Spring

The closest thing I have to a goddaughter is M, the soccer-playing soprano and third-year Aerospace Engineering student who has made occasional appearances on this blog before, and of whom I stood in awe even before she reported earlier this year that she'd scored a 95 for a subject called Space Vehicle Design.

Her birthday is on the last day of winter -- I remember the first one well; I have a vivid memory of sitting on some hard institutional seat in the maternity hospital with her late father, handing him the hip-flask of brandy that my own father had thoughtfully provided for his use -- and yesterday she turned 21, an occasion celebrated with an afternoon tea party.

As she floated down the hall of her auntie's house to greet me I was dumbstruck by what she was wearing --




-- not only because of its perfectly-preserved beauty as a piece of vintage clothing but also because the last time I'd seen it, her mother (above right, and below) was wearing it at my own 25th birthday party, 30 years ago:




I don't get a lot of opportunities to observe the young en masse, but there would have been about 60 people there yesterday, of whom only ten or fifteen were my generation or older. Most of the more-or-less-21-year-olds would have been from either the soccer team or the Adelaide U Choral Society, though in their tea-party clobber -- there were some very pretty floral frocks, waistcoats, bow ties and so on -- it was impossible to tell these two groups apart right up to the moment, not long after that photo was taken, when it came to sing Happy Birthday, which was the most brilliantly tuneful and certainly the only eight-part rendering of Happy Birthday that I've ever heard in my life. Having warmed up with that, the AUCS members present -- at least 25 of them -- sang several other things, most of them through mouthfuls of cake or champagne, and were magnificent.

To a person, the younguns were friendly, sociable and courteous, some of them showing a degree of social adroitness that I don't even have now, much less when I was their age. I saw a great deal of thoughtful behaviour, particularly towards M. Nobody was rude, nobody got drunk, nobody whined and nobody behaved like a prat. Perhaps young persons who join choirs and soccer teams are not necessarily representative of their generation, but I'd like to think they are. Watching and listening to them made me very happy.

Housekeeping: notes and queries

Can anyone explain why it is that kitchen implements, if shoved promiscuously and willy-nilly into an overcrowded drawer, appear to breed and multiply (giving forth in the process such nightmares as what seems to be the bastard offspring of a butter-curler and a melon-baller), but that socks and underwear, kept in a similar environment, do the opposite, so that you end up unable to find any clean bras except the itchy red lace one?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Don't mind the worms

My dad, now 81 and fit as a flea apart from his deteriorating hearing, snuck into the Navy in 1944 at 17 and trundled around the Pacific and the Indian Oceans and all the northern waters in between on the corvette HMAS Warrnambool for the best part of two years before he was demobbed in 1946, after which he went home and worked the family farm for 20 years. He was raised in and with an ethos of self-sufficiency that only someone brought up on a farm during the Depression could have so thoroughly internalised as still to have it the best part of a century later.

At my request he's written up some wartime memories for me as a few guest blog posts and they'll be up soon, but in the meantime he's developing his private theory that the solution to escalating food prices is to return to the days of the WW2 'Dig for Victory' campaign, and has asked me to find him whatever I can online about it.

So I Googled 'dig for victory' and this intriguing account is the first site that came up. All I could think of was the sketch in Beyond the Fringe about the imposition of rationing (in which the 'always out in the garden' tag line is a reference to the campaign): 'My woife came oot to me in the garden, her face ashen in hue. "Charrlie," she said to me, "rationin' has been imposed, and all that that entails." "Never you mind, my dear," I said to her, "you put on the kettle, and we'll have a noice steamin' cup o' hot water."'

What made me think of this was the astonishingly therapeutic hour I've just spent out in the garden at the end of a particularly traumatic work week, digging the leaf mould into the sandy soil and wishing my mum was still alive so she could show me how to prune the lemon tree.

Day residue*

*Freudian term intended to reflect my growing conviction that blogging can have a similar function to dreaming.

1) TAUTOLOGY OF THE DAY

'... the ugly side of binge drinking ...'


2) FRIDGE MAGNET OF THE DAY

'WE CHILD-PROOFED THE HOUSE ...
... but they keep getting back in.'


