I am a twit.

I've spent the last week or so fuming in my head over an ad for 3 mobiles which I've been seeing on the sides of buses recently -- and seriously intending to write about it here.

This one:


I've been shaking my head and muttering about it ever since I first saw it, to the effect that while it was all well and good to reach 96% of Australians, it was pretty fucking dodgy to draw a map in which, if you're not within the coverage zone, you don't exist. Darwin might be described as provincial (if we exclude the 'quaint' sense of the word, which seems to exclude a place in which people get eaten by crocodiles), but it's not exactly a one-pub-one-post-office kind of a town. Where did these guys get off pretending Darwin -- and, to be fair, various other places which I have no acquaintence with -- doesn't exist? I may be from a small town with pretensions,

Anyhow, as I say, I've been idly intending to write a bit of a rant about it and pop it up here, but what with one thing and another, never quite got around to it -- until tonight.

What prompted this little fit of activity, you may ask?

Well, in the continuing absence of Doctor Who -- which I fully intend to continue to moan about until they cancel NCIS and my favourite hot goth scientist chick -- I curled up in bed with my weekend newspaper magazine, and half a dozen pages in, there's a half-page version of That Ad in there.

This set off a new round of fuming and muttering, which came to an abrupt halt when I noticed that the names of all major cities appear on that map. And that, if you turn the map sideways, it's a cunningly disguised corporate logo, and not some commentary on the city-centrism of advertising execs. And that, to cut a long revelation short, all my fuming and muttering had been for nought.

Dear Beck,
You suck.
Yours,
Beck

I got out of bed with intentions other than just making this private little humiliation public -- although I only got out of bed at all because the phone was ringing. As it turns out, it was fortunate I did bestir myself, since I now have something to do with myself (besides sit at home, miss Doctor Who and read the newspapers) tonight, and someone coming in the car with me tomorrow on my trip to Canberra, which is pleasant. I very much enjoy driving, and while I generally like to do it alone, I enjoy the chap in question's company so expect to have a diverting drive down. Of course, this means I have to hustle to get my stuff ready both for tomorrow and for next week -- and here I am muttering to myself (mostly, but also to my small but adoring public) about ads instead of rushing around like I should be.

I've learnt dribs and drabs of a few languages over the years.

I learnt Japanese for a year or so in primary school, and again for six months in college (I quit in primary school because I didn't like the teacher - guess who the teacher was in college?), and did six months of French in year seven. Every time I meet someone who speaks a language that's new to me I get them to teach me a few things - most of which slip my mind almost immediately, of course - and I try to add to my list of languages that I can say 'I don't speak [language here]' in.

There's only two languages that I've ever really stuck with.

I took Indonesian for six months in year seven - part of my school's compulsory language program - and thoroughly enjoyed it. At the end of that six months, my class was sent off for the other part of the compulsory language program, six months of French, which I found to be a drag - mostly because it was full of grammar.

Come year eight, we were allowed to choose our own subjects and it was an easy decision to take Indonesian, although deciding between taking six months of Indo and six months of textiles, or just twelve months of Indo took awhile longer. Twelve months of Indo won out in the end. My best friend E. was taking the same classes, so while we took the class seriously we also had some fun times messing around with the language. Translated versions of the theme song to 'Friends', which make no linguistic sense but maintain the flow of the original, for example.

We kept studying it through to the end of year ten, but the college we then went to didn't offer Indonesian (hence that ill-fated adventure in Japanese). I went for awhile to a TAFE course, but when that folded (due to lack of interest), I pretty much put down the books and focussed on other things.

Since then, I've barely had occasion to speak, much less write, Indonesian, and I've been concerned that I'm forgetting all of it - like my mum, who spoke fluent French in her twenties but can no longer remember more than a few words. It was all quite depressing, but over the last couple of weeks E. and I have been exchanging letters in Indonesian (because the lucky cow is going to Indonesia on her honeymoon in January), and I'm astonished by how quickly it's been coming back to me.

When I wrote the first one I had to look up almost every word, remembering only very random terms that had lodged in my memory either through songs that I'd learnt in year seven, or through their similarity to other words. Tonight I sat down and wrote the seventh letter - the fourth I'd written - and just typed out a page, only stopping to look up one word that E. had used (library). It was really an exciting moment.

It seems to me that I really need an Arabic-speaking pen-pal, since I've not picked up an Arabic book since my final exam in Arabic last November. I have invested slightly less time (but significantly more money) in learning Arabic than Indonesian, and it seems like a waste to let it all slip away.

