jonathanstrahan

This morning was a bit of a mixed bag. I woke up quite early considering I was working on Sprawl till about 1am but then I managed to convince myself that sleeping in was better than getting up early to do work. No idea what I was thinking! We were supposed to check out some fabric shops today - notably some Jinny Beyer and also some Japanese fabrics - but alas it was the public holiday and these shops were closed. So too was the famed cafe we were going to have coffee at. So instead we headed down to Kingston Beach which was very seasidey and we had a lovely long brunch. I forgot my camera so no photos but I had a mint pineapple smoothie - finally able to take back and own the smoothie at brunch thing (old thing I used to do with the ex). Also reminded me that one of my New Years Resolutions is to unpack my blender, set it up on my countertop and make smoothies and cocktails, often. aifin checked out the availability of ristrettos (none but I think this may become a thing!)

This afternoon was an At Home that cassiphone had prearranged for a sewing circle. This was technically the first sewing circle I have ever been to and I am totally addicted to them. catundra and I have started up a sewing day but we might need to expand the peeps, perhaps. In any case, I got to catch up with looneymoth - YAY! She was in full stride and gosh I miss her muchly. Also lovely to clamp eyes on waqem007 and check she is still alive - she seemed well and she has some lovely lovely Japanese fabrics for us to ogle.

I brought the hexagon project with me. When I brought it, it was a pile of hexagon flowers, a strip of black fabric and a bag of hexagons still to be sewn into flowers. Here's the pile:



So the afternoon was really pleasant, filled with all sorts of conversation and chocolate and important craftily crafts. I've been working away on this project all week. I had in fact got to the point where I had sewn three complete hexagons together. But as I was working this afternoon on my project, I finally had the fourth completed hexagon to join on and um ... yeah I had a massive geometric crisis. I had completely screwed up the whole thing. But see, luckily, there were lots of sewers there to help figure out what went wrong and how to figure it out. And so, after that, I sewed like the wind and the project now looks like this:



Tomorrow we shall watch the yachts sail up the Derwent as they finish their racing. And then I shall catch a bus up to Launceston where flinthart shall pick me up. I'll admit to some trepidation having read his latest blog post from yesterday. But we spoke to him tonight and it was lovely to hear his voice and it shall be lovely to spend time with him and his family. I can hardly believe this is kinda the end of my stay with cassiphone and aifin - it feels far too short.

I did a load of laundry this afternoon in preparation for the rest of my stay in Tassie. And as I was hanging the wet clothes up on the line, I looked up and saw this:



Not bad view, eh?

I'm aiming to finish Hal 5, natch. I've been working on other projects for two months now, mostly programming ones, but I'm beginning to feel the pull of the WIP once more.

To say I've missed a deadline is an understatement, but I have to write my novels a certain way. First, I get a rough draft together over a period of months. I keep working on it until I'm sick of the thing, and then put it away hoping never to see it again. Two or three months later all memories of the hours, days and weeks of solid writing and plotting have washed away, and I'm able to pick up the draft and tackle it with an editor's eye, rather than your typical tortured creative writer's one.

But Simon, you say, this is your fifth novel. Surely you know the routine by now?

The reason it's taken me this long to work out my routine is because I had to rewrite my first three novels for publication, which is why they only took 4-5 months each. I figured I could knock out new books in eight months tops, making one a year including the publisher's side of things.

Book four (Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch) emerged from the smoking wreckage of three different NanoWrimo efforts, so again I started with actual wreckage to rebuild - even then it took me 18 months rather than 8.

With Hal 5 the wreckage was still tumbling while I was trying to fix the thing up, and that made things impossible.

So, I'm sitting here with a pile of manuscript wreckage on my desk, and it's barely smoking at all. I'm just about ready to pile in with the bobcat, shovel and dynamite, and I'm looking forward to it.