3) THE TRIUMPH OF THE IDEAL OVER THE REAL

Shopping list: margarine, Johnson's facial wash, cat litter, Vegemite

Actual shopping: Elizabeth George's new Thomas Linley novel Careless in Red, Robin Bradley's Australian Wine Vintages 2008, 1 bottle Parker Coonawarra Estate Terra Rossa cab sav, 1 bottle Pike & Joyce pinot, homemade potato gnocchi, panforte from Siena and two chicken micro-roasts (spinach and garlic).

As T.S. Eliot might have said, if he had been a different kind of person: 'Between the Shopping List and the Afternoon / falls the Sunlight.' But what the cats are going to pee in is anybody's guess.


My philosophy of blogging, which I expound briefly here lest my psycho-troll come back to excoriate me once more for writing about my personal daily life, is that the details of one's personal daily life exist along a continuum with big abstract issues in public life (examples from things currently in the news: buying petrol; one's relationship with one's adolescent children), and that one writes about one's daily life in the hope that those who read will see in it fragments of themselves and their own lives, and will recognise their kinship with the rest of humanity in the tiny mirrors of personal experience.

And that's what I value most in other people's blogs. If I want good commentary on public affairs I can get it from experienced, knowledgeable commentators via an assortment of media from all over the world, online or off. But I can't catch the flavour, the immediacy, the Zeitgeist or the rich, dense micro-detail of people's daily lives anywhere but here in the blogosphere.

Anticonfessional

It occurs to me belatedly that the previous LOLcat post could have been interpreted as autobiographical. But no. At my age we are too experienced cunning battered wise to put ourselves in situations where we might get stood up.

Actually I've never been stood up by a bloke. Disappointed, and worse, many many times, but no actual lonely waiting under lamp-posts. I just posted it because I loved the photo, and the caption.

Swings and roundabouts

One minute I'm singing the praises of the solitary life, and the next minute my friend D's kid writes this in his Facebook status update --

[Anonymous Son-of-D] is installing software to replicate a COM port via USB to trick a DOS program into working in Vista

-- and I am re-plunged in gloom.

I mean, if I'd ever got round to having one, chances are s/he too would have been able to say that kind of thing, and all that that implies for personalised helpdesk service finely tuned by filial obligation.

And if, like D, I'd had four ...

Oh well.

Save it, Oscar

Oscar Wilde once said 'There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.'

Now for the shameless and crazy-brave Oscar this may well have been the case, but we lesser, flawed and vulnerable mortals find it kind of painful. Especially when it's kind of nasty, and kind of secretive, and we know we have indeed said and done some reprehensible things under pressure and probably deserve to be trashed behind our backs, and we also know we can't confront either of the people involved and therefore can't defend ourselves.

One of my all-time favourite TV shows was Northern Exposure, not least for the moment when that fine actor Rob Morrow, playing the besieged Dr Joel Fleischman, says to himself through gritted teeth, 'Suck it up, Fleischman.' I've been saying this to myself periodically ever since, and am saying it to myself again now.

So much to blog about, so little time

Here are some of the things I wish I had time to blog about:

1) Hot on the heels of extended blogospheric and other discussion about excessive banging on in the meeja and elsewhere regarding the Acting Prime Minster's looks, hair, voice etc, we now have a huge kerfuffle about the new Member for Bennelong's skirt length.

2) Helen Garner has a new novel coming out next year. It will be her first book of fiction for over fifteen years.

3) Kangaroo Island is on fire.

4) December is impossible.

5) Having gone off Patricia Cornwell quite a while ago and therefore having missed the last two or three books, I liked the look of her new(ish) novel Book of the Dead enough to finally give in and buy it the other day. If I have read the first half aright, it is among other things an extremely damning commentary on the US presence in Iraq, with specific reference to Abu Ghraib. It's very heartening that such a widely read writer can reach her millions of readers with the grisly image of what can happen to a soldier's psyche, especially in such a dubious war.

