The Standard Line Delivery System Two Thousand And Nine

Former US President George W Bush recites a eulogy to my dead grandfather on my behalf.

2009-03-14T18:21:00.005+11:00

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090314032025805#

2008-12-22T23:36:00.004+11:00

John Barrymore Stokes: 4 July 1926 - 22 December 2008

Dear Pop,
It's a warm night here in Canberra. Just the other night it was too cold to even walk into town without a coat, but tonight there is a threnody of cicadas, an absolute stillness, a blanket of pin-stars. The perfect night for remembering.

I actually only have a handful of memories of you and I alone together, without anyone else around. One of these was a time at the beach, around the time that I hated everything about the beach, which was the same time of life that Mum and Dad tried unsuccessfully to get me to start doing surf life saving on Saturday mornings. This day we were a little north of North Cottesloe and our towels were a little further away from the water than we usually sat. I was laying on a towel on my front, my chin resting on a little mound, and you were sitting there, bare ankled and making patterns in the sand. You were explaining something to me in a lot of detail - it was either something historical (about the Roman Empire or World War II perhaps) or something scientific (some particular laws of physics) but I can't remember what. I remember distinctly that I wasn't listening to a thing you said. You were taking great pains to explain this thing to me; in fact, it stood out because it was probably the most animated and conversive I'd ever seen you. You were really into it; there you were, just riffin' on this one subject, diving deep into the nitty gritty; and there I was, chin on sand. I realised suddenly, after a while, that you'd been talking for ages, and I hadn't heard anything at all, that my mind had gone to sleep in the sun, and I'd missed all the wisdom you had for me. This realisation was a shock, and I remember that I felt bad.

I didn't know you all that well, Pop. But you always seemed to me a gentle and intelligent guy, a man who loved learning, who found beauty in complexity and reason. Often, though, it seemed to me that you didn't know quite how to relate to other people, how to share in the joy and spirit of others, that, at times, you felt a little uncomfortable. Looking back, you always seemed to associate best through rational discussion and analysis. I don't mean to say you were cold - I never felt that Pop - but I always wondered what you really thought about people, about all the people gathered at Christmas, about me. I always wondered.

Pop, we have always seemed such different men, but I realise more and more these days how, in certain characteristics, we are all too similar. At times, I too find myself unsure in relating to others. I realise that I sometimes shy away from even those I love clearly and vividly, that I can come across distracted and aloof, that my emotions are grey and hidden, even at times when I am most safe and secure. Fearful of something (I know not what), I find solace in the mind. I find myself telling long, enthusiastic, detailed explanations of politics, of genealogies, of geography, of literature, of war. I notice, much more often than I'd like, the eyes of my companions glazing over as I go on too long on subjects which are not always universal in their appeal. They turn their glances, and I am left with half a tale. It's a lonely feeling, Pop, and I wonder if you felt that too.

I think I had a lot more I could have learned from you, old man. I wish I had. I wish I'd asked you more, dug deeper, been more inquisitive. I wish I'd known more about the ancestors whose inscriptions mark the goblets and wooden compasses you gave me. I wish we'd spent more time together in those lucid years of splendid rationality. I wish I knew you more, so I could know myself, more.

Rest easy.

x

State of My Life Address, 8 December 2008

2008-12-08T16:08:00.003+11:00

A. Today I have lived for exactly 28 years, or 10226 days. 28 is the second perfect number; it is also a Størmer, a happy, and a Keith number. Twenty-eight is the number of convex uniform honeycombs, it corresponds to the word koakh meaning 'power' or 'energy' in Hebrew Numerology, and it is the common name of the Western Australian parrot Barnardius zonarius semitorquatus. Neo-Nazis use '28' to refer to 'blood and honour' (with B=2 and H=8), and there are 28 letters in both the Swedish and Arabic alphabets. In the drug trade, 28 refers to the number of grams in an ounce. Chinese astrology has twenty-eight mansions (xiù), each representing a latitude the Moon crosses monthly as it circles the earth. These twenty eight mansions are split into four regions, as follows:
1. Azure Dragon (青龍): Horn, Neck, Root, Room, Heart, Tail, Winnowing Basket;
2. Vermilion Bird (朱雀): Well, Ghost, Willow, Star, Extended Net, Wings, Chariot;
3. White Tiger (白虎): Legs, Bond, Stomach, Hairy Head, Net, Turtle Beak, Three Stars;
4. Black Tortoise (玄武): Dipper, Ox, Girl, Emptiness, Rooftop, Encampment, Wall.

B. Purple walled cheaply built brick townhouse with concrete slab, numbered thirty four of seventeen. Cream-beige carpets and cream-grey curtains. Above the street a baldachin of oak trees which drop leaves into the courtyard, where I sweep them on weekends with assistance from the next door neighbour, a six-year-old Chinese girl called Abby who is also teaching me how to speak Mandarin at the rate of one word per month, and who made cut-out monkeys for me which are now on our fridge. My room with the Rapunzel balcony, and the yellow lamp light that reminds passers-by at night of glow-worms. Night sounds: cicadas, neighbouring televisions, the engines of hoons, an occasional possum. We live close by to a Turkish owned fast food shop called Charcoal Chicken, which has very oily pides. The laundry fan makes a terrifying noise, so the switch is sticky taped to avoid accidental use. There are plans for collaborative artworks and furniture purchase trips, even a house-hold dance. Chimeras of community. I live with A.O. who makes salads with tinned mango, pan-fried chicken and macadamia nuts. She counts indigenous people for a living, on an abacus, in Belconnen. I also live with K.B. who must be a spook because I am not allowed to know what she does, and she has a small paper shredder on her waste paper bin in her room. She likes Marilyn movies, and that is all I will ever say about her on this website. On Wednesdays it is family dinner (another chimera), which we alternate in cooking, and follow up with desert in front of Twin Peaks. We have a tiny television. We live in Canberra (population 340,800), the capital of Australia, and sporadically I like it, often I don't mind it, but sometimes I just resent it so much.

C. Today, though, I am seated at the small square table in the tiny studio flat of my sister and her boyfriend, in Carlton, Victoria, Australia. It is a corner apartment and there are windows running the full span of two walls, and the light is pouring in, and there are many green plants in pots along the window sill. I am listening to the New Pornographers' Challengers record. I am wearing a checked cowboy shirt (brand: 'RANCH - BAR') that I bought in a Walpole op-shop in 2002, an organic white cotton t-shirt, grey jeans, white socks and brown, green & red Nike sneakers. I am also wearing the same old spectacles, and my hair is messy. I am a little sunburned from a long and lazy day yesterday riding bikes and wandering at the Collingwood Children's Farm. So far on my birthday I have eaten one plate of breakfast foods, cooked by Kate and Haslett, which consisted of 2 x poached eggs, 2 x slices of bread, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, big tomatoes, avocado, orange juice, and peppermint tea with lots of sugar. I still have seriously weird issues with my digestive system, particularly recently, which one day I might think about getting checked out. I also have a seborrheic keratosis behind my right ear, as well as the last remains of a healing cold sore. I weigh 77.9 kilograms.

D. I have taken the day off work today. I work in the Humanitarian Policy Unit of the Humanitarian & Emergencies Section at the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID). Very few people outside of Canberra seem to understand exactly what it is I actually do, so let me tell you. I am part of a team of four people who manage Australia's strategic policy when it comes to humanitarian affairs. This means that I advise the government on humanitarian issues, help negotiate appropriate text for UN resolutions on humanitarian issues, and spend taxpayers money on things like humanitarian research; provision of basic services and protection to populations displaced by natural disasters and conflicts; and core funding for multilateral and non-governmental bodies like UNHCR, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and the NRC Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and stuff. Basically, I push paper and tease my workmate about dressing and acting like a real estate agent. I sit at a desk with my back to the window, the view from which takes in Parliament House, the Lake, the National Carillon, and the purple hills which flank the south of the city. Often there is Toblerone that someone has bought back from an overseas trip, sitting behind me, taunting me like a villain in a children's puppet show. I like my job, actually quite a bit.

E. I also volunteer for CISV International and am one of the Training Coordinators for the International Mosaic Committee, along with A.N. from Canada and B.E. from Austria. I am a member of Board Game Club, with four others, and we frequently play El Grande, Ticket to Ride (Europe version), Tichu and 1960: The Making of the President. I frequently lose. I study Arabic language two days a week, private lunch time lessons in one of the little rooms off the foyer at work, with an Egyptian man who also teaches ballroom dancing. I can feel much improvement in my reading and speaking, which is exciting. My ballroom dancing still requires practice. I believe one day I would like to live in Damascus, Syria, where I will have tame finches in my apartment, cook kofte, and go on Saturday afternoons strolls to watch the dervishes.

F. I have a car, for the first time in my life, a small sea-blue thing with speed-stripes. I have a bread machine and a bicycle and a navy blue bedspread, with pinstripes. I do not have a girlfriend or any pets. I have $161.74 in my savings account.

G. For my birthday I got phone calls, SMSs and facebook messages from friends in Colombia, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Uganda, Israel, Portugal, the United States, Guatemala, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Italy, Egypt, Jordan, Mexico, Norway, India, Lebanon, Thailand, Argentina, Iceland, Austria, Lithuania, Sweden, Fiji, and Australia. I got some homemade blackboards from my sister, a book of Flannery O'Connor stories from Lauren, a Hannah Montana chocolate advent calendar from Claire, a bottle of elderberry syrup from Anneke, a video of a Puebla mariachi group from Abigail, and a video of Flo and Alena eating pizza for breakfast with a birthday candle on the table, from Flo and Alena. Thankyou to everybody! You are golden horse fruit!

H. I've made pilgrimage to this city a number of times this year, and each time its left me sort of shaken. Often times at home people assume I come from Melbourne instead of Perth (most people in Canberra are from interstate; we're a society of wash-ins) - "you just seem so Melbourne" they say. Which I'm not sure if they mean in a positive, negative or neutral way, but whatever it is, it seems to feel that way to me too. The city has long been a sort of Zion, both to me and to those I've grown up with, and to which a lot of those I love have migrated. And yet here I live, in Canberra, a desperately quiet and completely inorganic town of mindnumbing straightness, where culture is something imported from the Dutch Golden Age in bigass packing containers for a limited season at the National Gallery, not something that people, individuals and posses of likemindeds, live and breathe in studios and parks and attics and cold water flats and alleyways and town squares and community gardens and bedrooms and basements and collectives. Where any attention to aesthetic is marginalised in place of the quest to pay off the mortgage, and to slap together more beige suburban townhouses with tile floors to accommodate the inflow of young, engaged public servant couples and Chinese students. There's been some acculturation, but I still feel like a bewildered migrant, displaced and confusing to those I come in contact with everyday - oftentimes kind, intelligent, interesting and humorous people, but still not of my tribe. In Melbourne I am made jealous of the art and architecture, the community and spirit, the stories and images; but I am also reminded of the anxiety and discontent of my kinsfolk, the degree to which we be constantly questioning, forever exploring, fucking up in the same ways again and again. And then, as I get back to Canberra everything seems so lacking in complication, so local, so completely modest and unassertive, that I find myself breathing a long sigh of relief, and greatly enjoying the morning ride to work, and marveling in the simplicity of it all, and getting very confused indeed by what I want and what it means to be grown up, and whether or not I actually like living in this city a little bit, after all, and whether that means I'm becoming more and more boring (actually, I know that I am), and whether this bothers me, or whether all of this anxiety, all of it, is learned, and that all I need is to unlearn it, to be more calm and content in a chair with a book, to ignore the brazenly bland, to distinguish better between that which is good and that which is pretentious, to ultimately become more Canberran.