Just bits and pieces today:

Kyra and I have been having an interesting discussion in the comments about books and films and audiences, and dirty sealed sections in girls' magazines, and while I don't think there's much point to bringing it out here, I do want to take a couple of minutes to look at just one of the points that has come up over the course of the last couple of days, which is the question of agency in spectatorship, and how that agency varies when watching films compared to reading books.

I spent today working on an essay about Blade Runner, and in researching that, I came across this fantastic quote from Jenna Tiitsman:

Our spectatorship is a selective subjectivity, an image created in the action of deciding what and how to see, all of which arises from an original atomic field.

Selective subjectivity. What a great way to put it. Let's all just wallow in her phrasing for a little while.

(As an aside, I've posted a couple of my uni pieces that have some bearing on this issue: a brief paper that I gave last week on the differences between science fiction films and novels here, and the essay I handed in today about the problems of genre in Blade Runner here. I haven't toned down the academics at all, but the first one in particular should be completely accessible - which is not to say that the second one is massively dense, either. My engineering mates get it ...)

Anyhow, I think Tiitsman has really hit the nail on the head with that one. It's a poststructuralist perspective, of course, which is something I tend to sympathise with -- that idea of ongoing construction of meaning. Poststructuralists are among the wankiest and most disliked social theorists -- uncharitable people might suggest that that's why I find myself so drawn to them - birds of a feather and all that true stuff.

--

My favourite Indonesian meal is beef rendang, and I've just made it for the first time from a packet which is not the packet recommended by my Indonesian friend's mum. It's delicious, but seriously fucking spicy (for reference, rendang should be pretty mild). My tongue is burning.

I'm going to try making it from the packet I was given next week.

--
"Oh, Bart, don't make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice."

As a brief aside - since I am tied up with Blade Runner at present - I have turned my Dresden Dolls knitting chart (that I talked about here and here) into a PDF file, which I am more than happy to share with anyone who's interested in it. I just sent it to the Dresden Dolls as well, so maybe soon I'll be famous.


Sizes: I've made it up in 8-ply wool on UK size 8 needles (4mm), to a total size 28cm wide by 15cm high.

** Note that I've changed this pattern since I originally posted it - 21/9/05 **

I used to know how to put things on my dad's server, but I've forgotten how, am feeling time-poor and techno-incompetent, and hence, for now, the pattern is available by emailing me and asking for it: beckwise (at) student (dot) usyd (dot) edu (dot) au

When and if I get my tech issues sorted out (ie. succumb to my Luddite tendencies and get my brother to fix it all), I'll put the pattern and pictures up somewhere and remove that email address.

It's an intarsia pattern and probably most suitable for intermediate knitters, but go nuts trying. I didn't know how to do intarsia until I made up my mind to do it, drew up this chart and just knit the thing. Okay, so it was a disaster the first time, but the second one is much much better.

I'd probably suggest that, if it's your first time, make it in two colours first (ie, looking at the chart, do all the white bits in one colour and all the other bits in another colour). I'm in the process of knitting it up in three colours now and I am finding managing the threads to be a bit of a bitch. It looks fine in two anyhow.

I should add that the pattern is a perpetual work in progress, and that if it looks a little bit odd when it's knit up, tweak it a bit and let me know what you did. I've found that duplicate stitch is my friend.

I got my digital camera back today, and it doesn't seem to be broken, as long as it's plugged into a wall, since no matter how new the batteries are, it seems determined to think they're flat.

This, however, is all a bit beside the point, as I can't convince my computer to believe in the existence of said camera -- and, according to the Internets, nobody else can, either.

Fuck. And here I thought I was finally going to post my pictures of my fantastico Dresden Dolls knitting project.

'If you want to understand what postmodernism is, read American Psycho.'

So says my sociology of science lecturer (she's awesome -- and I thought that before she said about American Psycho). I totally agree; for a compelling example of what postmodern consumer society is, American Psycho is the go-to book. There are probably better examples of postmodern literature, but that's not of particular interest to sociologists.

She went on to say something that totally astonished me.

'I once set American Psycho for a class of first-years. The parents weren't happy, but by the end of it, they understood what postmodernism is.'

I find that amazing. What sort of parent would be unhappy about what their kids are reading at university level?

My parents have let me roam free through books since I was a little kid. They taught me how to use a dictionary - the same Concise Oxford I still have - and told me I could read whatever I wanted from home or the young-adult section of the library, look up anything I didn't understand, but that if I came across anything I found disturbing, I should find something else to read. I still think that's good advice, and I follow it to this day. Why read something awful when there's so much that's good out there?