6) There seems to be yet another uprush of nonsense in various op eds around the place along well-marked 'Why feminism has failed' lines. I plan a longish blog post entitled 'Why feminism has succeeded' and a very short one entitled 'Why all attempts to educate the public as to the correct meaning of the term "begging the question" have failed.'

7) I have a new Christmas Tree ornament:

Hooray

For those who, like me, don't find the new Prime Minister (elect) as radical as we wish he were, think about it this way: it's not so much that we've gained a Kevin, it's more that we've lost a Rodent.

Wednesday Claytonsblogging

Lest anyone (employers past, present and yet to come, this means you) get the wrong idea, let me begin by saying that late last night as I waited for the beta cat to finish her dinner so I could let the alpha cat out of the bathroom and go to bed -- they have to be fed separately, as alpha-cat bolts but beta-cat eats hers in instalments, three or four dainty snacks stretched over half an hour; if they are fed together, alpha-cat simply eats her own and then bumps beta-cat away from the bowl and eats that as well -- as I waited, I flicked through the current Women's Weekly's massive survey on women's lives deciding what my answers would be if I had the energy to get up off the sofa and get a pen.

There are pages and pages of multiple choice in this quiz and my answer to every other question was NONE OF THE ABOVE, but then I found a question with an answer option that exactly fitted my case:

Q. If you are currently employed, which of the following statements most accurately describe your feelings about work?

A. I love my job; it gives me great personal satisfaction.

It's not exactly a job qua job, since I'm self-employed and much of my work involves regular or one-off tasks of various magnitude. But there is an unprecendented number of said tasks on concurrently at the moment, a situation it's possible to survive only if you work on each one in strict rotation for an hour or two at a time, thereby not getting irretrievably behind with any of them. ('If it's 1 am, this must be the proofreading.')

Which means that blogwise I am resorting to the very last, erm, resort of bloggers (and, before them, columnists) everywhere: write a blog post about why you're not writing any blog posts.

I'd blog about the garden but at the moment I'm not spending any time in it and thinking about two major problems out there gives me panic attacks but there's no time to do anything about it.

I'd blog about politics but I don't have time to read or watch the news.

I'd blog about music or theatre, but I don't have time to go to any.

I'd blog about work, but I'm too busy working.

Not a well person

Before I succumbed completely to whatever virus or bacterium it is that currently has me in its icky clutches, Stephanie from Humanities Researcher and I went out to the University of Western Sydney's Bankstown Campus last Friday as guests of Professor Ivor Indyk's Writing and Society Research Group to talk about blogging and writing and literary criticism. Judith Ridge, who was there, has written about it here at Misrule (found via Matilda).

Stephanie and I are old friends and regular readers of each other's blogs, so it was a different sort of occasion from the usual more formal academic presentation -- something I don't think, after ten years away from the academy, that I could convincingly do any more in any case. (Though it does appear to me that in terms of intellectual influences and fashions, of new habits and modes of theory and critique, time has stood still while beleaguered academics everywhere instead spend their time being forced to do endless, pointless administration, sit on committees, find new ways of raising funds, and get dragged down by the never-ending nightmare of the compulsory ARC grants application cycle as by a giant squid, so perhaps I could.)

Giving a joint presentation with a dear friend is something I recommend highly, and I think it's probably fun for one's listeners as well; it adds an extra (and extra-benign) dimension of performance dynamic and a light blanket of warmth to what can otherwise be quite a challenging situation.

But the session was further complicated for me by the intermittent spinning around of the seminar room as I attempted to deliver my spiel and respond to questions. I'd been flat out meeting deadlines, having assorted dramas and doing various bits of organisation before I left for Sydney and I figured the week of early-warning momentary room spins was just the effects of tiredness and stress, but alas, it wasn't.

Apart from a lifelong predisposition to motion sickness that sees me permanently stocked up on medication for it wherever I go, and a very good thing that has often turned out to be (or not; at least one regular reader of this blog will not have forgotten the unfortunate flight over the Swiss Alps to Florence in 1993), I very rarely catch anything infectious or indeed get sick at all, so the opportunities for pathographyblogging here at Pavlov's Cat have always been thin on the ground.