I. Currently I am reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright, and The Responsibility to Protect by Gareth Evans. The last movie I saw was Quantum of Solace (2008). The last gig I went to was Rye Rye at the Bakery in Perth - that was in October. The last non-food item I bought was soap from the organic market at CERES community farm in Brunswick. The last thing I cooked was baklava, for the combined-graduate birthday celebration picnic on Friday. The last girl I kissed was L.S, who apparently no longer exists. The last country I have visited outside of Australia was Singapore. The last alcoholic drink I consumed was a vodka with orange juice.

J. Since my last birthday I have visited Java and Queensland for the first time; started cooking a lot more, and a lot more confidently, than I have in the past; and become well and truly confused by modern youth, with their hair and their shrieking and their enthusiasm for stupidity. I have started drinking some alcoholic beverages, including fruity cocktails, cream-based liquors, and Stones alcoholic ginger beer. For a period of time I started attending Meetings for Worship at the Canberra Branch of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which I very much enjoyed, but then stopped for some reason, which is unfortunate. I am certainly more spiritual than I was last year, and believe strongly that the human condition is, as Simone Weil describes it, a balance between gravity and grace - a balance which I am still struggling to find. Other than that, I follow Thoreau in believing that "religion is that which is never spoken". I certainly need more time in silence.

K. I ride my bike to and from work every week day, which takes me approximately 9 minutes each way. I play squash occasionally with a group of males. Sometimes I walk up Mount Ainslie with A.O., which makes pain on my lower back, and when we get to the top we sit with our legs looped through the balustrade of the lookout and gaze across the satellite towns to the Brindabellas, which are capped in snow for a short time in the winter. I am contemplating joining an Ultimate team. I went skiing a few times through the winter. This summer I plan to take anyone who comes to visit me kayaking on the lake.

L. My favourite poem is still "Self-Portrait at 28" by David Berman, which, as one of the original vague inspirations for these annual addresses, warrants special celebration this particular year, my twenty eighth. It will be celebrated by my now quoting my favourite passage to end this year's address:

It is a certain hill.
The one I imagine when I hear the word "hill,"
and if the apocalypse turns out
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown,
if our five billion minds collapse at once,
well I'd call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful,
a place I wouldn't mind dying
alone or with you.

2008-12-03T01:15:00.002+11:00

Anneke told me a story, as we were walking through the eucalypts up Mount Ainslie, about one of her friends who is working in a school on an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. She had to break up a fistfight that had broken out between two of the boys in her classroom. Pulling them apart, she asked "Now, explain to me: why are you fighting?"

"We're fighting about which is better;" one of the boys replied, "black Michael Jackson or white Michael Jackson".

Magic inky cuttlefish friends

2008-11-19T21:14:00.004+11:00

Tonight (and this is kinda symbolic of my life, nowadays, in general) I cooked cuttlefish paella with ink and white wine (a typical Spanish ración meant for sharing round a big outdoor table with jugs of sangria) and ate it alone, in my bedroom, while listening to the rain and reading the New York Times website. I had invited a number of people to join me - starting with the housemate who eats seafood (busy), then moving on to my two single friends (busy / didn't answer), before realising that the only other person I could really ask at short notice was a vegetarian. But I'd defrosted the cuttlefish, so I cooked it anyway, and it was fantastic - black and gluggy and warming. I helped myself to seconds, then tupperwared the rest for work lunches.

Today: I wrote a long sentence about Humanitarian Access which may be partially (or even wholly) used as part of a UN resolution. And I missed her more than I told myself I would.

In June a friend asked me to write a poem featuring the word 'shawl' as one of five challenges, and I wrote this.

2008-11-13T19:16:00.001+11:00

Talion

Let me explain the man
who appeared a month into the witchhunts,
while the fog was gathered on the barrows,
and you were in the hospice, engulfed in spasms.

I remember how he got everybody to reach for their shortwave radios
and the night became filled
with Morse clicks
and patriotic cantos

while the grasslands were swept of objects.

Jaw locked, you managed:
“how beautiful were its teeth before”
then merged again into turbulence.
I used your shawl
to swab the skerry of spittle from your chin
and admired from the window sill
the villagers assembling
a militia
on the paddocks below.

Then: a month of fires.

They prepared him a home
on the tallest mound,
rooms cut from blast rock and cedar,
where he sat with a flute of sherry
well fucked and plump
and commanding the hills and snow plains
all the way to the borderland shanties.

Posters of your delicate face
with the words
We Shall Avenge
fading on the roadsides
shuttereyed and pale.

The purple arc of dusk on the sierra
where they emptied the murdered
into canyons
and strung the raped by their throats, in trees
bald and bloated and eyeless.

O Girl, it’s darkness, and
I have run out of accustomed prayers.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

2008-11-12T22:39:00.006+11:00

I've said too many times that it's been too long and that it would be a fresh start. I've promised change, I've painted frescos of radical rebirth. I've been boughed with good intentions, imbued with Sagittarian optimism. And no silence has been as extensive as this one. I almost let a year slip by! A year of my life! Discarded to mere memory! By design I should stand here prone and exposed, begging for absolution, constructing before you all a monumental stratagem of transformation.

But no.
I have almost killed this somnolent blog a couple of times through this year - quickly and painlessly, of course. This town I live in now hasn't exactly been forthcoming in inspiration, and my life (far more... adult? than I ever saw myself becoming) hasn't provided all that many quips and tales that I thought any of you would be all that interested in. I work for a government (I am not allowed to say which one, so guess)- I like my job, and think there is much to be interested in about it - but I don't think I've yet had a conversation about it with anyone outside the industry whose initial interest hasn't wavered within a few minutes. Thats cool, I understand it. I'm usually not interested in others' jobs either. But y'know, the reason I'm here in this town is the job, there aint no other reason. In this way its my life. And what a life. Just not so transferable into a blog. You can imagine.

But here I am, trying anew. No promises, but there is a new layout to distract you from the words. Pretty bears! So we'll see how this pans out. If nothing else, I will ensure there's a S.O.M.L.A on December eight. Maybe I'll start telling you about what I cook. Tonight it was Persian stew - lamb 'n' rhubarb, with rice. Recipe: Put the lamb in a pot with fried onion, pomegranate molasses, saffron and stock and slow cook that motherfucker. Some mint, parsley. Sit back with a Stones Alcoholic Ginger Beer (ch ch ch changes!) and watch some old episodes of the Wire, let the juices seep. Add rhubarb, watch it dissolve. Eat it. Shiiitchyeah. Bone fide Standard Line food blog, holmes.

So anyway, suddenly its summer nights here in the hill country and the cicadas are singing and I find myself adding iceblocks to everything and wearing wifebeaters. Most nights are spent up late, listening to J Tillman, engaging in hair removal, and combing Flickr for talent. Sometimes I bake bread in a machine, in my bathroom so that it doesn't annoy my housemate's boyfriend who sits up very straight as he writes essays at my dining table. Sometimes I fall asleep on a beanbag on my skinny balcony. Sometimes I engage my board game club friends in a German-designed board game with colourful playing pieces. I am the single one in the board game club but that's okay because most of the games are for maximum five players, so a lover'd just make board game club infeasible.

As for writing, lets just say I've been reading Borges, and when I sit down with fingers on keys I get lost immediately in the "feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity". It's a fucker, that infinity.

Recrudesce

2008-01-29T09:15:00.001+11:00

I have been back in Australia for just over three weeks, and back in Canberra for the last three days. I am living, temporarily, in a large hotel room which has two flat screen televisions, two floors, a stove and a balcony overlooking a verdant garden, all paid for on my behalf by the Australian tax-paying public. I arrive in the capital by Greyhound from Sydney, on Australia Day, and drag my suitcase along the pavement from the bus terminal, through the city centre, past the black, red and yellow flags of the ‘Invasion Day’ demonstration in Garema Place, and down the wide, silent, suburban streets which flank the tiny centre of Canberra towards the hotel. At the check out desk the three girls are in the office, blowing up green and gold balloons and inhaling the helium to make their voices squeak. One of them has a flag tattoo on her cheek. A peroxide blonde with dimples and small eyes comes out to serve me, and continues to giggle and snort as she searches for my booking, and the other two staff keep opening the shuttered window into the office, poking their head through, and squeaking at her, which makes her burst with laughter again and again. ‘Your room (giggle) isn’t (snort, giggle) ready yet (guffaw) – it’s still being (giggle) made up… (laugh induced tear)… it should be an hour – you can go wander around the shops and I’ll call you (snort, laughter) when it’s ready.’ I head to the weekly community market and sit in the sun and read Miranda July and eat Salvadorian papusas with beans, cheese and chilli. A shirtless man with scraggly hair selling poetry on crumpled foolscap mutters curses at cricketer Adam Gilchrist and the nation of Australia. I go buy a mapbook for my upcoming househunt challenge. The Jesters pie shop has either shut down or moved, one of the two. Two brown wild rabbits are eating grass in front of the ANU Law building. I go back to the hotel after three hours, and the girl looks embarrassed at having forgotten to call me. One of the wall mounted flat screens is a metre wide. There are some excited Brazilians in the rooms surrounding mine; they spend a lot of time in the hallway, commuting between each other’s rooms and shrieking. That night I meet Stephen and Kate for a monster movie involving the destruction of Manhattan.

The next morning I am navigating myself in the park, using my new map book, when a heavily cleavaged elderly woman approaches on her bicycle. Her aim is to help me, but when she realises that I pretty much know where I’m going she flips the conversation to a virtual game of word association – she asks me a question, then reacts to the answer with whatever comes into her mind, eg: (1) I say “Oslo”, and she responds with stories about: (a) a Norwegian she met on a cruise ship from London to Guyana and subsequently dated, (b) her days in Guyana in the 1960s and an incident with overheard gunshots when she returned in the 90s, (c) the only other time she’s heard gunshots, during a drive-by while she was drifting off to sleep in Johannesburg. My mentioning Perth, on the other hand, triggers discussion of Heath Ledger. She has a theory that he was gay, but hadn’t come to terms with it yet. ‘I was married to my husband for 20 years’ she tells me, ‘and it took another ten years after we divorced for me to realise that he was gay. Wasn’t till I saw him rubbing suncream on the back of our son, who he always said wasn’t his anyway. That triggered it, the suncream. Very Death In Venice.”’ She rides her bike around me in a clockwise direction, mumbling something about ancient pagan rituals (“Probably come in handy with your peace studies!” she says) and goes back the way she came, following the stormwater drains northwards.