We finally caught up with this TV show even though it aired ages ago. What a cracker of a program! For starters, it starred the fabulous Jemima Rooper (pictured below) who was so excellent in Hex. I'd pretty much watch any show with her in it I reckon, even if it was about death metal or motorcross. Some excellent adaptive Austenesque dialogue, intricate twists of character and how much did I love Mr Collins' three disgusting brothers shipped in by Lady Catherine in order to take the Bennett girls off the marriage market. I believe a major motion picture is in the works. Awesome. Bring it on!

“This is an original and unusual work whose purpose is to make madness”

That’s what I read on the dust jacket flap for THE DIVIDED SELF, R.D. Laing’s first published examination of ‘ontological insecurity’ — the sense for some people that they’re losing themselves, becoming lost in the world.

For many students of psych, Laing holds a special place. He was described by my lecturers as a ‘psychedelic psychologist’: criticised for his mind-bending poetry, applauded for his humanity. If I recall correctly, Laing & his students would check themselves into mental institutions to expose them from the inside out as places that ‘blamed the victim’, that described the patients’ behaviour in ways that re-emphasised (& moralised) their illnesses.

‘Look at how the patients cluster around the lunchroom an hour early. Clearly they’re displaying greed,’ went the populist view of the ‘crazy’ behaviour found in these institutions.
‘Look at how little the patients have to do here, & how often they’re ignored. What else is there, of a day, apart from eat lunch?’ argued Laing.

And this was really Laing’s stance: that our attempts to fit into the world as it is cause us distress. That psychosis has a social birthplace. That the conversation of crazy people was a result of an attempt to express the distress caused by a crazy world. Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behavior and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism which is meaningful only from within their situation, claims Wikipedia. Laing also went a little bit further (some might say ‘a little bit too far’) in suggesting that the voyage of psychosis was ’shamanistic’, leading to deeper revelations about truth & reality. A popular & dare I suggest potentially destructive portrayal of mental disorder, the kind of thing found sometimes in Janet Frame’s (occasionally self-justifying?) writing, & such movies as ‘The Fisher King’: a kind of poetic self-destructiveness, later validated in a sentimental reality. More productively, Laing’s ideas have ended up, in a pragmatic form, establishing the foundations for modern psychotherapy. Relation to the world is equivalent to the relation to the self, argues psychotherapy. Change your perception of the world, change yourself.

One strand of Laing’s thinking, traceable to Marx and Sartre, condemns society for shackling humankind against its will, taking away individual freedom.

This I’ll come back to in later days, having just finished Albert Camus’ THE OUTSIDER (aka THE STRANGER) & not found myself completely convinced of the tyranny of society, nor the absolute rights of the individual.

On the one hand, I applaud Laing’s recognition of the reality of the individual, the dichotomy between self & other & the anxiety that can cause. On the other hand, I can’t carry that through to the *lack* of responsibility of the individual. If the world and my distress has lead to my disordered (differently-ordered?) thinking, can I be excused from killing a man? By logical extension, yes. By every other moral standard … lines must still be drawn.

Oh, & the rest of that quote from the dust jacket? It actually goes,

“This is an original and unusual work whose purpose is to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible to many who have no direct experience with this phenomenon. R. D. Laing offers new insights to many who, in either a professional or a personal context, are familiar with madness. He examines certain forms of madness in an existential frame of reference — the man who is an “outsider”, estranged equally from himself and from society, unable to experience himself and others as being real and substantial. An individual who is so basically insecure develops a “false” self with which to confront his world, in order to achieve some formula for living with his anxiety and despair. This process may lead to the gradual disintegration of the whole personality, and Laing traces the lives of a number of schizoid and schizophrenic individuals.”
– The Divided Self, R.D. Laing, 1960, Tavistock Publications

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Movies watched Saturday night were Torn Curtain by Hitchcock with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews (whose teeth I wanted to knock out during the first about 20 minutes of the movie). The whole thing is pretty preposterous plotwise --American physicist apparently defects to behind the Iron Curtain because the US govt stops funding his anti-nuke research. But he's really trying to get the pertinent info from a Polish scientist. Paul Newman gorgeous as per usual.

