Still standing

I'm sitting at my computer, it rests on a table, which stands on the floor surrounded by walls and a roof over head. But it might have been different had we not been terribly lucky last night.

If the woman at the top of the hill hadn't gone out to the bar fridge for that vital second bottle of wine, she wouldn't have smelt smoke and looked out across the valley to see the grass fire glowing on our shared boundary.

The power had gone off and when she called we were sitting in the livingroom playing acoustic music by lamp light. We're so low down in the valley that we were completely innocent of the fire - couldn't even smell the smoke.

G-Man went off to find some high ground to figure out where it was and met the Energex guys on the road in - they were looking for the power outage problem and beat the Rural Firies who I'd called on 000. Five guys with torches set out across the paddock (no road access) to find a downed line which, when it fell, was so hot it had set fire the long grass on the neighbor's property (our grass is grazed right down). Had this happened only a couple of nights ago, before yesterdays rain, when a windy storm blew up in the evening - I reckon we'd have had a bit of a conflagration on our hands.

There's a total fire ban here at the moment - everything is parched - and all those reports of the Victorian bushfires last year started cycling through my mind as I shut all the doors and windows to the house. Then I realised that was it - my whole bushfire plan.

Part 1: Shut the house. Part 2: Go out to see if you can put the fire out. Part 3: Run for your life.

Then I had to ask myself - what would have happend if the fire had got down into the scrub by the creek that winds around our house block, then, heaven forbid, up into the tree plantation? No naughty children playing with with matches to blame, nor any psycho fire bugs. The power grid started it and, apparently, that is somehow immune from blame. Becasue we're so addicted to the elecricity, we view a downed powerline as practically an act of God.

The lines that criss cross the bush are all potential incendiary devices. If it's going to get hotter and drier in this country, we are going to have to do something about the antique technology we've strung up above increasingly volatile bushland.

Thank you to the Rural Firies though. Very grateful you got out of bed to come to our aid.

Low tech incubator

... and here she is, Nana McHugh - my little silky bantam who is currently sitting on a clutch of a dozen hens eggs with which I sneakily replaced hers. By my calculations they should hatch around about the same time as we celebrate the birth of that little Middle Eastern kiddy. I wonder if Nana will be as amazed by her own immaculate conceptions? Heheh.

The colour of pomegranates

I bought a pomegranate down at the IGA (yes, the IGA- who'd have thought it?) There they were all conspiculously flushed and embarrassed by finding themselves in such a common place. I've known of them and eaten them, but you don't get them turning up at the supermarket any old day of the week. They are exotic here.

I'd heard a Radio National broadcast on the country viewpoint food on Friday segment -- an interview with a bunch of guys with a bit of an idea to cash in on the antioxidant magic of this fabulous "new" wonder fruit, so they were at the front of my brain and registered immediately.

With my beautiful pomegranate in hand, I picked up some snapper as well, thinking; pan fried in butter, pomegranate juice, a little salt and pepper, a splash of champagne - instant delicious. And it was. Delectable.

But even more delectable was that the explosion of flavour on G-Man's tongue prompted a memory. Not long after we met, he saw a film at a film festival in Sydney; The Taste of Pomegranates by Russian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. I wasn't with him, we didn't know each other that well, and he certainly didn't know at that stage what was in my mind or what had formed my consciousness - we were still at the tits-and-arse stage of our relationship. But now almost 10 years later, with the knowledge of our common points of connection through art, books, music and shared aesthetic on board, he remembered the film.

What had been at the time an ephemeral moment, is now Googlable. He typed in The Colour of Pomegranates and there it was, the entire film, available, out there in the uber-consciousness of the web. I'd never seen it, and have to admit that I have never seen anything more gob-smacking beautiful in moving images. I sat there gasping, weeping, amazed, aware that the filmmaker's aesthetic had lived in my own mind and informed my imagination without my knowing his. Every image, every association, my whole aesthetic is encoded in this film. I think I could watch it over and over, forever. It is every dream I ever had, the synthesis of all things that I have taken in and kept as reminders of what I think beauty might be. The whole history of art, the expression of Western civilisation, all our race memories flash dreamlike, a fantastic portrait of my inner imaginary life.

What a revelation it must have been to see it on the big screen.

WARNING: This video contains poetic associative imagery and is not suitable for escapist entertainment audiences. If you are suss about art, don't go there.

Hey Birmo - one of your bunnies is loose

Life imitates art imitates delusional reality.

It appears that ex Swans honcho and star crossed lover Jeffery Edelston has popped the question to twenty six year old, totally-sincerely-in-love-with-the guy and almost certainly natural blonde, Brynne (OMG, look at those funbags!) somethingorother. The wedding invite is a 15 mintue video.

Bwahahahahahah

Oops,

Aw, what a lovely old fashioned couple.

Rememberance day

Ah, what a beautiful day:

First no parallel importation on books

Then no Traveston Dam

AND A TAX RETURN too boot!

Thankyou umpire, thankyou ball boys.

All up hill to Christmas

Man, I think my brain is going to break.

Just got through the weekend; three open access sessions on Saturday for the Regional Rights project in which I make myself available for hour long personal consultations with budding writers. Then on Sunday, a full day writers' workshop on the nuts and bolts of creative writing and another four open access sessions on Monday. In the meantime I've been writing a report for the mentorship winner which involves a close read of his manuscript plus editorial notes, and also reading this monumental, vast family saga 350,000 words, written by one of the short listees -- an amazing thing that left me gasping by the end of it, an emotional rollercoaster.