It's caused problems, of course. When I was in year two, I started at a new school, and after the first silent reading time, I went home and complained to my mum about the boring kiddy books that were provided in the classroom. My mum told me to take in my book that I was reading at home, and I did. The next day I came home with a note from my teacher pinned to my bag, telling my parents that I was reading a book that was 'inappropriate for my age level' - insomuch as it had chapters, and no pictures. (Smartarse kid that I was: 'No, look, Ms Wilson, it's got pictures, see, right here on the cover. It's a cat, see?'). The battle over that one took a good couple of months, and in the end the school librarian (Mrs Libeary Smith) was put in charge of my literary welfare.

My parents only ever banned me from reading one book - a book which I promptly snuck out of my mum's bedroom and read cover to cover. It was apparently infinitely forgettable, because for years I thought the book in question was Stephen King's Insomnia, and when I reread it a couple of years ago, there was no sex scene at all. The school librarian told me I had to get my parents' permission to read the second Tomorrow When the War Began book - third? Whichever one had the sex scene - and that permission was promptly given. My mum and the librarian both asked me not to read it in class, so as not to provoke another flurry of notes about age-appropriate reading material.

There were occasional attempts made to steer me away from particular books - my dad once suggested that I might find Stephen King books a bit scary (I was about ten or eleven at the time), and that I should wait til I was a bit older to read them. I waited about three weeks, read The Shining, which was the first Stephen King book I could find on my family's well-stocked bookshelves, and then ambushed my dad to complain that the books weren't scary at all, and that I was really disappointed, and could he reccommend something else instead? That's the only time I can remember being told I was too young to read something.

Last Christmas, my mum bought me a copy of Ben Elton's Past Mortem, which includes a pretty graphic sex scene which features fisting and bareback anal. After I unwrapped it, mum told me that she'd flipped through it in the bookstore, and that it was 'a bit risque, dear -- I hope that doesn't bother you'. She said she'd opened it up, read a page or two, picked her jaw back up off the floor and shut the book firmly, reasoning that I was old enough to make up my own mind about what I read. Mothers seem to have a pretty unerring instinct for the risque - she'd opened that book to the single dirty page in it. It's mostly a humourous detective story. This is not to say that her instincts don't fail her sometimes - when I went to see Secretary, she told me that I might want to leave halfway through because it's disturbing, but that I should stay all the way through anyhow. My dad later told me that she'd gone to see the film under the misapprehension that it was 'a nice romantic comedy'.

As far as uni stuff goes, though, I can't imagine my parents caring at all, beyond the obvious fact that they're concerned about the pragmatism of working in gender and cultural studies, and would quite like it if I were still reading physics textbooks or something. It's one thing to steer a small child in the direction of age-and-intellect-appropriate books, but quite another to tell your 18-year-old, university-level child what they can and can't read. If a kid is bright enough to get into uni, they're bright enough to read American Psycho in a critical way, and to understand that what matters about the book is not necessarily the ol' ultraviolence. Ditto Clockwork Orange, which is another text I've heard criticised on the basis of its appropriateness as a university text (oddly, not the novel, which was set on my year eleven English reading list and which tends to be much less criticised than the film. Are they that different?).

Weird.

(Edited to add: My sister is visiting me at the moment (yes, the predicted drama has materialised), and she says she was only ever told not to read things by teachers. She added that quite a few movies were off-limits, though.)

--

Also today: I have written 600 words of my essay which is due on Tuesday, procured a book which will be helpful in writing the remaining 2500 words, made up a recipe for potato and spinach curry (which is, so far, cooking up well, albeit with a bit more kick than I'd anticipated), and bought a new knitting needle with which to embark on my next, supersecret project. Yay for rain, which encourages me to a) sit at home and work, and b) run my outside errands as quickly as possible.

Because I'm a committed and conscientious student with a paper due tomorrow, I absolutely did not stay up until 2am last night reading Bret Easton Ellis' new book, Lunar Park, and thus have absolutely no grounds on which to recommend it wholeheartedly. And equally, I am absolutely not about to waste valuable paper writing time in constructing a half-arsed, Harry Potter style review based on the merest snippet of the novel - actually, worse, since I haven't even read the first 150 pages, or whatever it was, that the Guardian based its review of Goblet of Fire on.

