Ava Maria [entries|friends|calendar] ... [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ] [ calendar | livejournal calendar ]

[19 Sep 2009|10:45pm] I realised today that this year has been seriously damn awesome and I don't know why it took me so long to realise. Foolish girl. I have done so many amazing things and met so many amazing people and have seen so many beautiful things and I've changed so unbelievably much. It's all about the learning, isn't it. 2| ?

[01 Sep 2009|03:25pm] If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. — Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or ?

[26 Jul 2009|08:01pm] I spent the last four days in Charleville, visiting an old school friend and her fiance. I was a bit nervous, because even though she and I were good friends at school, that really was a long time ago now, and she and I have caught up maybe 5 or 6 times over the past 6 years. But we had a lot of fun, it's interesting to see people you grow up with living adult lives - full time jobs, their own houses, serious relationships. I feel perpetually 16, still awkward and ungrounded. Charleville is an interesting place, just one of those small outback towns, looks like most outback towns in Australia. It's a 10 hour drive directly west of Brisbane, 10 hours directly west and that only gets you halfway across the state. The sheer size of this country is sometimes horrifying. No wonder most Australians cling to the coast line, the further inland you get the more alien the country feels. It's thin and raw and old, people shouldn't be here. It took 17 hours on the train, but I've never been on a train for more than three hours, so it was an adventure. I had weird dreams and a bloody nose and should have taken a longer book to read. I always feel slightly uncomfortable when people say that the real Australia is only found the further inland you go. There's a weird disparity between the perceived/perpetuated Australian identity and the reality of the majority of Australian life. But we drove back yesterday - 11 hours in a car, oi. Even though I was exhausted, I went out to see the Chocolate Strings and danced like an idiot. The venue shut at 12 (damn you liquor laws!), so we headed to a bar/club called "Trash". That should have given me a hint about the quality of the clientele. Between the 35year old steroid abuser who kept trying to take photos of me for his facebook (!) and the very tall 'ranga who didn't look a day over 18 but was trying very hard, it was hard to just enjoy dancing with my friends. :\ I think I need to be more inebriated to avoid being terrified in clubs....ah old age... ?

[20 Jul 2009|01:41pm] "In the end, the experiences we had together, and the memories that then formed, those didn't matter. Instead, it was the absence of memory that defined our togetherness, the things we never did together: we never kissed in the rain; we tried once, but it was only drizzling. We never spent the night together as teenagers, there never came a weekend when parents went out of town. We never had dancing lessons or took a summer art class together. Those gaps in memory are what give birth to loneliness, when all you can remember are all the things you did not do, things you only read in books or saw in movies, superimposing your faces onto perfectly framed bodies. That is love, when you only wish you had done more. It's almost as though you feel you are forgetting something, you are forgetting that there is nothing to forget. It is something the opposite of amnesia. We are all scrambling to recover memories of lives we never led. The list goes on: we never made love in a hotel in South Carolina. We never visited the Smithsonian. We never held hands and watched fireworks on the Fourth of July. We never, we never, we never." Bernard Hitch, 67. Excerpt from "True Accounts of Love and Loss as Reported by Bethany Bailey, Special to the Tribune." Cheerful content to resume presently. Promise. ?

[31 May 2009|06:23pm] Spent the weekend camping, it was an excellent break from work, which is driving me completely insane. (One of my students is 5 weeks late with his essay because he 'forgot'. He wanted an extension, and thinks it's 'harsh' that he's getting 0. Yeah, I wish I was kidding.) The fishing wasn't very good, but it was beautiful just to do nothing, nap in the sun, walk around the beach. I haven't been Rainbow Beach since last October, but that was close to the worst weekend of my life; I thought I'd have a harder time being back there, but it was ok. My boss emailed me over the weekend because she'd heard one of my students was aggressive in class last week. This came as a complete surprise to me, but apparently another student thought it constituted harassment, and so took it to my boss... I feel a little thick, because I really have no idea what this is about - could a student really abuse me in class, and I not notice? Hilarious. I'm so silly about some things. I can't get over things. Will I ever get over them? I doubt it. Certainly that awful feeling has lessened, the relentless march of time does that, but I don't know how I'll be over the next few weeks. Wildly frustrated, randomly angry, sold short, impotently denied. You said the other week that we should maybe catch up or hang out. And I hate that, hate that so much. Failure in any regard just doesn't sit right with me. I don't know. 2| ?

[10 May 2009|07:43pm] I guess I still think about her. Fixed smile. Those removed gestures. That terrified gaze whenever it wasn't lost to something dull, angry and broken, an image that invariably returns me to the same question: can Clara English ever recover or is she permanently wounded, damned to stagger under years devoid of meaning & love until finally the day comes when she stumbles and is swept away?... Back then November had seemed like nothing but fun. The drugs robbing it of any consequence. The sex erasing all motives. Now, however, thorns have surfaced. Sharp thorns. My blissful bower's fallen, overrun by weeds and deadly vines. So is Lude's. Spiked with hurt. Heavy with poisonous bloom. p264 People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex. None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all. p265 Karen has avoided the B-movie cliche of choosing evening as the time to explore a dangerous house. Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night. p415 House of Leaves, MZD ?

