I feel a bit dodgy for posting this, since I didn’t exactly make the puff pastry from scratch. It was an impromptu thing. I had to leave the house to get my blood pressure meds, onions and some fruits. At the grocery store I had a sudden urge to get puff pastry sheets. Then I came home, and in a crazy fit, started drafting out a short story set in the golden age of the Yrole Triptych that’s been sitting in my brain since last June. Well, okay, originally the story itself was set in Lumen Procellae, but I decided to set it in the world of The Yrole Triptych instead. The result is this: making the sort of Spiced Meat Rolls I imagined the people of my protagonist’s village would eat. The filling is minced meat, mashed potatoes, minted peas. I cooked it with caramelized onions, ginger-garlic paste, garam masala powder, some paprika, some fresh coriander, curry leaves, spices (cloves, black mustard seeds, fenugreek, cinnamon flakes, cardamom, jeera), a tablespoon of Malaysian curry powder and a tiny bit of lemon juice, just enough for flavour, not sourness.

Anyhow, I probably shouldn’t be drafting short stories when I’ve got academic deadlines, but reading about writing and scifi/fantasy literary criticism in general just makes me want to write instead of just writing about others. I’ll get back to the grindstone after this post-prandial drowsiness wears off.

I don’t know which worries me more, that I’ve been spending each weekend in a frenzy of cooking and baking, or that I’m dorky enough to cook stuff from my stories.

I slept a little earlier than usual and was awakened by nightmares. The kind of nightmare I used to have as a kid, to be precise, so I should be forgiven if, at 2:00 am, I am indulging in hot milk, cookies, Arcade Fire and photomanipwankery. I love saying that word. Photomanipwankery! I suspect the wind howling outside has something to do with the nightmares, as it rattles latches and doors; but it does invoke a rather delicious feeling, of wildness and possibility, that kind of manic exultation that I associate with reading lush historical fantasies or gothic and byzantine texts after midnight. I read Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts’s Empire books on a series of nights like these, puttering about a sprawling single story house in a white nightgown, listening to the wind rattle the branches of looming equatorial houses, feeling the thrill of fear but refusing to budge from the chair into which I wrapped myself, with a thick book I refused to let go of, not till the neighbour’s cock crowed at dawn.

There are no chooks in this neighbourhood; the cold wind which is not sure which season it belongs to is rattling through subtropical trees and the nearby bush. If I stay awake long enough, I will hear kookaburras at dawn. But the feeling corresponds to those emotions felt, over ten years ago when I inhabited a sprawling house with raised wooden floors in the bedroom. It was one of those large, clunky terrace house developments built in the `70s in Malaysia; they have such a retro feel about them. I prefer those house designs to the newer, more upscale developments. There was more solidity in their design, also more square feet. These houses were built for space and maximum coolness in a hot climate. Also, there was something about these spaces that breathed and exemplified gothicity, something that inspired, even as they terrified and kept me awake long after I should have been dreaming of cybernetic sheep!

I was very sad when I left that house. The haunting sense I experienced in it, the blossoming of my gothic artistic sensibilities made its way to more than one of my texts and paintings; although Domus Exsulis only came into being a couple of years later, in a house bordering a Malay village, where the claustrophobic communal lanes were populated with stories of phantom tigers that roamed the development at night, love spells and possessions, care of witch doctors. Where these fears took the shape of other revenants that lurked beneath the sickly orange glow of street lamps.

And so I listen to the wind blow here, and I think of all things that haunt these spaces and our dreams, which will not allow us to choose where our minds reside, even if our bodies inhabit different spaces; sometimes by choice, sometimes by chance. Perhaps there is a reason why, in these pictures, I looked for that quality of translucence and luminescence. They speak of a place where the borders thin out, become see-through, where possibility may yet sneak past the barricades we put up against both the cold wind and the revenant predators of our own making.

Not quite see-through, but cradling a sea-change, feeling it curve and wind around oneself; it is both liberating and unnerving. Perhaps it is the season’s change, but the ontological and ontical properties of things transfix me again.

