Gah. Stupid thesis chapter is confounding me. I’ve been staring at the bloody thing for the past couple of hours. Hate when that happens and you’re reduced to copy-editing and polishing instead of making substantial changes. A blog update seems to be good to break the stasis. So, some “good” news. Because I need to remind myself there’s good news in my world.

• I had a wonderful birthday with wonderful people, and wonderful food. This made me very happy.


• By my own personal standards, the paper I presented at Canberra was a “success”, in that it was my least flawed delivery, and I managed to answer all the questions well. I guess every conference I’ve been to has made me more sure of myself. Also, I think I have my conference paper presenting system down, and I can use this formula for years to come, hopefully improving on it. Last year, I realized that for me, it was more important to be a serious scholar presenting a fully written paper instead of just having nice slides or whatnot. I’ve stayed true to this. Public speaking is still terrifying, but I get over it by treating my audience like they were my students. That kind of helps.


• My abstract for Aussiecon 4 has been accepted, so I’ll be presenting there. I’m both elated and terrified. I think presenting a paper at my first Con is a good thing, though. Will give me some sort of structure and purpose.


• I also belatedly discovered that Said The Tree to the (Axe)Man is listed here. It’s for 2007. I’m utterly gobsmacked I’m listed in Locus Mag, no matter how obscurely. Granted it was my only print sale, but it’s a start, I guess.


• Speaking of print publishing, Cabinet des Fees 3, the print journal edited by Erzebet Yellowboy and Helen Pillinovsky is now out! I got a sneak peak, and I have to say, the stories are absolutely exquisite, so you should go get it now! Also, Erzebet has rolled out the new site and domain for Cabinet des Fees; there’s a teaser for the new section for Cabinet des Fees that I’ve been slowly working on this year with input from Erzebet, Demeter’s Spicebox. It’s going to be a “by invitation” project aimed at exploring lesser-known fairytale types, set in different locales around the world, and we’ve been making a wishlist of authors that we’d like to contribute.


• I have been reading books from the Hugo Voters Packet, finished reading Cat Valente’s Palimpsest over the week in Canberra, on my dopod. And, I love it. Yup. I was totally swept away by the story and enchanted by it. At its best, the intersection between worlds reminded me of both John Crowley’s style of fiction as well as Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, with some of the textual brutality of Murakami. Since the ability to be swept away by fiction when one is a jaded phd student in literature and drama can get a little strained, I’m grateful for small mercies. Next, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. I am also rather chuffed that I’ll be able to vote for the Hugos this year. It’s a moment of geekish pride, I think.


• Music recommendations that I have fallen head over heels in love with, both old and new: Belle and Sebastian, The Decemberists, My Brightest Diamond and Bat for Lashes. I’ve heard about the two former bands for years, but never got around to really listening to them, but they are now firmly part of my soundtrack for this year. I spent the whole day listening to The Decemberists singing “The Hazards of Love” an epic indie-folk rock opera with folkloric themes inclusive of Tam Lin. So good.


• I bought red clothing in Canberra for very reasonable prices. I’d been yearning for more crimson in my wardrobe and now I have it. Also acquired T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral at an open-air used books sale.


• I am now addicted to caramel cappucino. Wait, is that good news? :-/

That’s it for now. I hope I’ll have more good news this year. A fiction or poetry sale would be nice, but one has to submit for these things, before one gets either accepted or rejected, no? Maybe I should reserve one afternoon a week for this. I think I’d hate myself if I let this year go by without a single creative submission. For now, I’m going back to trying to add another paragraph in my thesis before I sleep. Despite all the good news listed above, I’m still whiny, angsty and more than a little neurotic. Sigh.

On Saturday, I watched Letters to Juliet with one of my movie buddies, who very gallantly allowed himself to be dragged to a girly flick, and even enjoyed it. We agreed that the lead actor was a total prat though. The reason was so we could say goodbye to The Regent, which closed for good on Monday. I think it’s a tragedy and I’m not the only one. I managed to get a couple of shots of the beautiful Regent that didn’t get messed up. I wanted to go back the next day but was still exhausted and overwhelmed by the whole homecoming thing. Alas. I should have gone for Casablanca, eh?

Apparently they’re keeping the facade but it’s hard to tell how much will survive the demolition process. People have been lobbying to save this landmark but to no avail.

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In other news, if you’re keen on poetic fantasy or mythic fiction, Vera Nazarian is currently giving out Dreams of a Compass Rose, free of charge for a limited time only via Smashwords. The snag? None, if you read ebooks regularly. Also check out other stuff by her.

Limited Time Promotion!