27 Dresses with Katherine Heigl--woman is the superbridesmaid who takes care of all her girlfriends' needs pre and during the wedding while having a crush on her boss ( who she can't tell). Baby sister comes to town in a whirl and sweeps boss off his feet. Ugh ugh ugh....some funny bits but I think overall the aftertaste is really pretty awful.

Finished the first season of Angel.

Post Christmas brunch at the Womacks. Took a video of young Lily zapping flies with her frog hat's tongue...fresh bagels, eggnog with rum, smoked salmon, chopped liver and presents exchanged. I'd already gotten a gift certificate/to donate to my favorite charity --Kiva--from Carrie, and also got a beautiful silk scarf made by Sylvie, a friend of Valeria's (birthday). A lovely sparkly single earring from Katya, strange Japanese purse that opens two ways from V&J.(xmas)--there will likely be a couple more birthday gifts coming my way this week.

Recuperated from the overindulgence of Xmas and raring to go this week...dinner with our of town friends at my favorite Japanese restaurant tomorrow night.

And my dad walked with his walker yesterday (only a little but I think it's the first time he's used it since the surgery) and asked to pee--which means that hopefully, the aides will help him use the toilet (TMI, I know-but this is an important step to getting my dad home).

After seven or eight days, the dog and I made it out for a walk. A little cold, but the streets and sidewalks were snow free. Sometimes, I think the two of us can be traced by dogs barking at us as we go along the way. Sometimes, those dogs are behind seven foot, wooden fences. Sometimes, they sound REALLY BIG. Buck is really cool with dogs and walking. Usually he just ignores dogs barking at us from runs, chains or behind fences.

Today, we as we walked on a new route, we walked beside one of those tall, wooden fences and from behind it we heard the low growl of a dog. It was this deep and heavy growl of only a note or two. Then, there'd be these massive huffs of wet breath through a huge muzzle. To complete this, we could hear the chain, a logger's chain. As we came upon this and were walking just inches away from whatever was behind the fence, Buck's ears went back, he stepped closer to me and increased his pace. As we came to the end of the fence and away from the dog, we'd heard, I became curious and decided there was enough space in the slats of the fence for me to peek through to see what was on the other side.

I didn't have to peek, as in this one spot I could look over the fence and see, standing upon a raised patio, the dog. The dog, square and massive, stood there looking at me. It was the largest Rottweiler I have ever seen. In my ENTIRE life. (Our next door neighbors have had Rottweillers and they lived just a chain link fence away from us.) This dog was heavier and more massive than an AFRICAN LION. It could have held its own with a Hereford bull. Well, a big Hereford calf, at least.

And, did I see it foaming at the mouth, jerking on its chain, huffing and puffing, pulling and tugging to get at me and my little dog. No, it stood up there all smart and happy as I told him how very impressive he was and what great dog.

A little comparison of Corgis and Rottweiler:

http://www.mistylakespetresort.com/images/rottweiler_james.jpg

I've been talking a lot lately about sex and cancer, about the overwhelming aspects of chemo, the impact of cancer on my circle of intimates, friends and family. But it has had other, less obviously dramatic impacts on my life, some of which are still very strong.

One of the most basic changes is not particularly TMI, which is that my sleep metabolism shifted substantially after the colonic resectioning of May, 2008. When I emerged from the immediate post-operative recovery period (during which one sleeps twelve or fourteen hours a day, or more), I found myself sleeping six hours per night instead of my classic seven and half or eight. This was a welcome surprise, and I immediately leveraged it to expand and firm up my exercise regimen.

So one of the frustrations of this round of surgery has been the intense oversleeping during recovery. I'm down now to six or seven hours per night, which tells me I'm at the tail end of the substantial recovery. Which is to say, I still have healing wounds, internal pain, range of motion issues, etc., but I'm a lot more myself. One of my chemo fears is that the sleep will spiral back up. Fatigue and lassitude are classic, and basic, side effects of chemotherapy.