With those disclaimers out of the way, I haven't read all of the book, only the first few chapters, but I'm really enjoying it. The reviews have been pretty uniformly terrible, but the good reviews I've read have drawn out the same things that I'm loving so much about the book. The first couple of chapters are just spot-on, pastiching Ellis' meteoric rise to literary stardom and equally meteoric crash back to earth, drugfucked and sardonic. (As an aside, I've never understood the term 'meteoric rise'. Maybe it's the scientist in me, but meteors are the light meteorites give off as they burn up in their descent through the atmosphere. The idea of a 'meteoric crash' makes way more sense to me, and certainly usefully describes the spectacular light given off by Bret Easton Ellis in that drugfucked haze in which he produced American Psycho.) The novel then turns into Stephen King at his dubious best - a genuinely creepy ghost story - but as I've only read a few pages of the novel after that key change, I'm not going to address it here.

Lunar Park has that characteristic Bret Easton Ellis 'voice' that I admire so much - you could tell it was him without looking at the cover (and, since it's somewhere between memoir and novel, without associating the Bret Easton Ellis that's a character in the book with the author of the book). He's a stylist of language - he writes like Hemingway, with that finely-honed sense of moment that produces breath-taking sentences without destroying the flow of the text. It's not like reading, say, Michael Ondaatje, who writes beautifully, so beautifully that you feel obligated to stop a moment to appreciate them. It's literary fiction, but it's still a page-turner.

Part of this, I think, is that sense of inevitable doom that comes along with every Bret Easton Ellis book, a sense that's fostered both by the excessive nature of his earlier books and also by the excessive nature of his media coverage - I call it 'like watching a train wreck', but only because the train wreck is one of my favourite and most overused metaphors. A better way of putting it might be this, which I found when looking for reviews of the novel the other day: 'Reading Bret Easton Ellis is like watching a brilliant dive into a very shallow pool: We admire the technique while awaiting the splatter.' The thing is, I think the pool only looks shallow - a sideshow illusion, if you will, constructed to scare and exhilarate the punters. Will there be splatter? The potential for splatter is what keeps us coming back, but we secretly know it's never coming. We just like the thrills.

It occurs to me that I would really love to be in charge of a book club, so that I could tell everyone what to read. I'd pick all my favourite and most disturbing books.

Y'all can expect the next breathless fangirl book review when I actually finish reading the novel.

PS - I deleted three spam comments from this post only a couple of hours after I first wrote it. This is exciting, since I normally only get one spam comment at a time. How pathetic, to be excited about spam comments. You take what you can, I guess.

In theory, reading the Saturday paper is one of the things I make time to do. Papers, plural, actually - but that's singularly unlikely to happen.

In practise, the Saturday papers mount up next to my couch until I lose faith in my ability to read them, and throw them all out.

Today, though, I got at least a start on the paper, and read the Good Weekend section cover to cover, and glad I did. There's always at least one article that piques my interest in there, but this time it was almost uniformly interesting. The feature articles were on dying Aboriginal languages, Bret Easton Ellis, goth culture and documentary photography. There were all my usual favourite sidebars, and a small spread on the politics of knitting. All up, awesome.

Everyone should go out and read it immediately.

Tonight is the engineering revue, and all going to plan, I would right now be picking up my brother from the bus and taking him for a slightly rushed pub dinner on the way to the show.

Do I really need to say that all is not to plan?

Handsome B. Wonderful missed the bus. He and my mum said it's because our dad gave them the wrong information. I'm not sure, since my dad gave me the right information, and typically, if he's going to give out wrong information, he's going to give everyone wrong information. This kind of confusion is, uh, not unknown in my family.

Anyhow, I got a slightly panic-stricken phone call at three thirty (half an hour after the bus left Canberra) asking, among other things, could the tickets be swapped for Saturday? That would probably have been fine - they're technically not changeable, but when a similar issue came up a couple years ago, my friends in the show bent and broke some rules to get us in the night after the one we'd paid to see.

The problem was that, at the time I got that phone call, I was sitting in a pub with a friend from work, waiting for our steaks to arrive, and so not really in a position to start wheeling and dealing to change tickets around.

Eventually it was sorted out that my parents - who had been planning to come up tomorrow morning anyhow, as part of my dad's 50th celebrations - would come up earlier and bring Mr. Wonderful with them. This is all happening just before four, and the show starts at 7.30 ... best case scenario, it's a bit over three hours from Canberra to Sydney. Peak hour? It could take weeks.

I don't know where they all are now. I don't know when they're likely to be here. If they get here by about 7.10, then it's easier for me to wait here for them. If it's going to be later than that, I need to go to the theatre, because I have other people's tickets as well - and I need to get out the door before seven if I'm going to do that.