But prior to that was a full week working with our Iranian mate Mohsen on his manuscript of collected poetry which is a delight and pleasure, if a little emotionally gruelling.

The work is collected from material he wrote when incarcerated in Villawood a four years. Dark as.

Somewhere in there I had to find time to practice cello, do the regular householdy things, and work on my book. Consequently I haven't had a lot of time to be reading through your blogs or writing mine. Not to mention the garden, which has fallen into ruin this season.

I figured it was time to let it go to weed anyway and give the beds a rest. Besides, there's been so little rain the past few months that I'd have drained the tank trying to water and keep it alive. We've just had the first decent rain of the season and can finally put in green manure crops to get a little bit more organic material into the soil.

And the pace it doesn't look like it will slacken off until mid-December.

Into the music

Here it is - my lovely cello.

Rehearsal for the choir yesterday. I've nailed the bass part for Vivaldi, Mozart and the Dvorak. They aren't difficult by any means, what is difficult is learning to play in ensemble and get the dynamics of the music happening. My sheet music is covered in marks and little 'notes to self' about how loudly or softly to play, up bows, down bows, attack on the string and little pairs of glasses drawn to indicate that I should look up from the music to look at the conductor.

Getting the bowing right is the most difficult. We have to sit so close together that if you get your bowing out of sync, you could end up with your neighbor's bow up your nose.

I'm one of those annoying people that can pick up most things and do a fairly slap up job of mastering it fairly quicky, but this! Arghh! It is the first time in my life I've come up against something that I can't do. It will take me the rest of the life I have left to master this sucker.

Still, beacause I can't play the bass part by ear I've been forced to finally learn to read music. I am now able to instantaneously recognise C,G,D and A on the bass cleff and match them to the open stings of my instrument! The other notes still are a bit of a mystery though. I still have to write the finger numbers above the notes.

I wish I was 6 yrs old and had a parent to nag me to practice.

Perhaps Flinthart or Nat might consider adopting me.

Zinc wire of Angels

Man, this dictation software is pure poetry. That title was supposed to be 'sing choirs of Angels'. Zink wire of angels is kind of tangental to what I'm talking about though, so I'm letting it ride. It conjures the sound that is happening just behind me, the squeaking of my cello's strings de-tensioning in the dry heat. I'm in rehearsal for a Christmas concert and so breathless with excitement it's ridiculous.

I am in a cello choir. For the next couple of Saturdays, about 15 middle-aged women (and one bloke) will drive to a tiny country Hall in Eudlo, just south of Nambour, to play together. It is just about the most adorable thing I've ever been involved in. We sit in a circle, in our part groups, in the midst of a large wooden speaker box, and fill it with the honey notes our instruments. Our teacher is a world-class player and has just moved to Eudlo. There is almost no opportunity at all for adults like us to play in ensemble, so when the opportunity comes up you grab it with both hands.

Even though I'm still not much more advanced than beginner (because I never practice, and I don't have a parent nagging me to do it, and it makes my shoulders ache and my neck stiffen up, the lure of that sound has got me hooked. Oh, and the morning tea. And the drive, which is pretty gorgeous. It's a bugger of a climate to play a baroque instrument in, they were never meant for such extremes of humidity and the virginal will be a million times worse to keep in tune.

Apologies for being so off the air lately, I'm flat out with the residency workshops, and for the past two weeks I have revisited planet parenthood which was a shock to the system. I can do kidlets in small doses any day, but two weeks? Woah. By the end of my niece's stay we were both counting sleeps till mummy came home. However, I did get a front row seat to the modelling of the 10-year-old fashion show of loot her mother brought back from Singapore. Beautiful Chinese silk pyjamas - two pairs, a fluffy merangue ballgown covered in ribbons and bows, a fairy floss creation, and a Bollywood outfit to die for in blue sequins, with bangles, junky Indian jewellery - the full catastrophe. At one point she looked like she'd died and gone to girly princess heaven, ecstatic - angelic even!

The trouble with not being a geek.

Well, will you look at that.

I'm sitting here with my arms folded, some considerable way from my computer screen, cuddled up in a comfy chair and not bent over like some kind of weird wicked old which hunched over her cauldron. I just installed and trained that Mac speech software Birmo was on about and am totally amazed by its accuracy.

The hardest thing to get used to is not watching the type as it comes up on screen because there is a delay while it figures out what you are talking about. Rather, you have to force yourself to stare off into the middle distance and let the computer overhear you thinking aloud.

It takes half the effort of actually sitting there typing and I am so impressed I can barely speak!

However, it wasn't easy because sadly, I am not a geek (i.e., even if I do read the fine print on computer software sites, it doesn't actually mean anything). The Mac Speech program propbably did say I needed Macos 10.whatever, but as I have a fairly new machine, I figured I was as up to date as anything. When I get it, it's not until it spits the program out like a bad taste, I realise that I need to upgrade the operating system. I make a few phone calls and, assured that it should be cool to get Snow Leopard because yes, I do have an 'intel core duo' (WETFTI), two days later the disc arrives in a cloud of dust from the TNT truck which was sent out to deliver this precious piece of gadgetry.

All excited, I load it in, only to have it tell me that it can't install because I don't have enough RAM - thanks Mister Jobs. So, what initially only cost me three hundred bucks adds up to more like $500, but hey, its worth it in chiropractic care for my aching typing neck.

Unbelievable accuracy when you consider what the computer is actually doing and in not in any position to make poetic connections or comprehend context.

no net nanny

www.getup.org.au/campaign/AddYourNameToSaveTheNet

ok folks - to the barricades

Get up is running a campaign to keep nanny rudd's mits off the net.

Go there and sign the petition.