Because I use those waking hours. That's how I sustain a Day Jobbe, parenting, a writing career, a love life, a social life, and still get laundry done. I'm not superhuman, I'm just awake and energetic more than most people. The eighteen hours a day I've been used to was a gift of the first Excellent Cancer Adventure. This round of New Adventures in Cancer threatens to take it away. Not pleased, me. Not pleased.

( Under cut for digestive health TMI. )

Your Sunday moment of zen.



Wildlife in rural Montana. © 2006, 2009 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

manmela with a mixed reaction to Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon thb | Barnes & Noble | Borders | Audible ]

Ta-Nehisi Coates shows Herman Melville some literary love

Vintage Soviet era holiday cars — And more of them!. Stastliva nova godina, y'all.

12 'sexy' ads that will give you nightmares — Decidedly NSFW link. Brain bleach may be required. You have been warned. (Thanks, I think, to wllyumtx.)

Get your mass handed to you — Higgs boson for sale on eBay.uk, via Bad Astronomy. I love geek humor.

And speaking of geek humor, Science Tattoo Emporium — Now that be some awesome ink. (Via Language Log.)

Applied Materials moves solar expertise to China — Along with their CTO. A major American high tech manufacturer has shifted their innovation center of gravity to China. A powerfully symbolic move that is part of a process that has been going on for years, but what does that say about this country's role in shaping the future?

?otD: What did you give for Boxing Day?

---

12/27/2009
Body movement: n/a (60 minute urban walk forthcoming)
Hours slept: 6.75
This morning's weigh-in: 225.5
Currently reading: Living With Ghosts by Kari Sperring

Today on twitter:

• 09:58 I missed you, @nicole_r_murphy! :) #
• 14:36 True Blood Season 2. WAAAAAAY better than Season 1, which I almost couldn't finish. Gah, Sookie, you live up to your name! #
• 14:55 So exciting: have discovered 'authentic' Mexican food supplier in Sydney! Via Food Safari, SBS: www.fireworksfoods.com.au/ #
• 21:23 One of my fave end-of-year activities: emailing the future, at www.futureme.org. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter and my twitter page.

Almost no hives from the cherries and strawberries.

I've been working away at reading for Sprawl, you couldn't tell I am on holidays! I've nearly read the submissions, and almost with only a few stern talks from Tansy. I am off to possibly dodgy internet for five days from Tuesday so will be hopefully ready for editing etc, away from distractions (you know who you are).

I seem to have acquired about a book a day for packing ... I got two books for xmas and bought one as a present. aifin has just passed me a very thick graphic novel which I intend to inhale at some point between now and Tuesday.

The hardest thing I did today was explain to an almost five year old why the sky is blue. I think I did ok. However, I completely failed at yo-yoing.

My sewing is progressing, photos after the sewing day tomorrow.

Here is the gorgeous necklace which aifin was kind enough to help me go back for today at Salamanca. Whereupon I discovered that they freight interstate! Oh my!! I think I might need to find something to bribe myself for a reward for a large, glass, pink vase. Or something equally gorgeous!





So um, I actually finally tried this on after this photo. Ooops, I might have bought it because it was pretty. The good news is it sits gorgeously, and the colour is not really all that great in this photo but more true than the one that was in focus.

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

The best thing about having a visitor from interstate is that you get to play tourist. Yesterday we took  girliejones to the Salamanca Markets so she could get some pre-emptive present & souvenir shopping done, and today we went out to the Sorell Fruit Farm, one of those places we’ve been meaning to go but never got around to.

Not that we actually went and picked berries or anything, but we could have done if we’d wanted to! Instead, we reclined in a lovely garden, eating amazing food and chatting nineteen to the dozen. (yes, we could have talked at home, but it was PRETTY and there were WAFFLES)

For the record, strawberry, cucumber, mint & pepper salsa on a crepe stuffed with brie and smoked salmon is a very good thing indeed.