Right now I'm sitting at home doing maths in my head, and smelling the bolognese sauce that I'm going to leave for my parents' dinner when they arrive. It smells delicious, and I'm starting to forget that I'm still full from my mid-afternoon steak. It's not strictly bolognese, because I've added mushrooms and zucchini (I normally add spinach as well), but otherwise it's my usual, straightforward from-scratch recipe - garlic, onion, mince, tomatoes, basil. You get a fantastic flavour if you use fresh tomatoes - I scald them to get the skins off, then put them whole into the pan with the rest of the stuff. They cook down quite quickly and it's not as watery as commercial sauces.

As an aside, it's quite strange to be making bolognese to leave for my parents. That was what my mum always made to leave for us whenever we all had dinner at different times.

I'm also leaving Lebanese pastries in the fridge. I went to Lakemba this morning to pick up a kilo of them for my dad for a belated Fathers' Day gift, and picked up a second kilo. My expenditure this morning was as follows:

Bulging shopping bag of fruit and vegies: $8.70. I estimate that would have cost me a good $20 in the city, rather than the suburbs.
Fifteen bucks worth of petrol: $15. I can't bring myself to think of the paltry number of litres I got for that $15. Nearly $1.40 a litre (admittedly LRP, but still! Ouch!)
Two kilos of pastries: $32

I think we all know where the bargain in that is.

My supervisor stood me up today, so it seems that a certain amount of the panicking I've been doing over the last week or so was in vain.

It has become apparent that the next two or three weeks are going to be among the most insanely busy weeks I've ever had -- and I choose at this point not to listen to friends who've already completed Honours and say encouraging things like "You know this is only the tip of the iceberg" and "It's just going to get worse from here".

As it stands ...

Today, 2pm - meeting with supervisor
Tomorrow, 3pm - seminar with a tonne of reading to complete
Thursday, 9am - tutorial presentation
Thursday, 4pm - work
Friday - cleaning up, in preparation for ...
Friday, 6pm - brother arrives
Friday, 8pm 7.30pm - taking brother to the engineering revue
Saturday, mid-afternoon - parents arrive
Sunday, 11am - work
Sunday, mid-afternoon - family departs

Next week is only slightly less hairy.
Monday - probably a rescheduled meeting with my supervisor
Tuesday - panicked study in preparation for
Wednesday, 3pm - giving a 2 hour long tutorial by myself
Thursday, 4pm - work
Friday, 10am - possibly meeting my supervisor?
Friday, 5pm - 2500 word paper due in
Friday, 9pm - sister arrives
Saturday - probable sister-related drama
Sunday, 11am - work
Sunday, 3pm - sister departs

The week after that is pretty tame. I need to submit a paper based on my tutorial from the week before, and will be working my usual Thursday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday shifts.

And then the week after that, I'll work on the weekend and then am going to Canberra for several days. I will barely be seeing my family at all, which is probably good, given that I'll already be overloaded on family from their visits here. Instead, I'm going to be spending some seriously quality time with my friend Em, chasing around after all kinds of bureaucratic things. She's getting married in January and has just asked me to be a bridesmaid, so we want to figure out dresses and she wants me to help scout out venues.

Somewhere in there, I'd like to fit in my knitting group at lesat once, some swimming (because running up and down the library stairs has played havoc with my demented knee, and swimming seems to be good for it), and I really, really want to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Oh, and Wallace and Grommit, but I forget when that comes out.

Whew. I'm tired just thinking about it all.

Fucking Apple can fucking fuck off and die.

Anyone that wants to quote me on that is more than welcome to.

The whole screen on my laptop just froze. Completely immobile - not just one window or one application. The whole fucking thing. A nuisance, yes, but generally not worth panicking over. Except for one thing ...

This has happened to me twice before, and both times, it occurred in the week before the laptop packed up entirely and sparked off protracted arguments with Apple on some of my favourite subjects: Why I Need A New Logicboard; Why I Need It Now, Not In Three Weeks' Time; and Why Apple Should Pay For It.

If this is the case again, I am not going to be a happy girl in the slightest.

I'm not sure what to hope for, though. I obviously don't want to be without my laptop, but I find myself believing that disaster is inevitable -- from experience, not out of any innate pessimism -- and that being the case, I should like it to strike in the next two weeks while my last new logicboard is still under manufacturers' warranty. It makes the arguments with Apple slightly less protracted.

Paranoid? Me?