In the car, Stephen, Kate and I head to Kambah pool, a swimming hole in a river past the satellite towns of Canberra, where we eat sandwiches and watermelon on towels in the shade of the banks and swim in the sand coloured waters. The gum trees are white and run up the valley edge. It’s gorgeous. Downriver a little there is a section of rapids and rock pools, and we leap across on boulders to the other side. A nearby car park is full to the brim, but there’s almost no one around at all, and we are confused, until we see a path with a stencilled sign on the cement: “NUDE BATHING AREA – 200M”. We follow it down, and on the way pass an ape-faced teenager who points his thumb down the path. ‘Those people are fuckin’ sickos’, he offers. Moments later, a rotund gentleman emerges from the bush with no pants and an open shirt. His cock wiggles. He stops just passed us to dress himself. On a bit further, we reach a clearing – sure enough, the rocks are scattered with nudists, men and women, their skin bright through the fronds and trunks. We do not go further, cautious of appearing like sightseers in our shorts and shirts. We turn around and head back to the car. On the drive home, we pass a BMX park named after Vikings, and one of the world’s three NASA Deep Space Communication Complexes.

Today, after an hour reading and sleeping under the statue of Mohandas Gandhi in Glebe Park, I am walking back to the hotel, when I hear words behind me, children’s words, the words of a four year old. It is a young boy, talking to his mother, who is pushing a pram and walking a few metres in front of the rest of the family. It is just us on the eucalyptus flanked avenue, I am just a little in front of them, and the air smells good and the sky is warm. I hear words from the boy and at first I just register them as the babble of a child, a child fielding probing but directionless queries at his parents, but then I hear them crisp and clear, and right there at my back. The words of the child go: ‘We don’t like them, do we mum, because they aren’t Ausssie?’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re not welcome’.
‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re not welcome’, he repeats after her.
‘Not welcome here at all’
‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re. Not. Welcome.’ His four year old squeak is tasting the words. His four year old mind is absorbing the very idea.
It’s that easy for my recent attempts to embrace the idea of living in suburban Australia to be undermined. That easy for the positive thoughts I’ve concentrated on since returning to Canberra to be sapped instantly. I am paralysed by disgust at this woman, at the whole idea of nationalism, at this country. I feel compelled to turn and hurl abuse. But I keep walking.
They go into a block of units, and push the pram through the gate. ‘I know where you live, you bigoted hatemonger’ I think. As I walk on, I place myself in scenarios involving violent campaigns of re-education, then downsize them to ones involving letters of careful, simple and passionate language, dropped through the mailbox. I dream of kidnapping children of racist parents and Pied Pipering them away to some kind of dynamic and multi-cultural Neverland. But none of these fantasy responses, nor anything else that afternoon, do anything, at all, to unjumble my head and lift, again, the heart.

State Of My Life Address

2007-12-09T09:36:00.000+11:00

A. Today I have lived for exactly 27 years, or 9861 days. Twenty-seven is both a perfect cube and a decagonal number. It is the atomic number of cobalt, the number of books in the New Testament, and the number of moons of Uranus. Twenty-seven is also the age in which musicians Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, and D. Boon (Minutemen) all died.

B. I am not a musician.

C. I live in Oslo, Kingdom of Norway, and have done since the beginning of August of this year. My time in Norway will finish in three days, at which point I will be leaving with most of my possessions on a bus to the south of Sweden. My home is a 25m2 one room (plus bathroom) apartment in a large complex of interlinked buildings with echoing corridors which smell of cooking, both good and bad. The buildings are positioned on the bank of the narrow Aker river, and wraps around a central courtyard with a playground and puddles made by a leak which recently have been mostly frozen. The complex incorporates student accommodation, a hostel, housing for immigrants and a Best Western Hotel. In the entrance to my building (#3) there is very often some rubbish or discarded furniture or household items, and there is some graffiti which reads "fuck da police". Right now there are some mandarin peels on the floor in the elevator; these were left by a French guy who I rode the elevator with and who was eating mandarin when I entered on the first floor. He said hello to me when I got on the elevator which is an incredibly rare event here - the Norwegians in the building rarely, if ever, say hello or even smile at people in the lift or hallways. Getting out of the elevator you must unlock the crimson coloured door to my hallway, and mine is the first apartment on the left, number 622. My door is also crimson. Inside, the walls are cream and the window and door frames a light wood. I have three windows which look out on a hospital and a tram line. Often you can watch tram inspectors stopping trams below my window and checking for tickets, dragging ticketless souls into a waiting bus where there are desks for the processing and awarding of fines. Inside the room there are two single beds, a desk, two chairs, a wooden stool, a coffee table, three lamps, a set of shelves, a small fridge, a cupboard, a set of coat hooks, a sink and two hot plates. My bed is infected with bedbugs, but as they have been there all semester without my noticing them, because my body not react to their bites, and because I am leaving in a few days, I am doing nothing about it. On the walls there are a series of old and new maps, including a Nazi German map of Europe (1940), a colonial era map of Africa (1922) and a map showing the location of Colombia's promising oil deposits (1939). There are also a number of illustrations by Marcel Dzama in two rows along one wall, a number of posteards, a badge reading "The Rock: Jesus", and an Efterklang poster. The room is pretty messy right now because the process of packing up stuff has begun (though not proceeded very far) plus I have in four large containers the orphaned household items formerly belonging to Sonja Litz, who left yesterday to Hong Kong. There is a heater in the room, but it doesn't really work, so a lot of the heat comes from the electrified bathroom tiles, which work perfectly. Norway right now is mostly covered by snow (so I understand) but Oslo is not. The roads are salted and there's neon Christmas decorations throughout the downtown and a little ice rink near the National Theatre crammed full of young kids and teetering Latino and Indian tourists. Today, the sun rose at 9.04am, and set at 3.14pm.

D. It has just turned 4.30pm, and I am currently sitting at my desk under the glow of a 60W globe, listening to Grizzly Bear's "Friend" record. I am pretty tired. I am wearing black rimmed glasses, a white shirt with red pinstripes, a maroon tie, a black cardigan, blue jeans, a silver ring, two Colombian bracelets of vegetable ivory, black socks and white & green K-Swiss sneakers which I bought in Sydney in June and already have already ripped at a number of places down each side, making them a particularly bad investment. The shirt and tie is on account of the semi-formal class dinner party I will be attending tonight to celebrate the end of exams. Beside my computer is a jar of 150 Norwegian kroner (A$30) in 1 kr and 50 øre coins which I have been collecting throughout the semester and intend to use tonight to pay my portion of the dinner, which is apparently going to be a selection of tapas.

E. Today I have eaten: 1 x raspberry tartlet, 1 x pesto, parma and mozzarella sandwich, and 1 x bowl of ICA "Crunchy" Muesli (with dehydrated strawberries and yoghurt clusters) and milk. Since arriving in Norway I have eaten this type of cereal almost every single morning, and I have kept every box (flattened) in order to know how many boxes I have bought and consumed. The grand total is 26. The tartlet and sandwich was from the United Bakery in Karl Johan's Gate, where they have a hot liquid chocolate fountain (with which to fill up brioches upon request) and a conveyor belt on the roof that pulls around little hanging carts, trays and boxes of scrolls and danishes, delivering them to the shop floor from the bake house in the floor below. I went there for lunch with AO and EK, and we sat and ate at a table on the street, where we weirded out Norwegians by smiling and saying hello to them as they walked past. I cannot report this year on my weight, as I have no access to scales, but I imagine its about the same as last year (70kgs) - perhaps a kilo or two less. I have some particular problems with my digestive system.

F. Yesterday was the last exam for my Master program - meaning that come January my full letters should read "BA(Hons), MIA". I do not have a job in which I am currently employed, though I am due to start working in February for the Australian Federal Government as a public servant at AusAID - the Australian Agency for International Development. This means that I will be moving back to Canberra, which is where I lived for most of the first half of my 27th year. Canberra is not a city I have grown fond of in any way, but I am thinking much more positively about the prospect of settling there than I was a few months ago. I think that for a few years I have been trying to create necessary change in my life by changing the place that I was in, rather than changing myself and my own outlook. I will try to do this in Canberra. For example - rather than sitting around thinking, procrastinating, using the internet, roaming aimlessly and such, I hope to read, write, cook, garden, build and create more. I will seek to be less distracted, more focused and unmixed in my attention. Rather than focusing my thoughts as much on human deficiencies I am going to explore the intricacies of the natural environment. I am going to seek, in both theory (through a forthcoming website) and practice (in my everyday actions and interactions), a more cohesive and symbiotic balance between community and solitude. If I can, I will not live in a suburb of Canberra, but in a cottage or small house slightly outside of the city, with a rural outlook. This may be tricky, particularly with the commute. I will probably buy a car and spend weekends bushwalking, camping, going for concerts in Sydney, skiing and exploring the eastern coastline. Absolutely essential to my vision is a bread machine and many, many books.

G. Recently, a number of people have said that I don't smile enough, or that I never laugh. That I am morose. This is probably increasingly true, and although I don't feel sad or grumpy most of the time, I am mindful of the impression I give people, and of the fact that I do take things too seriously and often find it hard to engage with people in a tender, relaxed, and loving way. I used to be a lot more filled with love and excitement for the world and its people, but these days, on the whole, I feel unable to connect with many things. There are individual people who I know that I love, and I know that were something terrible to happen to these certain people, I would be ripped apart. But I think that years, now, of moving and resettling and saying goodbye over and over to places and people; friends, family, lovers - all of this has led to my disconnecting my interior from the exterior, my self from community, my head from my heart. This is something I really want to undo. It is the thing I most feel I must try to change.

H. I am not a member of any organised religion, but I have felt more recently as though religion, or at least a part of it, is beginning to mean more to me and be more a part of me than it was in the past. By religion I follow Tolstoy in referring not to obedience to church dogma, not to submission to established authority, but simply to "the principle by which one lives". Part of the above process of personal change involves some fine-tuning, some recommitment and some reimagining of the principles by which I hope to live. I hope to engage more in and understand what may be called true human work - home and community building, agriculture, cooking. I hope to attend Quaker meetings in the new year and see if they hold anything of value for me. I hope to read and reread and become actively inspired by Henry David Thoreau and ideas of transcendentalism. I would usually refrain from providing hyperlinks in a State-of-my-life Address, however I must say that these two Curtis White articles in Orion magazine (along with two others of his in Harpers magazine) have been, very recently, massively influential in helping consolidate my thinking and outlook on belief and faith and care. I believe I am more of a pacifist than I was this time last year. I have a long way to go, however, before I can claim to act in any manner that may be thought of or described as religious.

I. I have a girlfriend; she is tall, Swedish, and perhaps the most caring, rational, hopeful and loving people I know. My love for her is both important and warming, and continues to grow, all the time. I wish I understood the way I experience love more than I do, and I wish that I could express and show it better. I look forward to learning more and more from her, about her, and about this love for what I hope will be a very, very long time. She was also the person I most recently kissed. I will see her in three days time.

J. I am very broke - particularly so because of the expense of life in Oslo. I have, over my time here, become more used to the idea of paying up to A$6.00 for a bottle of water. I owe a lot of money to my parents and a lot of money to the government of Australia. I hope, after February, never to have to borrow money ever again. I do not have a car, a boat, a horse, a dog or cat, and I have not read The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice - I apologise to MMM and EK, respectively. I do not drink coffee or alcohol. I have a Facebook account, a Flickr account and a Gmail/Blogger account. I use the internet more than I should. I need a haircut.

K. Currently I am reading The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen, The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, and Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. The last movie I saw was The Dead Poet's Society (1989). The last gig I went to was The National and Hayden, here in Oslo, and it was absolutely incredible. Seeing me at that show would have surprised those people who think I don't smile. The last thing I bought was a black cardigan, from H&M. The last meal I cooked was burritos with red kidney beans.