Dreams of the Compass Rose by Vera Nazarian Available now, and will be for 90 days, in its entirety, as a FREE download, in various e-book formats from Smashwords, and other online retailers. Download your FREE E-book now! Available Formats: Epub, Kindle (.mobi), PDF, RTF, LRF (Sony Reader), Palm Doc (PDB), Plain Text Free download period ends September 15, 2010. NOTE: Copies downloaded during the free period will remain yours permanently—completely free-of-charge, without any DRM restrictions, to be enjoyed on your various reading devices. Press Release

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And here’s a really practical and down-to-earth FAQ about photography from Kyle Cassidy. I agree with most of it.

Finished Memories of My Melancholy Whores, then polished off three very frivolous but fun books, bought in a used-book store whilst shopping with the girl who used to live 8 floors down.

I have not reached my goal of reading 100 books this year. I’ve added some of the books I’ve read for work because I would have read them for pleasure as well. But still, a dismal number of 50-odd. Still trying to reach 60 by year’s end, just to satisfy myself. But I’ve had very good reasons to not read 100 books this year, I suppose. I’ve been working on my own novel, working on work and research and applications and yeah, stuff.

And I’ve been MUD-ding too much, damnit!
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Recently watched L’appartement (The Apartment), confusing in parts but really, really cool. It’s the kind of movie many new directors try to make but never quite pull off because it ends up feeling contrived. Somehow, this movie succeeds in not being contrived. Brilliant! The only thing I didn ‘t like was the deus ex machina treatment towards the end of the movie. It was a touch overdone, but does not detract from the overall enchantment of the movie. And, there’s Monica Belucci in it And, I’m adding this movie to the list of movies with endings which I consider “perfect”.

Listening to: How to be Invisible – Kate Bush

Somehow, it has been hard to actually sit down to try to anchor impressions in words when it comes to this CD. Without comparing it to the other works in Tori’s output – the words that come to mind are: beautiful, more pensive than melancholy, lyrical. Perhaps it’s slightly less manic, less personal (and yet, because of that, somehow more), less of that fiery, chaotic energy we’ve come to identify with Tori, but still, very much the singer-songwriter we’ve come to know and love.

More piano in this effort than in “To Venus and Back”. Also, something about certain arrangements reminds me of “Strange Little Girls”: perhaps the echo/distortion effect with the piano, the laid-back guitars and drums. The album may seem more accessible, but in no way does this detract from her artistry, as the songs may be testament to a triumph, melodically speaking. Personally, I do not agree with the notion that you have to always have to be on a high, radical note to write good music. Nor do you always have to suffer for your art.

Songs that have become fast favourites of mine include the Maryannelike and very haunting “Carbon”, “Crazy”, the truly delightful “don’t make me come to Vegas”, “Sweet Sangria”, “your cloud”, which I think captures the essence of the whole album. “I can’t see New York” is of course, one of the more heart-tugging songs on this album, not just for obvious reasons, but because of the spiraling layers of the music and the many things going on both lyrically and melodically speaking. Rounding up my favourites: the strangely tender “Mrs Jesus”, the edgy, message-laden “Taxi Ride” with a beautiful and poignant chorus that somehow reminds me of Jonatha Brooke, and the sneaky “another girl’s paradise”. Sneaky because it suddenly snuck up to become my favourite, that’s how quietly beautiful it is. Backtracking a little: I loved “Carbon”, I think, because it has that edgy, crystalline, myth-laden, portent-laced effect of her earlier albums. And “Sweet Sangria”, for some reason, has a hook that I can’t get out of my mind. I’ve gone for days with the chorus on autorepeat in my head- pretty scary! I suppose my subconscious picked this up to be a favourite before I consciously did- the same thing that happened with “another girl’s paradise”.

And yes, while I truly got into and appreciated “Scarlet’s Walk”, I’m still homesick for more of her earlier efforts, which is why I keep comparing key songs to other songs on other albums. This does not mean that as an album it isn’t as good. It’s more of a personal thing, I suppose- the degree of bonding I’ve done with the first four. But I’m in the process of bonding with this CD too, so, who knows, eh? I have certain songs in my head during times of the day when I’m not listening to it, which is why, it was kind of hard to detach enough to write this post, though I’ve been promising it for nearly a month!

Somehow, I feel that the songs of “Scarlet’s Walk” are more “folk-y” than her previous releases in a quietly introspective and thoughtful way. Also, despite her subject matter (America in the aftermath of you-know-what), you get the sense that a more centered, contented Tori is singing. I’m not one of her fans who would be disappointed by this. Yes, her earlier efforts had the sort of pain that a lot of us could relate to, and which made listening to her a strangely healing and cauterizing effect. But do we have to always feed off the pain of our favourites in order to love them? Because that is, in essence what fans are doing by claiming that “Tori only writes good songs when she’s unhappy”. Personally, I feel that it is only when one moves beyond personal pain that true artistry can evolve, though she did achieve something of this sort in “Under the Pink”, which is the closest in essence to this album, for its social commentary and spiritual undertones, though certain ideas/polemics have grown up along with Tori.