[08 May 2009|12:28am] Despite feeling terrible, coughing enough to dislodge a lung, I still went to Bob Evans. I have heard him live a few times (mostly far away, chilling out on a hill at Woodford) so this was the first real concert situation. And it was excellent. And they finished with a George Harrison song! But I spent most of the time watching the adorable and ridiculously talented guitarist. He was adorable. And tiny. And so serious! Students are driving me bananas. And my skin looks awful (thanks flu!). But I just ate some really good soup, and I'm staying in bed all day tomorrow. And my two new dancing scarfs came today. Hurrah! 2| ?

[06 May 2009|02:15pm] "Belief is one of Reston's greatest strengths. He has an almost animal like ability to accept the world as it comes to him. Perhaps one overcast morning in Hyderabad, India he had stood rooted to the ground for one second too long because he did not really believe an electrical pole had fallen and an ugly lash of death was now whipping toward him. Reston had paid a high price for that disbelief: he would never walk up stairs again and he would never fuck. At least he would also never doubt again." House of Leaves, p99. Mark Danielewski. 2| ?

[30 Apr 2009|08:25pm] A grain of sand is as complete as a world, he said to the fire, his voice audible only to his own ears. The thought that someone sitting above the clouds could gaze into this small cocoon in which he and his wife were trapped in pain comforted him; their suffering to the eyes above could be as tiny and irrelevant as the piece of coal in his own eyes, a burning ember that would soon cool into a gray ball of ash. p53, The Vagrants, Yiyun Li ?

[23 Apr 2009|04:50pm] leaving. So you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades... But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back - all the stories say so. Look what happened to Lot's wife. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into question. p1113, Stephen King, It ?

[18 Apr 2009|06:37pm] Bill saw his father was crying, and this increased his terror. A frightening possibility suddenly occurred to him: maybe sometimes things didn't just go wrong and then stop; maybe sometimes they just kept going wronger and wronger until everything was totally fucked up. ...He left and went creeping along the upstairs hall, hearing his mother doing her own crying down in the kitchen. The sound was shrill and helpless. Bill thought, Why are they crying so far apart? and then he shoved the thought away. (p249) A third [poster], which George had coloured himself, showed Mr Do... Kid wasn't too cool about staying in the lines, Richie thought, and then shuddered. The kid was never going to get any better at it either. Richie looked at the table by the window. Mrs Denbrough had stood up all of George's rank-cards there, half open. Looking at them, knowing there would never be any more, knowing that George had died before he could stay in the lines when he coloured, knowing his life had ended irrevocably and eternally with only those few kindergarten and first-grade rank cards, all the idiot truth of death crashed home to Richie for the first time. It was as if a large iron safe had fallen into his brain and buried itself there. I could die! his mind screamed at him suddenly in tones of betrayed horror. Anybody could! Anybody could! (p338) ...he began to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with careers and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn't kill him. Oh no. Killing was too good for the likes of that little bastard. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to time. That was really all there was. And that was enough. (p570) Stephen King. It. I love King so unironically. But horror, gore, monsters...they're pretty run of the mill. It's his grasp of ordinary pain, human suffering, the monsters that exist within the most mundane of us all that are the most fascinating. It's not the creature under the bed that you have to worry about, it's the ordinary people you know. Yourself. ?

[28 Mar 2009|05:43pm] Call it a surfeit of melancholic humour or an imbalance of endorphins; call him bipolar or possessed: whatever cause it, something was wrong with Torquanto Tasso. His letter are full of imagined slights and malicious conspiracies. The doctor is trying to poison him. The servants are untrustworthy. Nobody appreciates his genius. He has no genius. Other courtiers were more than concerned by his habit of surrendering himself up to the Inquisition. It was as if he gained some momentary equilibrium, after he unburdened his anxieties about heresy and catalogued the sins he might have committed, and the priest, scrying into the corners of his soul, pronounced him forgiven. Like a caricatured contemporary novelist, he relied on the closest thing in the sixteenth century to a shrink. But in the gossipy, secretive world of a Renaissance court, Tasso's compulsion to confession was a dangerous liability. The Book of Lost Books, Stuart Kelly, p144 ?