L. I have been to 36 countries and one occupied territory: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Laos, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States of America, Vietnam, the West Bank (Occupied Palestinian Territories). I have lived in Australia, Canada, Egypt and Norway. I speak English, a little Spanish, a little French, a dwindling amount of Arabic and a tiny collection of disconnected Scandinavian words.

M. I am a member of CISV (Building Global Friendships), an international peace education organisation which I've belonged to since I was 11 years old. CISV likes acronyms. I am currently a co-opted member of the IMC, in which I am part of the training and communication sub-committees. As of today I will responsible for doing the Mosaic website. I am also a director on the board of the Australian NA. In the last year I have participated in two international programs -APRW/JASPARC in NZ, where I did a training session for the JB; and an IPP in DK. Etc. Basically, its a cult.

N. This year I have attended lectures by three Nobel Peace Prize Laureates - Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams and His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and in two days time I will be seeing a fourth (and fifth) when I attend CNN's interview with Al Gore and a representative from the IPCC in the Oslo City Hall, as part of this year's Nobel ceremony celebrations. I have studied often in the Nobel Institute library, visited the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and held a season pass to the Nobel Peace Center here in Oslo. These experiences have been: varied.

O. It's been a strange year, a bittersweet year. I've learnt a lot, I've felt lonely and even forgotten, I've hurt people I love and been hurt by people I love, I've made only a handful of new friends, and missed my old ones more than I usually do. I've found new clarity and focus in where I want to go and who I want to be, but I've simultaneously become more lost at sea than ever before. I feel scarred and bitter, and yet naive and hopeful. I have realised that the idea of 'place' has come to mean a lot less to me now than it once did, when it used to factor heavily in my writing and thoughts and dreams, and I think this has come from living in two separate cities with which I am not in love, nor have historical connection to. It's been a year without spring - autumn then winter segueing into a windy and wet intermission when it was often light but seldom warm, before returning again to autumn and dark, dark winter. Even love, which I have tried to allow myself to feel again, has, at once, soothed and confused me. I have spent a lot of time watching seabirds pass my windows, suspended in the grey skies. Here I am, I'm twenty seven, and I'm hovering in the thermals, feeling the updraft, hanging here, one of the luckiest people alive, and yet still: black eyed, selfish, and unable to decide where to perch next.

State of My Life Address 2006 (26 years).
State of My Life Address 2005 (25 years).

Simulated Roomscape

2007-10-29T09:57:00.000+11:00

Today, it was grey and wet and dark by 4.30pm. In a desperate attempt to do anything but an essay on Proportionality, Just War and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah Scuffle, I downloaded the newish Google SketchUp program, which is: Awesome.

Instead of 1000 words on jus ad bellum, then, we have a 3D model of my one-room (plus bathroom) apartment. In colour. Lets just say it took me some time.

So, if, dear reader, you find yourself wondering what hijinks I'm up to o'er here, rest assured that what with wretched weather, lack of disposable income and impending academic assessments I am more than likely sitting in my private 25m2 penitentiary, which, while in actuality a lot more dirty, messy and filled with kitchen utensils, pieces of paper, books, clothes, chairs, and, on the walls, posters and postcards, is otherwise roughly as these diagrams suggest:

(view from above)

(view from the doorway)

(view of the main area)

(just imagine that outside the wind is blowing water at the window at a 65 degree angle)

Are Falling Leaves

2007-10-27T10:50:00.000+10:00

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Today I sat, reading, in the window seat of a French-style delicatessen near my house, where I had a shrimp & salad sandwich drizzled in olive oil and a cold bottle of hylleblomst saft, which in English you would call elder flower drink. Elder is common here in Scandinavia, both as a cordial made straight from petals, at home, by crafty men and women, and as a pre-made beverage in a green bottle. In times when we as humans paid more heed to folklore than we do today, it was thought unlucky to grow elder in one's garden. If an elder tree was cut down, a spirit called the Elder Mother would be released and take her revenge. Reads the poem "Wiccan Rede": 'Elder be the Lady's tree, burn it not or cursed you'll be". In order to cut the tree you had to chant a rhyme to the Elder Mother. Now elder is sold in Israel as Fanta Shokata, which is this bright red fizzy type of Fanta that kind of tastes like heavily sugared battery acid. Danish/Norwegian hylleblomst is much much better.

Oslo's getting really cold. The vanloads of begging and busking gypsies with layered skirts and accordions who were scattered all over the city area have dispersed, returned with their earnings to Budapest and Bucharest. Every first step outside immediately makes me think of Montreal, the way the skin reacts instantly and your breath suddenly adumbrates. I have a Syrian scarf, big and black and grey and red and green, but I don't have any gloves yet. Everything is quiet in the streets, the cafes and bars look sleepy until the doors open and the clatter and din and warmth inside escapes. The trees have turned from rufous to gold to sallow, to thin and tenebrous. The leaves are becoming mulch and loam, a pepper tinted carpet. The skies; greyer, often, and darker, sooner. We play basketball to keep warm, hustle to-and-fro, and it's that strange combination of sweat and chillbitten cheeks.

I hide away at nights and make processed foods with stick blenders.

Tonight I saw Kurt Wagner play under a pegged and pulleyed clothes line for his tunesheets. The audience were perhaps the most silent I've ever heard one. His voice's warm timbre was perfect for autumn. He even started, from amongst the audience, in darkness, with a hymn about autumn, a capella. Snaggletoothed. We were definitely snug there, under those songs. He made the season feel less in transition. We are meant to be here, after all.

an irrelevant anecdote and an angry outcry

2007-09-19T09:16:00.000+10:00

My friend "Giacomo" works for ICBL, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, one of the two co-winners of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. He doesn't get paid for this job, he does it pro-bono, but its amazing work experience and he's extremely likely to get streamlined into some other, equally great organisation, as soon as he's done with this one. About a month before I left Canberra, he asked me to do a tiny little comic/character that he could use on a bunch of business cards he was having made up. He wanted either a picture of himself with "some luggages", or perhaps a little looking land mine with an evil face, or something. I agreed, but never really got very proactive on the producin'. And then it sort of became a joke, sort of, in which I just kept alluding my promise, much to his chagrin.

Anyway, about a month ago we were sitting in a bar here in Oslo and I was drawing on this stack of napkins and we were talking about the West Wing, which "Giacomo" discovered earlier this year and became appropriately obsessed with. So, while we were talking I just started scribbling this sketchy picture of Toby Zeigler, all furrow browed and shoulder-slung jacket, a drawing that was finished in about 25 seconds. "Giacomo" took the napkin and put it in his pocket.

I was against his using it for the business cards. I thought it represented him as a short, bearded, grumpy, balding Jewish man, rather than what he really is, which is a tall, grinning, beardless, goofy-but-loveable northern Italian, with a full head of hair. But he loves Toby and he loves the West Wing and he insisted. He sent off for the business cards to be made, and they were.

---

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the signing, in Ottawa, of the International Treaty banning landmines. Here is Oslo, there are celebrations going on. One of the main squares, beside the Hard Rock Cafe and the National Theatre, have been taken over by a simulation mine field, demonstration sniffer dogs and an absolute Leviathan of a truck called a "Minewolf" which looks like cross between a tank, a bulldozer and a combine harvester, and swings thick metal chains out front to detonate mines in large flat areas like fields. Throughout the week a series of conferences and events are being held, which in part commemorate the project, but also draw attention to, and prepare further for the signing, hopefully by the end of 2008, of a similar treaty against cluster munitions.

Yesterday during lunch, I put on a collared shirt and my better shoes and snuck into the afternoon session of the Civil Society Conference. "Giacomo" had been there all day, in suit and tie, schmoozing with the NGO celebrities and meeting his co-workers, previously known to him only by email and skype calls. And there he was handing out the business card, with my little Toby Zeigler scribble. To the ex-head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. To Charmaine Gooch, founder of Global Witness, who initiated, ran and pulled off the campaign to ban blood diamonds. To ICBL members Paul Hannon, director of Mines Action Canada, and Steve Goose, Director of Human Rights Watch - Arms Division. And to his wife, Jody Williams, campaign spokesperson for ICBL, recent head of mission for the UN Human Rights Council in Dafur, and joint winner in 1997 of the the Nobel Peace Prize.

I was there to see Jody speak, along with Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Judge who also won the Nobel Prize, in 2003. "Giacomo" and I had told a bunch of people in our class about the talks and said how we should be able to just walk in and listen, even though we weren't officially invited, but nobody else came, citing "too much study" or "it'll probably be boring".

It wasn't boring. It was incredible. Jody Williams gave the most inspiring speech I've seen given for a long time. Probably ever. In massive contrast to the other Nobel Peace prize winner I saw this year, the Dalai Lama, there was not one platitude, not one feel-good fuzzy, not one moment of kumbai-ya. There was no apologies, and no set speech, and no big statements, and no soft forgiveness. Jody Williams is angry, she is outraged, she said so many times. She is outraged at governments, she is outraged at the UN, she is outraged at civil society for giving in, or for not pushing harder. She is outraged, and she should be, we all should be, at what has happened to humans, what has happened to the concept of the individual, to the need for human security, to the absolute common fucking sense that says that inventing, testing, producing, selling, stockpiling, threatening to use and actually using all types of purely destructive machinery, from small weapons to land mines to clusters to thermobaric bombs (like Russia's darling newbie) to nuclear monstrosities, is WRONG; that it is not just wrong but disgusting, criminal, evil. Jody Williams sat there, tired eyed and tight jawed, and she ponders these simple questions out loud, and when she asks why, it's not the sort of why you can just make up excuses to. It's the sort of why you just have to listen to, and think about. And get angry about, too.

How, she ponders, can a country like Sweden, with all its platitudes to peace and freedom, how can it still be the leading producer of small arms and clusters per capita in the world? How can the Russians and the Americans produce bombs of massive destruction and then release statements to the world's media about their "pride" and "excitement" at the success? How can government's like Frances - smart men like Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières - how can they seriously even consider the possibility of war with Iran? How can Western governments continuously backflip and pander and smooth over the truth in Dafur when every day people are being slashed to death and women are raped and there's just not enough food and shade and water and medicines, and they say they want reports that everybody is happy with? How does one act in such a way, when we know the full extent of the destruction our act is causing, but we do it anyway?

And the beauty is that she wonders all this without leftist cliche, without flimsy grand statements about the brotherhood of humans, without inane gestures towards the strength of the human spirit, without always blaming someone else, without using just words. In order to wonder all of this aloud, to cry out about all this she uses truth, she uses outrage, she uses logic, she uses the painful fact that we are all to blame, but that we also all have the capacity to make noise, to learn more, to care.

It's an odd feeling, being filled up with a sad flame of fury, and a hot flame of excitement and energy at the same time. To walk out of a room with a new hero.

---

After the speeches "Giacomo" was approached by Paul Hannon, asking whether the balding bearded guy on the business card was meant to be him or Steve Goose. "Oh no, it's meant to be me when I'm older and balder" he said. "But it doesn't look like you at all" replied Paul, "although, it does sort of look like a... fictonal character". Hahaha.