We have also managed to take our guest to many literary high points, notably several locations for Siren Beat. This afternoon, while I stayed in the car with the baby,  aifin took GJ for a walk around the docks and showed her the boats, and a particular set of Antarctic statues. “You mean where the bodies were found?” I said when they returned.

The visit so far has been lovely, but  flinthart is stealing GJ from me for five whole days which seems completely unreasonable since he apparently wishes to spend most of that time teaching her to hunt and fish, which doesn’t seem like a productive use of anyone’s time. Having mostly provided her with coffee, desserts and gluten-free dinners, I feel I have already won this particular contest.

Tomorrow there will be fabric shops. Because I play dirty.

Meanwhile GJ has had a remarkably good influence on Raeli, who listened seriously to descriptions of what an engineer was, and how important they are to building things, and reported gravely that she thought she was going to be a builder when she grew up. Score!

... continuing on from the last post where we were at Constitution Dock:



The dock has been cleared in preparation for all the boats heading our way. This is the only remaining boat:



I got a bit of a tour of Constitution Dock. For those who have read Siren Beat, these are the rocks where the bodies are discovered, at the beginning of the story:



Nicer in daylight, and with less dead bodies but the sky seemed ominous and the call of the kraken faintly present.
And then we had a bit of a wander around the other dock and had a look at the fishing boats docked there:





And this is a photo I took (don't be misguided into thinking that I like boats or anything) because I found myself walking along the jetty, peering into the boats tied up alongside and checking out what kind of things were in the kitchen and other random signs of life aboard. Which, was funny because for six years I was on the other side of that, being docked alongside, being forced to eat food I didn't like, and having people walk past and peer at me to watch what I was doing.



And then we finished up the day with delicious fish and chips from Mures - fish caught locally. Yum!

Made a pilgrimage to Launceston today to take in the new Guy Ritchie directed Sherlock Holmes flick, with Robert Downey Jr in the title role, and Jude Law playing Watson.

The journey was not without mishap. I phoned the Friendly Neighbour People to see if they wanted to send a couple of their kids with me and the boys - and instead, we wound up travelling in their car, with five of them. My two lads performed brilliantly. We all climbed out into the car park in Launceston, and Elder Son promptly turned green and puked all over the tarmac. Younger Son poked his nose around the rear of the car, caught sight of Elder Son's stage-show, and immediately hurled his own breakfast in sympathy.

I'm afraid I wasn't very supportive. I was too busy giggling, pointing, and trying to get Friendly Neighbour Dad Tony to stop making comments designed to set off two little chunderbuckets all over again.

They paused for a breather. I took 'em to a sammidge shop, put some food and drink into 'em, and it was okay after that.

The verdict on the movie?

Really good, yeah. But one of those films where they never really had any chance of living up to how awesome you hoped it would be.

What do I mean? Well -- it was a Guy Ritchie flick about the London underworld and crime and stuff. Which is what Guy Ritchie does best of all. And it had Robert Downey Jr (who is one of the best performers of his generation, in my opinion) playing one of my all-time favourite characters. Sherlock Holmes has been part of my life since I was maybe four years old.

There was really no way they could have created a film awesome enough to fulfill my hopes.

But they tried pretty damned hard.

Guy Ritchie's visuals were a treat. The colour palette was used with beautiful, understated, gritty blue-grey elegance that gave the whole film real atmosphere. The music was by Hans Zimmer, who did the rich, lush score for the three Pirates of the Caribbean flicks - except this time he kept it sparse, and thematic, and it was excellent. The villains were suitably villainous. The action was top-notch, with really solid, well-crafted fight scenes. The pacing was really good.

And the acting?

Well, Jude Law has now become THE Dr Watson. No more Nigel Bruce bumbling here: Law's Watson is tough, competent, smart, and very nicely torn between his off-beat relationship with his best friend, and his wife-to-be. In a wonderful piece of screenwriting and directing, the film enters the Holmes/Watson partnership at just the time when Watson is moving on with his life - getting out of 221B, setting up in his own private practise, and preparing to get married. The whole thing between Holmes and Watson reverberates around this separation. We get to see the pair of them as long-term buddies, complete with the jokes and the habits and the backstory, and the feeling of trust and affection between them comes through very strongly.