The last two weeks, however, have been quite something. If you see an infection approaching that appears to include a virulent sore throat, head cold, chest cold, headache and apparent middle/inner ear thingy involving attacks of vertigo lasting, at their height, up to five or six hours and involving violently nauseatingly spinning rooms, and that seems to go on and on and on and bloody on with ever-new and more charming symptoms, tell it you don't want it and to please go away.

Especially if you are alone in a hotel room in a city not your own.

Alternatively, you could try very hard not to get so run down that not even your normally very resistant immune system can repel this little charmer. At least, having checked in with my GP, I'm now at the entertaining stage where I can feel the bug and the drugs fighting it out in my bloodstream.

All kinds of things can make a person cry

Lymphopo of As the Tumor Turns, formerly Liz of Grannyvibe, has got her scans back. The longer you have been following this saga the more you will appreciate the quality of the smile.

Actually, if you've never heard of her until now this post will probably do it for you anyway.

Do you have any blondes?

Right, that's done it: I will be renewing my subscription to crikey.com.au whenever it comes up and whatever it costs, and they won't hear a peep out of me except for the rustling of my money.

I mean, where else could you find out completely priceless stuff like this?

'Former tax office auditor and legal brothel industry lobbyist Chris Seage writes:

While many Sydney CBD businesses are crying fowl because of the APEC presence, some of Sydney's brothel barons are cock-a-hoop at the potential for big business during the forum. Brothels located outside of the city's declared and restricted zones, particularly in Surry Hills, have been fielding phone calls from overseas for the past two weeks.

The most frequently asked questions from our economic allies are:

How many entrances are there to the brothel?
Is the brothel in a discreet location?
Do I need a booking?
Does the brothel have a stringent privacy policy?
Is there discreet parking available instead of off-street?
Can the car park spots accommodate big cars?
Can a client be taken immediately to a room?
Do you have any blondes?'


So here's a question: are the taxpayers of these visitors' countries paying for their recreational needs?

And here's another question: are any of the APEC visitors women, and if so, are any of these intriguing inquiries being made on their behalf?

I don't know, I really don't. On the rare occasions when I get to go to Sydney for work, I spend the evenings either networking over a working dinner or sitting in my hotel room frantically preparing for the meeting/conference session/writers' festival panel/whatever-it-is that I have come to Sydney for. And after that I try to get the sleep I know I'm going to need in order to function properly at whatever event I'll be taking part in the following day.

But even if I had the requisite time and stamina, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't choose to spend the evening forking out fistfuls of my own or somebody else's hard-earned for the thrill of shagging expensive strangers.

You were only waiting for this moment to arrive

Blackbirds 1, Dirty Great Bright Green Garden-Eating Caterpillars 0.

God I love Spring.

Pavlov's Law #49

Pavlov's Forty-Ninth Law states that every glass you break will be the first of a set. The house will thus be full of sets of glasses numbering three, five or seven.

There are, however, two silver linings here.

Silver lining #1: it further encourages one (as though any further encouragement were needed) not to hold dinner parties of the Noah's Ark variety, the kind to which people with no official/acknowledged/visible partner (of the opposite sex; this convention must drive gay and lesbian couples straight up the wall) never get invited unless the hosts accidentally find themselves with a 'spare' guest. In such cases, one is usually invited on the afternoon or even early evening of the dinner in question.

One should accept such invitations only if one knows the food is going to be good. While Noah's Ark dinner parties are usually dramas with double or triple parallel subplots -- extra points if any of the subplots are, so to speak, intra-couple -- to rival Shakespeare's, the dialogue is usually substandard.

Silver lining #2: The kitchen floor gets swept. Properly.

An intricate, beautiful world

When I turned the key in the ignition this morning, the car radio was set to RN, where Michael McKenzie, host of Bush Telegraph, was chatting to a man called Andrew Murray from a project called Southern Ark.

They were talking about ecosystems, a subject dear to my heart ever since the Matric Biology exam in which I wrote a surreal, heat-struck rave comparing an ecosystem to a piano. More specifically, they were talking about the fox eradication program in East Gippsland.