---

STOP CLUSTER MUNITIONS, NOW.

http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/
http://www.icbl.org/
Jody Williams' Nobel Lecture, 1997

Oslo

2007-09-11T06:54:00.000+10:00

Oslo. I walk your quiet streets flanked by quiet houses capped with handsome mansard roofs, these quiet, neat streets, with autumn trees holding green, the quiet skies darkening earlier and earlier. The soft moaning sigh of a passing tram, the harmony of a raw wind from off the fjord, a wind danced by seabirds. A trio of Swedish girls, teenagers, all matching in Helly Hansen puffy parkas and dusty foundation and jingling charms, their hair fashioned wet and swept sideways (as though licked by a large horse), their mouths stuck in scowling singsong and dipthongs. Street corners colonised by 7-Elevens, by Narvesens, by Delis-de-Luca. A sound, a silence, a sound.

Home is the border line between Grünerløkka and Grønland, between hipsterdom and the migrant quarter. Along the Aker river African men stand in position making hissing noises and whispering hash? hash?, their hands clenched around tiny parcels, while the water gushes and trickles towards the fjord. Blond men pushing strollers. Bass guitar from the warehouses. The two sides of the Anker bridge, guarded by statues of human-animal teams from Norwegian fairy tales - Per Gynt and the reindeer, Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon with requisite bear, Veslefrikk med fela and Kari Trestakk - and in the middle, a Roma couple playing accordion and tambourine. My apartment is part of a massive complex, eleven connected buildings round a central square, where Somali women talk to friends through ground level curtained windows, where bored looking Kurdish teens hang out by the little playground, where white students pass by, heads down, where Arab men stand against the wall listening to Arab pop songs on the fuzzy speaker of their mobile phones. From Anker: down Torggata, the Turkish and Vietnamese grocers, the Kurdish kebab and pizza shops, the cobbled squares, the worn out, greybearded gypsy beggar, always in the same doorway with his paper cup. Up Markveien, the second hand stores, the keffiyahed indie kids, the bars with antique furniture, the smell of coffee, the ghosts of industry.

I spend a lot of afternoons in the Nasjonalbiblioteket, the National Library, in its big reading room, rimmed by bookshelves, under disc shaped ceiling lights that look like UFOs, listening to the symphony of paper shuffling, zips, computer keys, the tap and squeak of stepping shoes and the occasional punctuation of sniffs or coughs. I spend a lot of nights in bed, under the doona with my back against the window sill, reading Sigrid Undset or my Ethics textbook and listening to Efterklang or Pärt. I spend the mornings sitting naked, mindlessly trawling the internet for items updated while I was sleeping. I spend the other mornings in class, in which I am one of 16 students from seven countries. I spend the darkness dreaming about people I have never met, and of hideous circumstances. I spend most breakfasts eating ICA muesli clusters with dehydrated strawberries and dried yogurt clumps. I spend a lot of my time thinking about one person, one girl, one smile, one set of eyes, one city, south of here, a city that feels as much like home as any other at this point.

But, Oslo, you hold me safe for now, you appease me for now, you with your rolling skies and cold sea air and colourful streets and lanterns and fountains and construction sites and drug addicts and freckled girls and accordion players and sighing trams and oil-proud Hummers and sad looking trees and street-corner berry sellers and graffiti and nervousness and wooden houses and hills; you with your song.

You smug city, Oslo; you'll do for now.

Looking into the Eyes of Others

2007-09-06T07:17:00.000+10:00

In his book Totality and Infinity Emanuell Levinas makes a distinction between rhetoric and conversation (or dialogue). Rhetoric resists dialogue and corrupts the freedom of the Other not to become the Same. For that reason it is violence par excellence and thus injustice. Levinas talks about violence as interrupting humans' continuity. It is tempting to see our lives as lived narrative in that connection. For Levinas the face of the other speaks to us and its manifestation is already conversation or dialogue. The face opens for the original conversation. We do not fuse with the other or become like her, but interact. The ethical is for Levinas then taking consideration for the irreducibility of the Other. The way the face of the Other presents itself to me is, he writes, non-violence par excellence because it does not violate my freedom but instead calls my freedom to responsibility. As nonviolence it maintains the plurality of the Same and the Other.

Ref: Erik Cleven, "Between Stories and Faces: Facilitating Dialogue Through Narratives and Relationship Building"

just a song

2007-07-28T22:23:00.000+10:00

Ukelele: The camp ended. There wasn't many tears, except when Joanna left. There were, of course, hugs and notes: hugs that spoke louder than words had been able to do in three weeks, as well as uncomfortable hugs, hugs by expectation, hugs of severance. Notes containing compliments and platitudes, silent notes speaking carefully, notes with outpourings of almost desperate love. A note declaring the recipient as grossly self-centered, honest. His back was a voice bubble saying "Rock On" which is about as much a sidestep as you can get and still have pen on paper. It appears the people of France and I might need to spend a bit of time on patching our relationship.

Voice: I do feel bad that I didn't really try very hard. I tried but I couldn't find it. This will be my last international CISV program for a while - I think I get it now, I think it's time for me to do something else. Mosaic, for one thing, and other things, other things entirely. Which is certainly not to say I have regrets: No. Wheat fields, capoed guitar on hilltop, Amella (as a symbol), Magdalena, Jo, the looking beyond, the smell of rain and fire; no.

Accordion: She is only seven, and she is waiting and she will keep on waiting and she has been waiting all of her life, and she is unknowing, she is defined by unknowing. Here I am in Sweden, so easily in Sweden. That's something.

Percussion: The Dane, Kierkegaard, asks if despair is a merit or a defect. He proposes that it is both. "It is infinite merit to be able to despair. And yet not only is it the greatest misfortune and misery actually to be in despair; no it is ruin...Despair is the imbalance in a relation of synthesis, in a relation which relates to itself. But the synthesis is not the imbalance, the synthesis is ust the possibility; or, the possibility of the imbalance lies in the synthesis. If the synthesis were itself the imbalance, there would be no despair; it would be something that lay in human nature itself, that is, it would not be despair; it would be something that happened to a person, something he suffered, like a sickness he succumbs to, or like death, which is the fate of everyone. No, despair lies in the person himself. But if he were not a synthesis there would be no question of his despairing; nor could he despair unless the synthesis were originally in the right relationship from the hand of God."

Trumpets: You are so beautiful when you are shy.

Stories from Svogerslev

2007-07-17T09:15:00.000+10:00

Tonight we were in the fields, waist deep in grain, and suddenly, thirty metres away there was a young deer, bucking and leaping through the wheat. I yelped "ET RÅDYR" which is how you say it in Danish, and stooped and sprinted along the tractor path, thinking I could catch it up and surprise it. Unfortunately a leaping deer is faster than I am and it got away. Still, it was a beautiful moment, the sky of milk being pierced by a disappearing cardinal sun and the wind mills whipping and our movement making tracks of crushed cereal stalks. It was always gonna be beautiful, but the addition of a solitary leaping deer? I mean, come on.

Also there are hundreds of very very large slugs, often in clumps.

The school we are staying in is peculiar in that it has a Lord of the Rings theme, and has meeting rooms with runes on the wall, and hallways with murals on the walls which depict different bits of the story, kind of like a Catholic church might have depictions of the twelve stations of the cross. At night local kids play on the sloping tin roof and spy on us through the skylight as have our discussions. While exploring the adjacent forest today I found a series of paths which lead to a mini climbing wall in a little clearing in the trees, on which I plan to hang a white sheet, and to which I will run a very very long electrical cord to power a projector and computer and I will take mattresses and couches and citronella lanterns and tea lights in brown paper bags and set up a little outdoor cinema. This I will do in secret and then I will lead the other participants to it in the dark, and we will come to the clearing and they will be shocked and enchanted. There we will sit and we will watch the film Voces Innocentes which is about a very good film about child soldiers in El Salvador and then we will be discuss child soldiers and everybody will be very engaged and interested and even emotionally affected. But shhh, I said it´s a secret.

I leave you with a humorous company logo from the side of a plastic food delivery tray.

Scandinavia: An Introduction

2007-07-12T07:24:00.000+10:00

Hello?

For a while now, there's been something wrong. Somehow, somewhere along the line, this blog became something in my mind which it was never meant to be when it started, it outgrew itself and went through some sort of mid-life crisis - it lost shape and energy, its very reason came under question, it grew inert. The need to write began filling me with apprehension, with emptiness, with fear. Once upon a time it was a way to say hello to friends and loved ones around the world, and just express whatever was in my head, or in the streets and skies and hearts and minds around me - but at some point it became something else, it hung above me threateningly, it taunted me, as if saying "you're not good enough anymore. Your writing is not as intelligent, not as beautiful, not as thoughtful as Bec's or Marty's or Patricks. Your photographs are nothing like the brothers Eaton. Your thoughts are repeats, your emotions thin and familiar. They don't want to read about that, not now".

I know this is a stupid way to think. I know that even if it was true, it shouldn't matter, because this is for me, its for my parents, its for my most forgiving and loving friends, its for my children, its for my memory. It's the only way I've ever found by which I actually maintain some sort of commitment to writing - and I must start again now, before I lose this one last medium, before the doubt and paralysis overtakes completely. I must write regularly from here on out - If I can't do it in this six months, when I'm all the way over here, experiencing these things, learning all that I am learning, then something is massively wrong.

I've been meaning to kick off this "new phase" of the blog for a while. I meant to use it to mark the end of my period in Canberra, and to process my quick return to Perth, and to herald my arrival in Scandinavia two weeks ago. But this has been a hard post to write. I've stalled on it again and again, distracted myself just as I've sat down to write. And for whatever reason I needed it first, as a page break, a border, a full stop, a new paragraph. Hopefully with this posted, we can forget about the lapses over the past few months, and I can just start using this more as I always intended it, with entries frequent, imperfect, and likely rambling. This is ok. At least it is better than silence.

Right now I am living in a school in a small village with an unpronounceable name (Svogerslev) which is a few kilometers from the city of Roskilde on the island of Zealand in the nation state of Denmark. I am living here with 24 others from 9 countries, and we are working together with CISV and with the Youth Association of the Danish Red Cross in a refugee asylum center nearby. The families that live here are mostly on their way out - the system has pulled and shunted them around for up to seven years, but their temporary residence visas are about to run out, and they have been denied permanent residence, so they are due to be returned to their countries soon enough. There is despair, and there is pain, and there is depression in this place, especially with the adults and the teenage kids, who remember life before Scandinavia, and understand completely what uncertainty may come next. The younger kids, meanwhile, the ones we are working with, mostly, are left confused, bored and scared. Boys and girls from Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Kosovo float above the grass in the Danish countryside. We spoke earlier in the week to an Iraqi Kurdish guy who had grown up in the Danish asylum seeking system, and had been lucky enough to be able to stay on in the country. We heard about his family being sent a bill to pay for the bullets that the Iraqi government had used to execute his uncle. We heard about the psychological pain his father went through during seven years of imprisonment, and the damage caused to his mother as she tried to get her children out of Iraq and to keep them in Denmark, and to keep them alive. And these were horrible stories to hear, incredible and hard stories, but they have become so real, working with these kids, watching them move and talk and think and play, and doing all these things with them. It is an honor, and it is devastating.