To be honest, for me the least effective part of the film was RDJr as Holmes.

I'm not referring to the director and scriptwriters' re-invention of the screen Holmes as an action hero, master of fisticuffs, eccentric and abrasive and socially impossible. All those things are on the page in Arthur Conan Doyle's books, and frankly, they've been missing from the screen versions of Holmes for far too long. Even as the new Jude Law Watson is much closer to ACD's original character than the perpetually bumbling sidekick of so many films and TV shows, the Holmes given to RDJr is a lot more like the Holmes I knew and loved from the books.

No - for me, the trouble lay in RDJr. For my money, he laid on the arch humour just a little too thick, played it for laughs just a little too obviously, couldn't quite understate the role effectively enough. This isn't the Holmes it could have been: this is Tony Stark (hard-drinking genius with a dark side) shoe-horned into Sherlock Holmes' Victorian-era wardrobe.

Having said that -- well, I'm being nit-picky. And if I hadn't seen RDJr doing Tony Stark, I probably would have been a lot more forgiving. But I did, and once the connection was made, I couldn't shake it.

Overall? Definitely worth seeing, and very enjoyable. The plot's complicated and appropriately over-the-top, and there are a few scenes that don't quite make sense -- but it moves along nicely, and the visuals are brilliant, and the action and fight scenes are really well done. A very strong thread of humour surfaces often enough that I giggled a lot more often than I do at most comedies, and the strength of the Holmes/Watson dyad laid out by these two very fine actors has me already anticipating the sequel.

So: gtfo and SEE the thing. Several times, so they make enough money to hire everybody back for the next movie.

It's kinda hard to get to bed early at the moment cause, yo, hello? I'm in HOBART at cassiphone and aifin's and I now totally understand the sheer pleasure of post-children's bedtime :) Last night we trialled slushy seabreezes - or seabreezetinis - which, well, produced much giggling and amusement. Anyway, I got to bed late which meant I got up late.

Today we headed off to Sorell and luncheoned at the Berry Farm.



This was on the to do list for the finalised decision on whether I like cherries or not aka if they are as fresh and as ripe and perfect as can be, will I *then* like them? And if they need to meet this requirement, then do I actually like cherries? aifin hunted out this punnet for the deciding round:



So the thing about the cherries is this, every where I go in life, people smile and "mmm" when you say "cherries" and I just don't really get it. I'm not that fussed, to be honest, about fruit in general nor about cherries, specifically ("Well they're not chocolate," says cassiphone). What I did like instead was my very first ristretto, which the Berry Farm also boasted that they specialised in:



Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Bit of food pron up next, imagine a long decadent afternoon in a lovely flower garden, not too hot, slight breeze, the best company, delicious food.



Waffles with warm strawberry sauce, strawberries and vanilla ice cream:


After we had our fill, we headed back home via Constitution Dock, where the yachts will soon come sailing into after their long voyage from Sydney:





to be continued ...

calendula_witch explains today better than I can. Easy travel (relatively), quiet day, family stuff. All quiet here in the Witchnest, with the_child watching anime on her laptop and me about to sink back into Living With Ghosts, a very fine book by la_marquise_de_.

Most importantly, I'm back with calendula_witch. Yay!

Women are supposed to love shopping but I despise it. Left to my own devices, I'd happily live in cargo pants and offensive t-shirts, both items passing quite comfortably for dress code at my work. But there's a handful of events each year that I need to frock up for, starting with the Aurealis Awards at the end of January. So every day after boxing day, Lourdes and I put on our battle armour and head for Miranda Mall where we proceed to punch and kick our way through the various big store sales. My broadsword is drawn, my chain mail brassiere polished and gleaming. Wish us luck...