I spent the afternoon and evening at the botanical gardens, photographing flowers and branches, being amused by other photographers, the amateurs, the serious and professionals, and the tourists. Not entirely sure where I fit within the continuum. Probably the artwankery type of serious amateur. Does it matter anymore? For me it’s about allowing myself to be enchanted, allowing myself to play with a battered camera even if most of its processes still remain a mystery to me.

I’ve also re-drafted I Will Not Save Your Damned Princess! at the river. I started drafting this sometime in 2006, and had plans to set it in Japan, from the P-O-V of a grumpy asian photographer chick. That hasn’t changed! However, I write differently these days. Perhaps it’s because of mixing with performance studies people. Perhaps it’s the stuff I’ve read concerning performance studies, or if it’s just the fact that I am engaging with life and the physical qualities of existence more now; I always visit places where I want to write things. I enact scenes, I mark “X” on the ground in my head; I traipse through gardens or parks or the dark corners of concert halls and rock clubs. The scenes are grand and ornate; they spool as though they’ve got a director and a stage manager on hand. I’ve re-set I Will Not Save Your Damned Princess! inevitably enough, in Brisbane, though it begins in Japan. And so, because it was part and parcel of the seachange I am experiencing which mixes gothic literary theory with mad fiction-writing, even madder art adventures, photography and a return to philosophy, all of this has made it into the short story. I’m happy about this.

Don’t know how to feel about being so translucent, though…

It feels like I am remembering once again, that to be golden, you have to glide in-between. I spent the better part of a lovely, unexpectedly warm afternoon taking these photographs, re-acquainting myself with my camera, realising I’d allowed myself to be lazy. But then again, how much time can one devote to the technicalities of good photography when one is busy being a ph.d student?

Re-acquainting myself with objects and items out of nature had me re-acquainting myself with both Heidegger and principles of aestheticism again. It was a good place for me to return to. I also mused on the fact that every single time I produced my best bit of academic writing during my candidature, it had been during periods of intense creativity when I was also painting, taking photographs, and writing fiction. So. That really answers my dilemma, doesn’t it? The times in which I denied myself of my integral need for expression were also my academic fallow times.

And this hasn’t really changed from my M.A. in Literature days when I would hammer out a chapter and a 9k work of historical fantasy within the same week.

What I really need to improve is time management. Otherwise, I think I have a working plan for success. Within the scope of my candidature, that is. Or so, I would like to dream.

I am still afflicted by a ghastly plague that has me hacking and coughing, fuzzy-headed and feeling very sorry for myself. My language has become strange and colourful, even if most of it is steeped in self-pity. I have decided rather arbitrarily that certain things will make me feel better. Like making Fettucine Alfredo last night because my throat wanted something creamy. Or eating raspberry jello and fruit salad. There’s no science or logic to this, but my brain seems to feel that if I do this just so, and that just so, I will get better. Based on this arbitrary method of “trying to feel well enough so I can be productive enough”, I offer you some pictures from my life. Because photographs make me feel happy. And I hope they do the same for you.

Just so you know, this is what I see when I step out of the glass sliding doors that lead from my study to the patio at dusk.

In choosing a suitable habitat for grizzled ninnies, it is hard to tell if she chooses environments which echo best the elements in her stories or dreams, or if they choose her. She suspects the method is as arbitrary as her irrational masterplan for “getting better”.

Claimed by landscape, owned by it; I write my best work when it is thus.

Sometimes, in the morning if one awakens early and has the presence of mind to be alert, one may hear the sounds of a kookaburra. Although, this shy fella is actually an inhabitant of Moreton Island.

Within this comfy granny flat that sits against a hill, cooking takes place after dusk. The colder weather requires comfort food and experimentations. Like Boeuf Bourguignon. The full recipe by Julia Child is available online, but if one has health or dietary/religious concerns, the recipe may be modified, even if it may make purists cry. (Substitute w/ beef fat, stronger broth and vinegar, preferably fruit-based).

Or, one could whip up a quick and easy fettucine dish, with chicken that has been sauteed with tons of minced garlic in butter, with a dash of parsley, oregano, salt and pepper before adding canned italian tomatoes and red capsicum. All of this is made easier when one acquires a new serious-as-a-heart-attack jumbo non-stick frypan on sale. One could also make a creamy mushroom risotto. These are things sore throats like, if not one’s hips or already too-round belly.