I am blessed too to be working here with some incredible people, with warmth and intelligence and creativity and real, thick, creamy compassion. I invite (actually I implore) you now to read a blog entry written by one of the girls I am doing all this with, Joanna from Canada, who is 20 years old, and very inspiring - and you should read it because she says everything I have been thinking, everything I want to be able to express, and she says it amazingly well. Her blog can be found here: http://ideas-thegrandtour.blogspot.com/

I will try to write every two days or so for the next six months at least. Maybe more. I really hope it will be no less. Right now its the middle of the night and there are still birds chortling and squeaking outside, like this: "chauuuuchooootwitttercheeeechoootweet". There are always birds making these noises, which makes me think that Danes don't need windchimes. Today I sat in the grass and planned pirate activities and made daisy chains and we fit three grown people on the tyre flying fox. This is the beginning of the Scandinavianised version of the Standard Line Delivery System. Velkomme til.

On Escaping

2007-07-15T10:47:00.000+10:00

Behind the school where we are living, over the little hill and across the road, there is a vast wheat field, the stalks waist high and shimmering yellow. In the middle of it all, three vast turbines, whooshing mechanically, and a tractor path running under their shadows. It’s half past eight, the sun is getting lower on the flat horizon, and we are enjoying the magic hour, the four of us, which is to say me and the three people I like most in this project – Maggie (Sweden), Jo (Canada) and Ghassan (Lebanon). We are lying here, hidden by the sea of crops, feeling good because we have escaped for a little while; we are vagrants, camped out and cautious of farmers with shotguns, we are five minutes from the camp but it feels like we are in a John Steinbeck novel, somewhere in California, or Nebraska, or Saskatchewan. We are giddy with laughter and there are ravens in the sky, and flat white clouds. The stentorian whomping of the turbine blades, the gentle rustle of wheat husks, the glow of the sunset on the faces of these people that I have recently met and recently come to love.

We started phase ‘two’ of the project today, which means that working with the kids in the refugee centre is on hold while we devote time to discussion, research, activities and exploration of the project theme (human, and specifically children’s rights). This does not suit some in the group, those who came here to act, to plunge themselves into the lives of some confused kids with confused futures, to do something for a couple of weeks so as to return to ‘normal’ life feeling as though they have achieved something – who look shocked and somewhat horrified at the suggestion that this could in fact be a learning experience for themselves first and foremost. I guess I understand this almost desperate desire to be of use, to stop talking and start acting, but for me this is in no way the venue for that, and we are not the right people – and I disagree greatly with these people. On the other hand most of us are excited and engaged by the switch into discussions. Having seen first hand the impossible awfulness of the situations of these children I feel like I owe it to them – Burhan from Kosovo, Omar from Iraq, beautiful doe-eyed Shamsa from Somalia – to know as much as possible about everything (every declaration, every policy, every arrogant or ignorant decision) which has led them here. Then I owe it to them to work, with every one of my actions, with every one of my thoughts, with my life, towards change. That this is not a reaction shared by some of the other equally well meaning people I am currently sharing a bedroom with is…interesting to learn.

The last day with all the kids at the centre was the easiest so far in terms of running activities and dealing with the kids – but it was by far the hardest emotionally. I think this is the first time I’ve cried sad tears from watching children laugh and smile – brought to surface by the overhanging realisation that their score has been well and truly set, that we are only masks, smokescreens, three minute long funfair rides, that we are powerless, and that next time I hear of death in Iraq, I will have no idea which of these kids are there now, and which are still trapped in the green, leafy purgatory of Avnstrup.

The other day, in the sunshine, a moment worth sharing: Muna from Somalia was playing djembe (she plays really well), while the other girls (Kurds, Persians, Albanians, Roma girls) clapped and trilled their tongues and sang together the song "Ah Wa Noss" by the Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram. I sang along too and attempted to dance, which inspired the Kosovar boys, who busted out some break moves in the long grass. There was a butterfly, and I remembered the name in Danish. The world seemed so small in that moment, and incredibly beautiful, and in that moment, just like in the wheat today, and in the fields of daisies with M and S yesterday, it felt as though escape (from reality, from everything) was really still possible.

An Echo.

2007-04-21T14:29:00.000+10:00

It’s a slow and measured ride. A little after sunset, the smell of wood fires, the scratch and shuffle of possums. The chilled air bites your cheeks, your knuckles, your nose. Scattered milk crates, a barking dog, patches of gravel on the path left from flooding during the hail storm months ago. Bus stop graffiti reveals Casey to be a Big Fat Slut. You cross the dew licked grass. The moon is full, and glows like a future behind the dark lump of Mount Ainslie. A carefully placed bunny-hop up the curb and you’re out the front of the house, cresting at the apex of the shallow U shaped crescent, hidden by the line of conical hedge trees which are exactly the sort you can buy in hobby shops to line the country roads of your model train diorama. Around the dark buses, through the chain link gate and past the old bath tub and little piles of car parts. Through the bead curtain hanging in the backdoor frame. This is what we call home.

And it’s definitely a lonely town.

But here I am and here I am. Canberra, our nation’s brave and bright political beacon, our majestic capital. A city kinda like Pauly Shore or Vanilla Ice – a joke that never fades. Already half way through my first (and possibly only – inshallah!) stint here. Steel-trapped behind the computer desk, reading, typing, thinking, procrastinating – procrastination never feels so bad when you’ve got nothing better to rush off to anyway. Stretch it out, make it last right up to the hour it’s due. See what I care. I’ve got Allen’s snakes, I’ve got the new Modest Mouse, I’ve got Facebook messages from ex-lovers. Out there there’s nothing but a couple hundred up-collared jocks stumbling liquored outta Mooseheads, humming Khe Sahn, on their way to the $2.50 pizza slice counters. Beyond that? Silence and cold and darkness, and somewhere among it all, my bedroom.

I exaggerate of course. There are warm, sunny days with windsurfers on Lake Burley Griffin, and birds flicking from orange and yellow trees. And there are people I have here as my friends, and they are good people, despite not exactly making my desert island shortlist. The key people in my life right now, for your information, are as follows:

"Giacomo"
He is Italian, from near the French border. He likes wearing his sweaters over his shoulders, smart-casual style. He has a particular way of speaking that often includes the use of the phrases “It’s a good/crappy thing, actually, at the end of the day” and “oh PERfect, well done, well done”. I will be studying with him in Oslo for the second half of the year, also. He once stole a 7 disc set of Dawson’s Creek Series 5, but felt guilty and returned it to the store, offered to pay for it, and was arrested. He represented himself in court and walked away without a criminal record. He has trouble with getting the ladies because they all think he is “such a good friend” and “such a nice guy”, and we all know how sexy that is. Little do they know that he’s actually a sexist, Eurocentic (bridging on racist), porn-collecting, smack-shootin' motherfucker. You’re missing out, girls.

Yui
She is from Thailand. She is here on an Ausaid scholarship, meaning the Australian government pay her the same amount to study here as they give about seven local undergraduates – ie: she actually gets enough to live on. She’s pretty much the cutest thing since Sanrio and I’ll admit here that our friendship kicked off when she was chosen in the early days as the closest thing to a crush I was ever likely to develop in the course (and indeed in Canberra) and thus approached her with invites to social occasions. Since then its all gotten pretty severely platonic (thus rendering the whole crush-scene distinctly wastelandic) although Micky and I joke often with her about both of us being somewhat head-over-heels, hence our new (hilarious!) project – http://yayforyui.blogspot.com . She likes cake and German boys.

Hugh
He is from Perth. He is friends with Jim Mitchell! He has a pretty girlfriend called Claire, and surfs, and wrote a honours thesis about Aceh. When he doesn’t want to discuss something he gets very obvious in his vagueness. He doesn’t like discussing the affairs of others, or about his honours thesis, or about skinny waitresses with lisps who have mad crushes on him. He’s a really lovely guy, but he lives out in Upper Downer, which is a very inconvenient place to get to by bike, so he’s consequently notoriously antisocial.

(photo to come)

Jason
He is from Taiwan. He is the most fashionable male in the course, as voted by me and Yui. He works at the Taiwanese embassy, or whatever they call it given that they are not allowed to have an embassy. He is actually a special operative spy intent on the immediate destruction of China. He cooks a powerful Korean dumpling, too.

*
I’m gonna post more, I promise. This is the start of a new era for the Standard Line Delivery Corporation. Enough stalling with illusions of literary birds nests – this is supposed to be a diary goddamn, something to belt out when I’m alone and cold, and to read back on someday when I’m alone and cold and, also, old. For now, to the two or three of you who still bother checking this thing for updates, goodnight, and may your dreams hold rickshaws filled with soft fruit and slender Vietnamese women in milk white ao dai.

Sturm Und Drang

2007-02-28T17:13:00.000+11:00

(all photos are not by me, but are, rather, taken from these four flickr sites - (1) (2) (3) (4) -
you can see many more such photos at these sites)

“Oh, and by the way,” Sarah had told me, “Jane said you can only stay with them in Canberra if you can bring some rains with you. They’re desperate after such a long drought.”

Last night, I was sitting on my bed, slowly absorbing a dry and drawn-out essay on self-education and evaluation in humanitarian aid organisations during situations of crisis, when, all around, the rumbling started. Not at all like the usual punctuated claps of thunder, the approaching storm sounded like a great stampede of wildebeests, like the catastrophic build-up of angry electricity, like the centre of a oval-sized swarm of bees. There were bursts of lightning, slashing across the city centre, and there was the growl of wind coming from all directions. But for a while there was no rain. For a while there was only the terrible noises, an approaching war.

But then it came, the rain. And with it came the hailstones, pounding the trees and the soil and the windows; rocks the size of icecubes. I opened the door a little - ice flecked in through the crack and scattered onto the carpet. It was ferocious - I closed the door again and a burst of excitement shuddered through my body as I jumped onto the bed and snuck under the covers.

It continued. The drains were blocked by hail, and the yard flooded. I went to the door again, turned on the light outside, trying to assess the carnage from the safety of my flat. Where my feet had touched the carpet, wet patches appeared. From under my door, rain had been pouring in, the rubber-bottomed carpet was floating. My room was flooded.

I lifted up the VCR, books and clothes which were on the floor and put them on my bed. I slammed towels and the bath mat up against the door to stop more seeping in. I rang Ed, who ran down and got in through the shed, into the flat. The main house was leaking everywhere, he said, rain was pouring through the roof. We ran outside. Ted was up on the roof, clearing hailstones out of gutters - Jane grabbed a mop to help make the water flow efficiently into the storm drains, Ed and I threw rags and tarps at the base of the door to try and clog up the openning. We ripped drainpipes off the walls to make it flow faster, we clambered up to try and divert the flow of water to other areas of the roof, we dashed through troughs of water in the garden up to our ankles. All the while, hail stones pounded us from every direction.

Then it stopped. The wind slowly died down. Everywhere there was the sound of sirens - police sirens, ambulance sirens, house and car alarms, wailing like this was some other type of air raid. Everywhere the ground was a pot pouri of white and green - huge drifts of ice banked right up to the house, flecked throughout with torn leaves and broken branches. A thin mist snuck across the suburbs.

I pulled up the carpet, and in my soaked socks I started mopping the concrete floor underneath.

Today, the university is closed, due to water damage. Classes are cancelled, shops are shut. People in the streets are shovelling the huge carpets of ice that coat the paths and gardens, creating mini mountains of hailstones. The city centre's streets are covered with ripped leaves and drifts of ice. I have never experienced anything remotely like this.