It seems that since the program was implemented, the potoroo population of East Gippsland has gone through the roof. This came as no surprise to a farmer's daughter who vividly remembers the sight of fox-mangled newborn lambs, to say nothing of the slow-burn paternal displeasure that accompanied it, and the retaliatory (and also slow-burning) poison gas thingies that he used to chuck down the foxholes.

(While this sounds mean, it's nowhere near as bad as the reason foxes were introduced into this country in the first place in the 1870s: they were brought over so that people could chase them down with horses and dogs, thus terrifying and exhausting them before having them torn to shreds, in the hateful, vicious sport of foxhunting.)

The potoroo, it seems, eats a particular kind of truffle-like fungus. These truffles grow in the roots of trees and shrubs, not parasitically but in a symbiotic relationship in which the truffles enable nutrient takeup from the not-very-good-soil. Because the trufffles grow underground, they can't spread their pores by shedding or bursting like mushrooms or puffballs, so they rely on the potoroos to eat the truffles and spread their spores via fur and gut. The potoroos, in digging for truffles, aerate the soil and help the breakdown of leaf litter, both of which improve the nutrient value to the trees and shrubs. Via mobile potoroos, the spores are spread, new truffles grow on new roots which uptake nutrients to new trees, and the forest maintains itself as habitat for more potoroos.

Andrew Murray explained this lovely bit of bio-clockwork to Bush Telegraph host Michael McKenzie, who was clearly mesmerised by the neat, balanced beauty of this scenario; you could practically hear him listening, and when Murray finished the description there was a little pause in which you could hear McKenzie being too enchanted to speak and then remembering he was on air. 'What an intricate, beautiful world we live in,' he said.

More Bracks: television at its best and worst

Thanks to Darlene Taylor's heads-up at Larvatus Prodeo yesterday morning as the Bracks news broke, I was able to rush out to the telly to watch events unfold. I flicked through the channels and found a live cross at Nine, where an excited young reporter was standing in the street telling the story. Bracks had made his announcement to his Cabinet and was expected to arrive at any moment for the press conference.

Not being any kind of daytime TV watcher as a rule, I had no idea what it was a live cross from until they crossed back to the studio to reveal Kerri-Anne Kennerley, framed against the backdrop of an oddly funereal floral arrangement and looking (Kerri-Anne, not the flowers) suspiciously paralysed about the mouth and eyes. The director then cut to her guest: none other than Sir Ian McKellen, still gazing intently at the monitor and clearly enjoying this little bit of unexpected drama.

When he realised the camera was on him, he sat up and spoke directly to it. 'And people ask me why I do Shakespeare!' he exclaimed, in a flawless segue from the interruption back into his conversation with Kerri-Anne. Currently in Australia playing King Lear, McKellen picked up the breaking Bracks news and ran with it, talking about Lear and family dramas and the abdication of power, and pointing out, quite rightly, that Shakespeare's plays are basically about things that we all see happening around us every day.

It was an amazing impromptu performance and it was perfectly tailored to Kerri-Anne's audience: conversational, interesting, charming, clearly expressed, and a brilliant bit of incorporation. And it was immediately followed, daytime television being what it is, by an excruciatingly protracted infomercial full of hyper-nasal, brain-damaged Valley Girl voices extolling the virtues of a miracle cure for acne.

Gaaahhhh

multiple deadlines and other work commitments
new bathroom basin & taps (urgent)
meaning of life
termite check OMG
too cold to go outside
new printer (urgent)
outrageous behaviour of federal government (endemic)
no time to blog
call electrician (urgent)
no food in house (some might say this was a good thing)
house looks like bomb hit it (need nameplate for house: Chez Cat Hair)
5 x close friends with life issues that make this smalltime stress look completely laughable
meaning of life (reprise)

On anniversaries

Yesterday was my dear friend Stephanie's first blogiversary, or rather that of her blog, humanities researcher.

And looking at the date on it, I realised with a jolt that it's ten years today since I made the decision to resign from the very 'ancient and ramshackle' department she describes, and did so, three days later. At the time, it was more to do with feeling ancient and ramshackle myself, and knowing that I had to put a bomb under my life sharpish, or something very bad would happen.

