it at least had social and socio-historical dimensions, and a level of dialogue which lent it sophistication. The Slap, for its problems, is a far better book than Wetlands, to my mind.

Eek, plastic people!

For security reasons this year, some of the stars chose to be represented at the Oscars by waxwork stand-ins;

Alain de Lobotomy

An interesting skirmish between Infinite Thought and Alain de Botton, after I.T. gave the blurb of his new book an interpretive walloping. I suppose part of why he's pissed off is because her review is at once so acerbic and so hilarious.
There's a whole lot of ranting which could be done about tweeness, patronisation, misapprehension etc., but all the important parts of the argument are accounted for on I.T. So basically, cop it sweet, I say to Alain.

It's a good thing the ancient Greeks were so good at remembering their dreams. I suppose they didn't have half the poisons and anxieties we have to contend with. I wonder, though, if there were instances where the Gods troubled themselves to appear in someone's dream, to make prophecy or offer navigational solutions or such, only to have the dreamer wake and promptly forget the whole thing. Oh, how the course of history might have been swayed!

Keating says it

I admire Paul Keating for saying this. I don't suppose anyone who's still in power would go there. Certainly not Rudd the dud...

From The Age:

Ditch IMF, G7 to beat crisis: Keating
February 3, 2009 - 7:36AM

A worldwide political and economic overhaul is the only way to overcome the global financial crisis, former Australian prime minister Paul Keating says.

World leaders should do away with big inter-government institutions and the International Monetary Fund to overcome current financial woes.

"What we need is a completely new global political and economic settlement," Mr Keating told the ABC's Lateline program on Monday.

"Get rid of the old G7. We've got to get rid of the old IMF. We've got to bring the surplus countries into the political framework.

"The G7 is made up of debtor countries, countries like the United States, Britain, France, Italy - these are all borrowers.

"There's no surplus countries in that, and if you look at the structure of the IMF, the Chinese get 3.7 per cent of the vote. The Indians get 1.9 (per cent). The Americans and the Europeans get 51 per cent.

"There is just no way the Chinese communist government is going to hand over control of their currency and their political fortunes to a Washington-based, US Treasury-run institution, so unless there is going to be a totally new settlement ... we are not going to get out of this."

The world financial meltdown was "a catastrophe", Mr Keating said.

"It's way worse than it appears.

"We've had an expansion of credit running for 60 years, from 1947 to 2007. This is the first time - 2008 and then `09 - that we have had a contraction of credit.

"The top 200 financial institutions in the world have suffered a loss of value of 74 per cent," he said.

AAP

The heat wave

The house feels like a large animal. It is warmer than my body, the sun baking into the interior walls from the roof down, reactivating the oven-birthed bricks.

People attempted to work through it on the first day, but gave up yesterday morning when the duration of the heat began shuffling neuron paths.

Administrative workers are triumphing in their air-conditioned environments, kernels of vindication.

The sheets have been clutched into whorls and smudged into reefs.

Trickles of sweat meander down my calves with insect purpose.

Yesterday a man stopped his car on the Westgate Bridge, took his four-year-old daughter out of the back seat (leaving his two sons), carried her to the edge, held her over it and dropped her to her death. She didn’t struggle. It seems she trusted her father.

OhYesOhYesOhYes

I have managed to remain almost completely disengaged from Christmas this year. I have trouble reconciling the frantic consuming with all the obvious environmental concerns. Christmas this year seems like a funny patina superimposed on everything. Though I am sure there are acts of graciousness and humanity occurring around about the place. One hopes!

Mike Kelly lives in Carlton. Awesome.

F*cktard for New Lord Mayor

Ugh, how depressing that Robert Doyle has been elected new Lord Mayor of Melbourne. Adam Bandt will have his day eventually! So now we have a lord mayor who makes one of his first promises to get rid of 'badly talented' buskers and bogans from the city street. Um, class stereotyping? And um, least of our worries?
And this guy wants to install a theme park in the CBD, to attract families. And re-open Swanston Street to traffic! You have got to be kidding.
On a brighter note! Stephen Jolly, of the Socialist Party of Australia, re-elected to the chamber of inner-Melbourne's City of Yarra. Fight the good fight, Stephen. Or dance the good dance, whichever you do best...

Tigers and Others

I had a dream last night in which a tiger ate me whole, though I was still conscious and able to see and breathe inside its gut even though I was really cramped in order for all of me to fit inside its body. I wasn't afraid in the dream, just perhaps felt somewhat inconvenienced. Then suddenly the dream switched and it was I who had eaten the tiger whole, and I could feel its claws uncomfortably in my throat like when you get a fish bone stuck in your throat, and I kept trying to gulp it down for the rest of the dream. There are other associations with the idea of the fish bone in the throat also, about the incessant.

Financial crises are good for art, I reckon

This has been a favourite topic of conversation of mine over the past few weeks, as the balls of the financial crisis drop, and the government scrambles to offer bank guarantees, and art sales start dropping off, at least on some levels of the market - one gets the impression that 'safe bets' are still saleable as they are viable investments, but the more gamble-oriented purchases are falling by the wayside, or it's simply not going to be so easy to make a living off art in the foreseeable future - was it ever? I suppose it depends who you are talking to.
So conversations have been harking back to the eighties, that glossy, excitable decade, when artists could drift and soar on the financial updrafts, and excitements and justifications and momentums could all culminate and fatten one another up, until, as now, the winds of profit fell away from the proverbial sails (sales) and left a whole lot of things in freefall, and forced artists to ask themselves, 'what am I doing this for?' And the answer, at these times, tends towards 'if you are doing it for the money - forget it.' - thus, in my perhaps idealistic eyes, heralding a new era of art that is urgent, art that needs to be made; a friend was quoting a well-respected Melbourne curator as saying they could remember this moment from back in the early nineties, and some of the best art of that decade came out of that time.
Exciting times!

So much kudos to the Somali pirates who hijacked this oil-ridden beast. The biggest ship ever to be taken by pirates in history! So amazing.