Monthly Archives: July 2010

woman’s prerogative?

so chaps, here I am, changing my mind.

What was I thinking? Who wants to read about my trip to Japan after I come back home? I tell you what, in this digital age, nothing’s of any importance unless it’s happening right now!

(Like, for example, you can’t really get away with calling it the “digital age” unless you’re being faintly ironic, because that’s so not current anymore. “Digital age” aged on its way from what’s actually happening to being what’s really happening according to what someone wrote. I digress.)

I’ve been writing my posts as I go anyway, so will begin posting them now. Wasn’t sure we would have internet, we do.

The one fly in the ointment/cockroach in the sushi is that I didn’t bring my camera lead, and thus can’t upload photos till I get home. (Er, you’re in Japan, I hear you say. Can’t you just buy a new lead? It’s worth some thought, I reply, cursing myself for my stupidity.)

So here goes…

Japan is imminent

dear readers of my blog,

special k recently came home, exhausted but oddly determined and said “We’re going on holidays.” Yay! I thought, imagining the beach or some such.

“Japan, San Francisco or Hawaii,” he said, in that same determined way.

So in two days we’re off to Japan (the future) for 12 days of wandering around looking at all the weird and wonderful things.

Which gives you 12 days holiday too, because I won’t be updating whilst I’m away. (Oh no! I hear you shriek. How ever will I do without my fix of tv/romance novels/incest/the daily workings of this strange mind? Er, like I said, a HOLIDAY…)

Will post 12 days of Japan after I get back, so brace yourselves for weird pics and beautiful wallpaper.

Over and out.

a thought whose time really hasn’t come yet

I just went out for dinner with my sister and mum, followed by the film Creation, the Charles Darwin biopic. A humble evening out but “one of the best of my life!” according to Mum.

I guess, if you think from a mother’s perspective, having one’s disparate daughters together and to oneself for an evening must be rather a treat.

Darwin, so the theory goes, was terribly guilty about the death of his eldest child. Charles had married his first cousin, so as a scientist he knew he may have biologically weakened his daughter to the point where she couldn’t fight off her illness.

It’s brought to mind again something I’ve thought about, with no answers in sight:

Considering that in our day and age it’s possible, via the wonderful world of hyster/vasectomy, to prevent contraception with no room for error, is there any real impediment to first cousins taking up with each other again?

Actually, the theory also runs to any close relation, but as the title of this post suggests, the idea is so uncomfortable I’m not sure it’s quite ready to see the light of day.

The way I see it, as soon as you remove the danger of inbreeding, the remaining danger of incest is emotional damage. Surely, I think, it’s emotionally toxic to confuse family and romantic relations. Then I think: that’s how many, many people still see homosexuality. As though it’s psychologically damaging.

I’m one of the many who think it’s a no-brainer that same-sex love is natural. It’s love. Will people think the same about love between relatives in 100 years? (Let me be clear – I’m not equating homosexuality and incest, just wondering whether it’s possible our perception towards it could change in the same way.)

By the fact that first cousins used to marry all the time, we can see that it’s not inherently emotionally perverse. It was completely normal back in the day, before the dangers to offspring became clear(er). So if we can take those dangers away?

Anyway, I don’t think this is a comfortable thought for anyone, but it’s an interesting question all the same.

goodbye/goodnight

when I was about ten I was called to my older sister’s side because she was inconsolable.

“She read your diary,” Mum told me, “and now she thinks you want to die.”

After looking in a kind of despairing wonder at my sister’s red and crying face, the penny finally dropped. I had written I hope that I die peacefully in my sleep. Meaning, of course, when I die, far, far off in the future. I explained matters to my sister.

A couple of days later she smiled smugly at me and teased me about Francis Simmons, who I’d written about in my diary.

I am lying in bed beside special k (facing me this time, his book fallen against my arm, his sleeping fingers holding the page) and just wanted to write a goodnight message. The first thing to come to mind were those lines from Romeo and Juliet:

eyes look your last!

arms, take your last embrace!

but I thought that without the above anecdote some confusion might arise from the sentiment.

something I saw today

in the middle of the day I watched the British film The Secret of Moonacre. I wanted to see it because of the trailers, but as soon as it started I realised I knew it inside-out: it’s based on a book I loved reading as a kid, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.

The film was good (the costumes a definite highlight) but nothing special. Except for this one moment.

Ioan Gruffudd plays the enigmatic, rude uncle our heroine goes to stay with after her parents die.

He neglects her so she wanders the house and starts playing the piano she finds in a deserted parlour, because it begs to be played. Her uncle comes to the doorway and when he sees her he breathes as though he’s reminding himself to. As though he’s saying: Just keep on keeping on, even though your heart is in pieces.

a new machine is still a stranger

I am in mac-love. Again.

I remember this feeling – I remember the new computer smell in the same compartment of my brain where I remember the smell of my dead grandfather after he’d been treated with embalming fluid. You never forget it.

Six years ago I unpacked my brand-new iBook G4, and last night I did exactly the same with my Macbook Pro. Pulled the white box onto my lap. Marvelled at the packaging. Smelt my new machinery.

It’s hard to remember thinking the old iBook was a sleek and beautiful thing when these days it looks more like a Storm Trooper’s lap top than anything else. I’m trying to convince myself that one day my Macbook will seem just as clunky.

I’m failing.

But the weird thing is, despite all the joy and wonder of a new purchase, of fast internet and almost frictionless tracking, I feel rather ambiguous towards the new machine. We don’t know each other yet. The track pad of my old computer is sticky because I have used it for hours. And hours and hours. Every time I focussed my mind to the task of writing, reached into that part of my brain, sat, breathed, drank too much coffee, I did it in the company of my computer.