Tori’s always had a multitude of viewpoints and voices (or tried to have), but it seems that she’s matured a lot in the sense that she’s reached a place where her viewpoints truly reflect something external by being within it. To put it in more literary terms, she’s more “negatively capable” in this output, and her “girls” speak more than she does. It doesn’t have the visceral grip of “Boys for Pele”, which shall always remain my favourite Tori album, nor does it have that deep, swirling (and truly thrilling) melancholy of “choirgirl hotel”, but it’s special in its own way. It shows a Tori who is moving onto new things, and melodically speaking, she seems to have advanced in ways we didn’t know she needed to.

Different sections of songs segue more seamlessly together. A case in point is “don’t make me come to Vegas” which always makes me want to dance, with the laidback-yet-edgy beat and the piano and very appropos bass as well as “your cloud”. That track is definitely my ultimate favourite on this album, the way “Liquid Diamonds” was my favourite on “choirgirls” and “Yes, Anastasia” was my favourite on “Pink”. My only hope is that she doesn’t polish up her songs anymore than this, or something will disappear as fast as an icicle in a desert (pardon the reference). I’m thinking back on what disappointed me about Suzanne Vega’s “Songs in Red and Gray”- despite its indisputable quality. Some gems shouldn’t get too polished, y’know?

CODA: Yup, I bought the Limited Edition Pack, and at first felt slightly cheated. What on earth would I want with cutesy stickers? But I was quite amused with my charm – I nearly screamed when it fell out of my box into my hand because it looked like a worm, but it was really a small rubber snake. The polaroids were nice, but the best part of the album was the huge road-map/lyric sheet which really made me feel like I was taking a journey with Tori. Kind of like taking part in a story of novel-like proportions, in aural and map-form.

Update: I wasn’t too impressed with the DVD that came with the Pack though. It just seemed like filler material and crumbs thrown to the more rabid (and easily satisfied) fans. I’d buy this edition for the road-map alone.

“Behind the Sun” is a Miramax production, based on the novel Broken April by Ismail Kadare. It is set in Brazil, amidst the lives of two feuding sugar-cane plantation families. The pace was set for me by the opening scene, almost claustrophobic in its proximity to the main narrator, and somewhat baffling at first.

The story is told from the viewpoint of the youngest brother of the Breves family. He loses one brother to the feud and does not want to lose the other. The story illustrates quite clearly what occurs when we blindly stick to “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”.

Cinematographically the movie is quite stunning in both its violence and its vertiginous stolen moments of joy. One of the moments that left an imprint was the chase scene through the sugar cane plantations. It made me rather queasy because I actually felt I was inside the scene, could almost taste the terror and and the breathlessness involved. The scenes of death were brutally realistic and sobering, as opposed to the glitzier, sanitized versions in most Hollywood “action films” which seem to glorify violence as something “thrilling” (Caveat: not that I am not appreciative of glitzy scenes of violence. As evidenced by my going absolutely nutty for the Matrix movies).

Here, the violence is almost unbearable, and you can feel the emotions that go through both hunter and hunted in this crazy world of instant “justice”. The intensity of the movie-making and how much has obviously gone into it awed me. This does not mean that the scenes were in any way forced though. They managed to pull it off without seeming too heavy-handed in the polemics.

Undoubtedly, there is more to this story than the feuding. It is also a story of the kid, who dreams of mermaids and seeing the sea, and his brother, who slowly awakens to the fact that there is so much more to life than vengeance. Because life underscores the relentless death in the movie, there are many moments of beauty that makes the tragedy even harder to accept.

The complexities of the lives of the two families are underscored by the funerals and the strange code that rules their lives. There are also moments of stark beauty, in this land “behind the sun” that is so hot that all redeeming feelings seemed to have been burned away.

I particularly loved the mythic implications of the movie, especially in the beginning when you see the oxen moving round and round to power the machine that gets the sugar out of the sugar cane. Drove me crazy trying to fix “The Oxen of the Sun” in mythology. It exists of course, in “The Odyssey”. And the figure of the mermaid that appears in the “kid”’s narrative symbolizes the bounties of the sea.

I would say this is a story that is prima facie quite simple, but the beautiful imagery, symbolism and the powerful acting by the cast (especially Tonio, the kid and the father) made this a very effective and beautiful endeavour indeed. And I found the final scene particularly satisfying but I won’t spoil it for the rest of you by saying why.