And they say it might happen again this evening.

(Special note to those in the northern hemisphere - I would like to remind you that: (1) this is summer, and (2) this is Australia. Yeah, holy shit.)

A house, a family, a home.

2007-02-19T19:55:00.000+11:00

SINCE arriving in Canberra I have been staying at the house of the Radclyffe family, in Ainslie, just a short ride from the city centre and from the university. The deal was hooked up for me by my friend Sarah, because she is wonderful. The house's residents currently number six. There is a dog named Lucy. There is a cat named P.C. There is a guy named Ed and his girlfriend named Kat. And there is Jane, the mother, a warm faced woman of about 60, who teaches English to refugees and migrants, mostly kids and women from Sudan and Sierra Leone. She also sometimes teaches French and Japanese. And there is Ted, her husband, a small man with a tight face and white hair and a blurred tattoo on his inner arm. Ted used to be a public servant, now works as a contractor, something to do with passports. All this info I was given by Sarah on a special piece of paper before I left Perth, a short introduction to the family. They, and their house, are some of the very best things about my short time in Canberra thus far.

ON the front verge there is a vintage car, a light pink Dodge with two surfboards strapped to the roof, and there is a beautifully restored silver and blue full-length antique bus. In the driveway; two more buses, one massive green and cream double-decker which looks like it belongs in some 1930s Superhero comic, the other smaller, blue and red and decorated with Trailer Park Trash stickers and an exhaust-burnt dolls head on the tow-ball. This bus has been converted into a living space and is therefore the mobile residence of Kat, she who is the girlfriend of Ed (the son), has piercings in both nostrils and is from Tasmania. Ed is a musician and this week Kat and he have been in Melbourne while he was being filmed on some new show called "Australia's Got Talent!" so I haven't really spent much time with them yet. Also in the yard is a motorbike that Ted rides to work, another restored Dodge with bench seats and some tiki figurines on the dash, a noseless mini minor which has been converted into a trailer, an old engine or two, and a fair amount of junk. Also: there is a vegetable garden, there is a murky pond rimmed with stones, there is a hills hoist, there is a plastic hose transporting run-off from the washing machine into the garden, there are two wooden hives, flecked with swirling bees.

I am currently bedded in the granny flat, which is out back of the house as well. The flat is joined to the garage and a shed, which until late last year was the space in which Ted was constructing a small aeroplane from a kit he got from the United States. It took him seven years to build it, but its finished now, and hes been travelling two hours each way once a week to fly it around a bit ("It looks pretty unique up there on the tarmac" he tells me, "all those other planes are nothing but caravans with wings, all painted perfect white with stripes. Mine might not be like theirs, its all hand-painted, red and silver, but thats the effect I was going for, and it's the way I like it".) This weekend he is flying it to the coastal town where he and Jane have a holiday house so that in the future he can stay longer on the coast, and just fly back to Canberra for work. "At least once" he says. "I just want to do that at least once, y'know, to say I've done it".

Inside the granny flat there is a small fridge, a tv, a microwave, two burners and a bathroom which has a floorspace measuring about 1m x 2.5m, including the shower. There is also a Telstra rented telephone, as well as an old black telephone without any dial on it, just a silver crank you would use to contact the operator in order to place a call. I thought this was a showpiece only, until it rang with two short bursts the other night. I didn't answer, thinking it must have been hooked up to the main line inside the house, but a few minutes later Ted came knocking on the door. "Dincha hear the phone?" he asked "I was tryin ta ask you if you wanted to come in for some dinner, or a beer". Apparently inside the house there is another vintage phone, hooked up as a direct line through to the one sitting plump on my bedside table. An old-world intercom.

Inside, Ted tells me how he brews his own beer, in order to save money on Reeche's, which is otherwise the only beer he'll drink. He tells me his plans to go to the following night to the club. ("They raffle a meat tray on Fridays. Not many people go down for it, so I think I'm in with a chance"). He discusses his hatred of pumpkin ("Ah, I just don't think we should eat orange vegetables. I mean I don't really mind pumpkin in a soup. Or a pie. Or a garbage dump".) At 6.30pm he turns on SBS World News. Asking my age he puts my data into the Nielsen TV ratings tracking device they have hooked up. I become a statistic. Every morning at 2.15am on the dot the stats of who-was-watching-what,-when for the day gone are sent by modem, causing a single trill of the telephone throughout the house. "We try to stick in who's watching as accurately as we can," Ted says. "You can cheat it if you like, trick 'em about how many people are watching. But what's the point?"

Jane brings out some dinner and the three of us watch the news. The two of them moan and grumble whenever Bush or Howard are mentioned, but its whenever David Hicks is discussed that they start exclaiming at the screen. "Bring the poor fella home!" cries Jane. "Oh, they will, you wait and see," predicts Ted. "Right before the election, they'll whisk him outta there. You wait and see." After dinner and the news are over Ted flips through the channels. "Ah, what is this?! SHIT-HALF-HOUR?! That's what we call this Chris, when they don't have anything to show of value. So all we get is shit."

I excuse myself (something tells me Ted is going to sit and flick through the shit anyway) and head back to the little flat out the back, where I find three Daddy Longleg spiders in the kitchenette. I clamber onto the bed with a massive round of Afghan bread and three tubs of dip - red pepper, smoky eggplant and Persian chickpea; I tear the bread in chunks and dab . I dance around the flat a while to the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, I watch the West Wing on ABC, I do some readings for International Relations Theory. Outside I can hear a possum growling and wheezing like some terrible monster, and then a sudden fight, and a clatter, and then silence. The night hangs close and heavy around my little shack. I am asleep before midnight.

THIS arrangement was meant to be temporary, while I scouted the city for a room to suit my needs and budget. But, this is Canberra, and therefore this is almost impossible. The city is flooded with students, the (liveable) cheap rooms near the uni have been claimed. I looked at a room in a house the other day whose two other tenants are currently taking each other to court - she's a miniature Russian woman called Dino (who I thought was a feminine Asian man until I was corrected by two others who had also been to see the room before me - apparently we've all been covering the same ground, all us new arrivals) who likes meditating but never cooks, only microwaves, and requests that tenants scrub the shower (in their private en-suite) down after every time they use it - while he is a one-eyed drug user who lives out the back and doesn't trust anyone to touch his stuff, so while thats where my room would have been had I taken the house (haha!) I couldn't actually see that particular room today, because he was apparently in a bad mood. What's confusing is that despite their feud when I arrived Dino was delivering him a salad.

Anyway, after explaining this particular househunt experience to Ted and Jane they warmly offered for me to move more permanently into their house, outta the granny flat and into the spare room inside the house, once they've cleared some clutter out of the way. So this place, this house with its TV watching monitoring system and its stacks of banjos and guitars and cobwebbed books and antique telephones and cars and buses and its mannequins with sailors caps, and its tiki masks and Buddha heads and its cat and its dog and its possums and its smell of possum shit in the rafters, this place is, for the next four months, going to be my home.

Goodbye Qawawis

2007-02-19T23:15:00.000+11:00

( all photos by my friend David Parsons. Thankyou David. )

During Ramadan 2005, I stayed for a short time, just three days and nights, along with two friends, David from Canada and Maraya from the USA, in the rolling south Hebron hills in the occupied West Bank, in a tiny Palestinian settlement called Qawawis. Settlement is a loaded word to use in the context of this land, like so many other words ('wall', 'terrorist', 'refugee camp') it is drenched in subjective meaning - but there is not another good word for this place that I stayed. It is smaller than a village, and not really a farm. Qawawis was a collection of about seven stone huts built low to the ground, it had some pens for goats and sheep, it had some olive trees, a couple of stone bake ovens, a well, and a population of about 40 people, from four or five families. These people are shepherds and olive farmers, they rise early, graze their gaunt stock in the surrounding hills, bake bread, make olive oil, pray, talk, laugh, play soccer. They had electricity for only one hour each evening, from a generator.

David, Maraya and I were in Qawawis for these three nights because we were acting as international activists aiming to lessen the threat of harassment of the Palestinians who lived there. Qawawis was situated near to a smooth bitumen Israeli road, like the many which slice through the West Bank, connecting army posts and illegal Israeli settlements with Israel itself. On the horizon on three sides such Israeli settlements were perched high on hilltops, overlooking the huts of Qawawis - these settlements were all built since 1982, and are home to Jewish communities of the more fundamentalist persuation. Frequently the Israeli settlers or soldiers would make visits to Qawawis, or stop on the roadside, often with weapons, in order to harass, abuse, threaten and sometimes attack them. Shortly before I was in Qawawis a makeshift bomb was found, planted by settlers in a stone wall - if a rock above the device was removed the bomb would be detonated. The log book in our hut documented countless cases of the villagers being hit with rocks and sticks, of cars driving loudly towards the village honking horns to scare the animals, of settlers suddenly walking around, and into the huts, unannounced, and occasionally accompanied by soldiers. Caves attached to the houses and often containing ovens or storage areas have been cemented over, animal feed and olive trees poisoned. Soldiers at one stage declared the area a "closed military zone" and began to arrest any Palestinians found in the area.

In March 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the military had to respect the rights of the people of Qawawis and similar villages in the surrounding area to live in their ancestral land. The people of Qawawis returned and rebuilt their homes, requesting permanent assistance from International Human Rights observers to help them retain their homes. Harassment, on an almost daily basis, continued.

This photo is of Hadj Khalil, one of the patriarchs of Qawawis. In this photo he is sitting on a platform on which he prayed each day, and looking towards the watchtowers of a nearby Israel settlement.

Hadj Khalil, along with all the other people of Qawawis, were welcoming and warm with us during our stay. Despite the fact that they were fasting for Ramadan, they frequently bought us mint tea and olive oil and za'atar and warm fresh loaves straight from the ovens in the caves. They sat with us and spoke in patient Arabic, as we asked countless questions they had been asked again and again by other internationals. The three of us had an incredible time here with these people, we were made to feel at home in our little stone hut, and together we learnt so much, in so short a time. I will never ever forget the people of Qawawis, or the short time I was there.

A few days ago, Qawawis, along with a number of similar Palestinian villages and settlements in the Hebron hills area, was destroyed by Israeli military. My heart is sunk. Please read the below press-release, sent to me by my friend Sarah, and today, keep in your mind these few innocent, peaceful, beautiful and now homeless families, and the countless others like them, throughout Palestine and the Middle East.

---

Seven Palestinian Homes Demolished
Independent Catholic News
Saturday, February 17, 2007

Israeli soldiers demolished homes in three Palestinian villages near bypass road 317 on 14 February, the Christian Peacemaker Team reports. Starting in Imneizil at around 9am about forty Israeli soldiers with two bulldozers demolished one home, an animal pen and a stone bake-oven. At noon the soldiers moved to Qawawis where they demolished the homes of five families and one bake-oven, then on to Um Al-Kher where they demolished one home and damaged a wall of another home.

At Imneizil several young children were in their home eating when the Israeli military arrived; the soldiers gave the family time to get out, but did not give them time to remove their personal belongings. The animal pen was demolished with a few animals inside; two lambs were injured. The Palestinian family began immediately to build a makeshift pen for the animals as the majority of the sheep were just returning from grazing in the fields.