Now here’s this beautiful, impersonal new machine that probably finds me wanting.

People tend to see machines as depersonalising. In this case at least, that is not true at all. Just as with any human stranger, time is the only thing that will bring me and this machine into accord.

a great kiss needs great coincidence

I kissed special k goodbye this morning – the kind of fond, slightly melting kiss of the long-committed. And I suddenly got the fear you get when you almost have a grisly accident on your bike and it leaves you shaking even though you’re technically unscathed.

I looked into his close-up, kissing face, with the smiley eyes and the textured lips (does the same quantum theory apply to lips that applies to coastlines?) and I realised how many things have to agree and come into confluence for a kiss like that to happen. Just an ordinary, morning kiss.

There stands a whole separate person to me, with a whole separate set of needs/wills/desires/have tos, and here I am with all my needs/wills/desires/have tos, but somehow, in this moment, all that personal impetus has brought us both, separately, to this.

How easily that could have not happened! What are the chances that I love him and he loves me and we meet in the corridor at the lips?

the letter generation: Part l

I’ve just been rifling through my old journals and letters as I like to do occasionally, and the things I’ve found hurt my heart and make me infinitely grateful I managed to not be gen Y. We started emailing in highschool, I guess, but letters predominated. Hundreds, thousands of letters from the breaking, devastated heart to the boredom of English Lit.

If these had been emails they would be gone by now, I suppose.

There are many, many letters from the boyfriend I had when I was 16. Not as romantic as I remember – more long, annotated lists of mixed tape playlists. Also:

I hope you aren’t TOO angry at me, but I showed part of your letter to my best friend “Nick”. He’s sort of an analyst and he was pissed off that you wrote nothing’s serious at 16. He said “16 is the most serious age!!! Nothing is more serious!”

Wherever you are, “Nick”, if that’s even your real name, I AGREE! A woman ten years older than me was the one who planted the idea that I was only 16 and shouldn’t take our relationship drama too seriously. For anyone out there dispensing advice for same, heed our analyst “Nick”. I think his vehement defence of teens everywhere proves that there’s nothing “sort-of” about him.

breaking the tenth commandment is sexy

This has been a reading weekend, so here’s another book I’ve just read:

Oh how I love this book. This is Quinn at her absolute best. It begins thus:

“In every life there is a turning point. A moment so tremendous, so sharp and clear that one feels as if one’s been hit in the chest, all the breath knocked out, and one knows, absolutely knows without the merest hint of a shadow of a doubt that one’s life will never be the same.

For Michael Stirling, that moment came the first time he laid eyes on Francesca Bridgerton.

After a lifetime of chasing women, of smiling slyly as they chased him, of allowing himself to be caught then turning the tables until he was the victor, of caressing and kissing and making love to them but never actually allowing his heart to become engaged, he took one look at Francesca Bridgerton and fell so fast and so hard into love it was a wonder he managed to remain standing.

…the occasion of their meeting was, lamentably, a supper celebrating her imminent wedding to his cousin.”

See? I didn’t mean to go on and on and transcribe the whole first page, but I just couldn’t stop. There’s so much narrative traction I’m surprised to look up and not find myself on some desolate stretch of the Hume Highway.

And the reason it’s so good? Duh. The tenth commandment.

When people covet other people’s people in real life it’s messy and there’s a hell of a lot of pain, bitterness, retribution… I dunno, has it ever worked out happily?

But fiction – that’s another, er, story.

Pain = thrill + desire for the end of pain. It gives our hero the perfect reason to love our heroine absolutely and without any chance of fulfillment. He also loves his cousin like a brother, so the guiding purpose of his life becomes to keep his awful love a secret.

Hey, breaking a commandment ain’t a guaranteed killer book, but Quinn pulls it off and then some. I don’t always like her heroines (see my Ten Things review), but there’s something lovely, poised, convincing about Francesca. And Michael is…delicious. Tenacious. Emo.

Check it!

the Disney cartoon of romance novels

Teresa Medeiros is chummy with a lot of my favourite romance novelists, so I thought I’d give her books a go. The result has been…interesting.

Medeiros’s writing is exuberant and charming, but reading this was seriously like watching a Disney cartoon. It’s kind of fun, because Medeiros just goes for it, in a tongue-in-cheek way. Her hero is such a champ on the battlefield that the time his enemies stretched him on the rack he took the opportunity for a nap. Her heroine has a driving desire to be loved that is rather hammered home, but fun all the same.

Medeiros said she based her hero on this pic:

which makes him look sort of silly and gormless, though I’d probably add some of this:

for the full, smarmy effect. The biggest problem her hero faces is that his sperm is too potent… It’s a laugh, but a silly one.

I loved the very earthy, real element to the book – she uses the word piss a lot and doesn’t politely misunderstand the musky smell in the brothel’s cottage the way a Regency romance would do. But it was an odd read, because most of it was playful and naive, and read almost like a children’s book. Then suddenly there was desire and swelling in the breaches.

It was like reading Cindarella, but suddenly Prince Charming has a massive erection and pulls Cindy behind the pumpkin for some hot sex.

Disconcerting, to say the least.

Anyway, I didn’t actually finish it, because as fun as it was, this is really not my kind of book. The characters didn’t exist for anything but to be irresistible to each other and overcome their, er, extreme fertility so that they could be happy together.

I don’t doubt in the slightest that this is the perfect book for some people out there. (It’s mighty New York Times Bestseller Listdom would be a giveaway.)