Resigning from a tenured academic job was and no doubt still is practically unheard of, so everyone thought I had gone mad, and universities do not, alas, give you a package when you are a reasonably productive 44-year-old woman, ie someone they would rather keep than lose, so I cut myself loose with only my own savings and what was accessible of my super.

Looking back, I'm astonished that over those ten years I have somehow continued to scramble a living (usually well less than half of what I'd earned as an academic) out of freelance writing and teaching and have not at any point been absolutely obliged to get a Real Job -- though at one point I did lose my nerve and apply for one, which I didn't get. Fortunately this brought me to my senses.

It has not been an easy ten years, and some of it has been terrifying. But a year or two ago I read an article which listed -- though who knows where people get these stats from -- the top ten things that people most want to do before they die. At the top of the list: 'Be my own boss.'

Well, yes.

I read the other day that Melbourne University, in its shift to the US model, plans to get rid of a quarter of its Arts Faculty staff. Had one stayed on another ten years, one could no doubt have got a great deal of money out of Melbourne University in exchange for one's quiet departure, and I hope a lot of my friends and former colleagues do exactly that. But there's no amount of money that I would swap for the decade that finished today.

Trying to think of a thesis topic? Take up blogging!

I first took up blogging after an Honours thesis I was examining blew the top of my head off with its brilliant and groundbreaking interdisciplinary analysis of 'infertility blogs' and their posts and comments. The student had used a mixture of narrative, psychoanalytic, new media, feminist and life-writing theory, plus material from the fields of anatomy, psychiatry, sociology and ob/gyn, to put together a brilliant analysis of the content of these blogs and of their democratic and therapeutic nature (including a few incisive remarks in passing about the relationship between democracy and therapy), and to formulate a set of propositions about future possibilities for the medium.

Blogging opens up a whole new field for analysis and it certainly lends itself to interdisciplinary approaches, one of which would be some kind of sociological/psychoanalytic/general-discourse-analysis study of how people behave at computers and what they put into search engines. The terms that turn up on one's own stat counter reflect both the nature of the blog and a cross-section of who's out there Googling and Yahooing, and it's quite an amazing reflection on human nature: on the things people want to find out about, the ways in which people use language, and the ways in which their language then gets crunched by the search engines.

In the course of this experiment in Ideas-Festivalblogging, I've had occasion to check the stats-counter information a lot more often than usual in order to get an idea of how many people have come to the blog directly from the Festival website or from searches about it. And I've not been able to help noticing -- as you do -- what some of the more exotic searches have been that have brought people here. Many of those people will have been bitterly disappointed; others will have found exactly what they were looking for, particularly in the case of the frilled shark.

So before I get on with the last two posts from the Festival of Ideas, here for your amusement is my version from the last 100 posts of the time-honoured Search Meme: here are some of the things people search for that bring them, sometimes kicking and screaming, to Pavlov's Cat. Yet again, I don't seem to have scored any of the real bottom-feeder dreck, for which I can only be grateful. And even just my last hundred visitors have thrown up a number of definite, and predictable, themes.


ABOUT CATS

'ideas to build a cat pen'

'magnificat cat'

'picture cat stuck in fridge'

'cat drama' (a tautology, surely)


ABOUT FOOD

'pauls brandy custard'

'frog cake'

'cherry puree+jelly recipe'

(Do you see a theme emerging here?)


ABOUT OBSCURE SCHOLARLY/LANGUAGE STUFF

'bachelard nests and memories'

'retromingent metaphorical meaning'


DUBIOUS MISCLLANEOUS

'wardrobe fall on top'

'wire in the blood sexual tension' (another tautology)

'prehistoric shark-half eel' (see above)

'cuckold tramp stamp'

I particularly love that last one. Observe the mix of the quaint outdated concept of the cuckold with the very contemporary 'tramp stamp', which is a tattoo on one's lower back or upper bum, depending on which school you went to, and for which the most usual synonym is 'arse antlers'. Poetry at its finest.