In the village of Qawawis one of the demolished homes was over sixty-five years old, and sheltered two families.

The Israeli military, in concert with Israeli settlers, has been trying to force the Palestinian residents of the south Hebron hills to leave their homes for years. Due to harassment from the nearby Israeli outposts several of the young families of Qawawis moved to a nearby town; when the Israeli army then forcibly evacuated the remaining families, a court ordered that the families could return to their homes. According to a lawyer representing the families, the Israeli army now claims that this court ruling allows only the last inhabitants of Qawawis to return, not their children who earlier fled the assaults of the Israeli settlers.

"Our children need homes," said one villager. "What do they want us to do?"

The Israeli army said: "Twenty illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity." The Israeli military made no provisions for shelter for the families whose homes they demolished. The families asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide them with tents.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said: "A building permit is unavailable there [in the south Hebron hills]." The preceding day three Israeli peace activists and two internationals, including CPTer Sally Hunsberger, joined approximately fifty Palestinians in working on their land near Imneizil. The Palestinian men, women and children planted 600 olive trees in fields that they had been afraid to walk on for the past four years due to threats of settler violence. During the action, soldiers and settlers watched from a distance, but did not interfere with the tree planting.

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, please visit: the CPT website

© Independent Catholic News 2007

The Pull of the Bush

2006-12-30T00:15:00.000+11:00

Rising up out of Sawyer's Valley the highway careens at almost the level of the treetops. The forest sprawls out, a shawl over the dry land. It is an honour to see it from this level. The air tunneling through the two front windows makes the car shake. I am driving at 100 km/h and I am listening to "The Dreaming" by Kate Bush, and I am singing loudly and the sky is large and baby blue above me.

See the light bounce off the rocks to the sand.

I break, and the trailer (heavy with the luggage of twenty-six newly arrived CISV teens who themselves are carving crushes and hopes and impressions on each other in the bus just behind me) jolts the car forward as if being toyed with by a hidden magnet. An old wooden train carriage in a small paddock. The rust tin roofs. On the road's edge I pass a car crash memorial; plastic flowers scattered in murky jars on the gravel and a Metallica flag hugging the death tree, refusing to let it forget its charges.

At the turnoff I get out to open the sheep gate; unclipping the chain, throwing the two gates swinging, barefeet on the red stones, Kate Bush spilling out across the yellow grass. I have been listening to this album on repeat the whole way from the city and its beautiful, its perfect. In the bus windows Scandinavian and North American faces are pushed to the glass, anxiously staring at their new temporary life. There is a rattle in the bonnet of the car. The patriotic SHOOSH of wind in the eucalypts. Its nice to drive in one certain direction. It feels like home.

See the light ram through the gaps in the land.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Går å Norge

2006-12-22T23:31:00.000+11:00

In 2007, I'm going to live in Norway.

All these photos of Norway are from Fecal Face dot com, and are by Corey Arnold

State of My Life Address, 8th December 2006

2006-12-08T07:42:00.000+11:00

A. Today I have lived for exactly 26 years, which means I am no longer classified, formally, as "youth". I have been alive for 9496 days.

B. I am currently living in an old terrace house, which I share with two girls, Jess and Laura. The house has the word MENAI printed on its front facade, above the roof of the front porch. The Menai were the Greek goddesses of the lunar months, the fifty daughters of Selene (the Moon) and Endymion, the king of Elis and Olympia. They each represented one of the fifty lunar months of the four year Olympiad. I have the third room as you progress from the front door, down the hallway. My bedroom is fairly full of items, clothes, books, boxes, cds and other items. On the walls there are 42 postcards, a chart with the letters of the Arabic alphabet, a large diagram of the skeletal system, a reprint of an old map of Australia (missing Tasmania), 24 prints of drawings by Marcel Dzama which are attached to metal rods with bulldog clips, a framed poster advertising a 2003 Mount Eerie/Mountain Goats/Baptist Generals concert in Anacortes, Washington, six small black frames containing Chinese paper-cut characters, and a reproduction print of a 1936 promotional poster for the Palestinian Tourist Association. My bedspread is navy blue with a very fine pin stripe and my bed linen is black. My house is in Lake Street, which is geographically in Northbridge, but technically counted as Perth (because of strange jig-jagged urban zoning) which is the state capital of Western Australia, Australia.

C. I am currently in bed, with my computer on my lap, a wonderful breeze coming through my window and the occasional light spindrift from the thin mist of summer rain hitting my bare shoulders. I am listening to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. There is soft light from a paper lantern. It is after 1.00am on December 8th and I am tired, having worked ten hours today over a 13 hour period.

D. I am also hungry. In the last 24 hours I have eaten: 1 x bowl of Wild Berry Fruity Bix with milk; many chocolates while in a three hour meeting at work; a Bean Burger with chili cream from Retro Betty's Burgers in Oxford Street, Leederville and two fairly old mini chocolate muffins which were home-made by my boss, Sharon. I was planning to go to the Moon cafe for dinner after work but then I had emails to write and this thing to write, so hungry I remain. This is a common pattern for me - I am terrible at keeping myself in supply of three balanced meals a day. Despite this I currently weigh 70 kilograms and I am 182 cms tall, making my body mass index 21.1, which is healthy enough, apparently.

E. I currently have two paid jobs (bookstore, out-of-school care centre), one smooth alabaster 1.83GHz Macbook, one dental filling, no pets. I am borrowing a car from Gene Eaton, who is in Europe, for a couple of weeks, but usually I ride my bike almost everywhere. My favourite ride is from Leederville to home when its a beautiful still night and the road is empty of traffic and the Morton Bay Fig trees smell rich and pungent. My least favourite ride is around the river towards the university when the sea-breeze is blowin' right towards me and my backpack is very heavy.

F. I have earlier tonight been notified that I am one of seven Australians who have been accepted to the Peace and Conflict Studies Specialisation, as part of a Master of Arts (International Relations) at the Australian National University in Canberra and the International Peace Research Institute / Bjørknes College in Oslo, Norway in 2007. This means that (if I choose to accept) I will spend six months in Canberra from February next year, followed by a semester in Oslo and then another in Canberra. This is exciting news, but there is still a little bit of thinking to be done, as I have also been accepted for a Master of Social Science (International Development) at RMIT in Melbourne, and this also looks like a great course. That said, I think the Canberra/Oslo option is the way I am likely to go, despite the fact that pretty much the best thing our capital had going for it - the legality of fireworks - is no longer applicable.

G. I am not affiliated with any organised religions, though I believe humans should remain humble and inquisitive always, and that we have, on the whole invented a reality to frame ourselves in which is inherently corrupt, self-serving and largely arrogant, and that needs to be changed, in significant ways. I believe strongly in non-violence, but am not strictly a pacifist. I identify in particular ways with all three monotheistic religions and find myself regularly concerned with trying to help rescue Islam in particular from misunderstandings, distortions or misrepresentations. Which is kinda like trying to use a farm plough to flatten the oceans, I fully realise.

H. I currently have about 402 Australian dollars in my savings account, along with $A28.50 in my wallet. I will be paid a further $A298 later today. There's another $US10 in my desk drawer, along with coins from Colombia, Israel, Thailand and Costa Rica. I owe $A100 to my parents for a speeding fine I apparently (according to the multinova photographs) attracted a few months ago, which I have only just found out about.

I. I have been to 34 countries (Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nepal, Philippines, Hong Kong (pre-unification), Israel, Egypt, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Spain, France, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Czech Republic, Austria, Canada, USA, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina) - 35 if you count the Palestinian Territories (actually, I do).

J. I am currently the co-President of the Perth chapter of CISV - Building Global Friendships. I am a director on the National Board of CISV Australia and a trainee on the CISV International Mosaic Committee. CISV is a worldwide non profit organisation working with young people to promote peace education and cross cultural friendship. In the last 365 days I have attended three international events for this organisation - an International People's Project in Phang Nga, Thailand; the Asia Pacific Regional Workshop in Manila, Philippines and a Seminar Camp in Medellin, Colombia.

K. My appearance has changed very little since last year. Until a week ago I had a month-old moustache for reasons of charity, but it has been replaced by the regular facial hair. On my wrists are two Brazilian wish band ribbons, one green and the other red, as well as two bracelets (1x black, 1x brown) from the Colombian Amazon, made from vegetable ivory. At the moment I am otherwise naked, unless you count the doona.

L. On my birthday today (after I sleep for four hours or so) I will be rising early, going to Claremont Pool, completing a refresher training for my Aquatic Rescue certificate, coming home, sleeping a little more, going to work at the bookstore and fielding enquiries regarding the location (in our store) of this Christmas's sleeper hit(!) book title, Where's Bin Laden, which is kinda like Where's Waldo/Wally but, like, with Osama instead of big Wal, which, wow, how clever, don't you think Carrie will think this is hilarious, what a perfect Xmas pressie, maybe I'll get one for Rebecca too, but is it her sense of humour, oh yeah sure, why not, get three etc. Also: I will eat cake.

M. I am currently reading The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. The last DVD I hired and watched was The L Word Season 2 Disc 1. The last gig I went to was Jason Molina at the Rosemount Hotel. The last girl I kissed will have to remain nameless this year, as I am fairly confident she would prefer it that way.

N. I do not currently have a girlfriend, I am not dating anybody, I am not engaging in repeated casual sexual relations with anybody and I do not have any crushes of significance. I am aiming to seperate the intimate and the sexual into two different spheres, and feel mostly like they would best be coming from mutually exclusive sources at this point rather than combined into the package of a single romantic relationship. And, in fact, the sexual I am putting aside as much as possible for as long as possible, so to concentrate almost exclusively (or at least increasingly) on the intimate (ie: close friendships, without lies or fictions). I need this.

O. I have a goal to speak English, French, Spanish and Arabic fluently by 2014 - there has been little progress on this plan in the last year, and while I have refreshed my Spanish brain while in Colombia and maybe added a bit of knowledge in this area I have carelessly lost a lot of the Arabic I gained in 2005. I plan to concentrate on the Spanish in 2007 and also add to this a devoted one year goal to getting some Norwegian under my wing, should I actually come to live there. Sommerfugl = butterfly or, literally, "summerbird". I hope!

P. I have never taken mind-altering or hallucinogenic drugs, I have never smoked cigarettes, I have never been drunk and I have never drunk coffee. I do eat meat though, and I eat a lot of sugar.

Q. Often, recently, I have felt so distanced from people and from the world and from all the values and opinions and lifestyles and reactions and emotions that humans seem to have, that at times I have ended up feeling almost invisible. Sometimes this makes me feel angry, sometimes very sad. Sometimes it makes me feel resolute and strong and gives me direction - sometimes it thrashes me down and renders me completely directionless. Sometimes I don't understand people so much I want to scream and melt. That said, there are a selection of people I am fortunate enough to know and love who just seem so ready to change everything, just teetering there, just on the ridge of great things, or, actually, possibly already achieving them right now, right under my nose, and I'm just not noticing properly while I'm focusing too much on all the people who aren't. These people, these people who swirl around me and perform brilliantly, and who we are all blessed to live alongside, I also sometimes feel invisible in their world, ghost-like and shadowed, but at the same time, they are and they will always be a constant inspiration and source of wonder to me.

State of My Life Address 2005 (25 years)