[17 Mar 2009|03:13pm] Do you like...? was one of the games she and Alfred played. It was shameful how little they knew about each other, at least those childish tastes to which they confessed; if their honesty did not cut deeper, it was because the knife could not have prolonged their relationship: better to cherish surfaces in the time left to them. (193) "You've never been interested in books." It was true; it had suited her purposes to adopt the opinion that to read is to live at second hand. (193) Sometimes Arnold Wyburd wondered whether his being surrounded in his family life by too many women had nourished a streak of weakness in him. As he escaped from Sister Manhood he was pursued by some of the sounds he most disliked hearing: the sniffs, the sighs, tissues ripped from the box, the blown (female) nose. Much as he loved and depended on his regiment of women he often regretted their sogginess. He feared rather than despised their weakness: now especially it seemed to equate - let's face it - with masculine duplicity. (270) To be truthful, he had considered suicide once or twice in his life, but had not come at it: on each occasion the water was too shallow. In any case, he was not by temperament a suicide: theatrical gestures only convince when you can share them with an audience. (499) Now there was nothing to be done about it. Perhaps the grater instinctively loves the cheese. Wives don't love: they swallow you. And most mistresses are in it for calculated reasons. (508) F-L-O-R-A spelt out makes you feel more real hard to believe you're free at last to roam around lie on the park grass if you want not at night when they murder people who are on their own but under the sun the weight of the sun as much as the warmth is what you crave for. In the sun's absence, she began walking smartly down the street. She didn't depend on the sun, no more than on any man. (549) (all beautiful women stagemanage their entrances, either intuitively, or more likely after endless rehearsal on feeling the first tremors of power in their green girlhood) (571) Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm But I've already told you, Give us another answer, that one won't do, It's the only answer I can give because it's the true one, That's what you think, Unless you want me to make one up, Yes, do, we don't mind at all if you come up with the answers which, with time and patience, could be made to fit the proper application of certain techniques, that way, you'll end up saying what we want to hear, Tell me what the answer is then, and let's be done with it, Oh, no, that wouldn't be any fun at all, who do you think we are, sir, we have our scientific dignity to consider, our professional conscience to defend... (24) ...that is the great thing about ordinary words, they are incapable of deceit. (28) Don't let the devil hear you, minister, The devil has such good hearing he doesn't need things to be spoken out loud, Well, god help us then, There's no point asking him for help either, he was born stone-deaf. (98) - Jose Saramago, Seeing ?

[08 Mar 2009|03:05pm] Obviously, many of these blind inmates are being trampled under foot, pushed, jostled, this is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames. (p203) Jose Saramago, Blindness ?

[12 Jan 2009|07:26pm] "To be called 'sophisticated' is an ambiguous plaudit. The lustre of polish contains a suspicion of superficial veneer; suave urbanity raises the shadow of oleaginous artifice. Sophisticated authors may well be complex, but their cleverness is always denounced as mere cleverness. They may be charming, refined, chic and stylish, but the hint lingers that they lack a soul. Sophistication is a taunt and a triumph, an accomplishment and a snub." p.69, "Callimachus", The Book of Lost Books, Stuart Kelly. ?

[06 Jan 2009|07:25pm] Woodford was amazing. There really aren't words to describe it, and the photos don't do it justice. The whole week just feels like it went by in a second, and I don't know how to get back into reality. It doesn't feel like the year has changed, because we were so divorced from the external world. (My deep abiding hatred for chardonnay socialists still exists though. You're the fat, comfortable middle class, just accept it.) It was surreal to watch the sunrise; perched on the hilltop in that hallucinatory half-asleep, overly-exhausted way, the sky beginning to glow red and slowly, slowly seep in orange. The actually sun rises disturbingly fast, so quickly it goes from just peeking to completely up in a matter of minutes. I feel very strange, and I feel like I learned something. About myself in general, and my attitude, and my sense of (or lack of) patience and joy and enjoyment and freedom. I forgot that there could be a completely pure love in creating music just for kicks, and listening to nuances just for their own fun, and that made me so sad, but I found it again. I came back happy and tired and full of good music and good food and with sore legs and dirty feet. ?

[02 Jan 2009|08:45pm] I thank the bees for the candles and the honey. The bee's stinger is as the Rose's thorn. The rose is more perfect because it is quiet. Silence is perfection. Stones are the most perfect. I am training to be a stone. Making my heartbeat quieter. Tying towels to my feet (to walk quieter). Stones don't walk. They're so perfect they've nowhere to go. No desires or wishes. No needs or hunger. Even as I pick a stone up from the ground and carry it with me to learn its secrets, it doesn't object. It's a perfect in my pocket as in the dirt. Perfect in pile or at the bottom of the sea. When I sleep I must most resemble a stone. And when I am a stone I am with you in my dreams. Maybe stones always dream. How did the stone train to last forever? To be so perfectly quiet? Maybe it worked so hard it became externally exhausted. Let to dream while bees and roses meet. Stones make the killer cry. Every time I ask, HE WEEPS "Such beauty." You must love the stones as they are. I must change from what I am to have your love. You must love what the killer casts away. All that is perfect and quiet is yours. Everything else is the killer's to end when he sees fit. I want to be yours. I like the killer fine. For picnics now and then and for his wisdom on such things as stones. But I'm training to be yours. Every moment changing from what I am, into what you would have me be. You sleep underwater with the stones, making love in your perfect ways. I wish to be your favorite stone. So quiet I'm not there. A lover so dear, you would abandon all else. A quiet so quiet that you have never heard. Such quiet it could lull a clumsy, ugly world to sleep in its arms. p.58, Hawksley Burns for Isadora, Hawksley Workman ?

[08 Dec 2008|06:34pm] Fishing! and Winery roadtrips! It's been a busy week! Everyone seems to think it funny that before we went fishing, we stopped to have fish and chips. I don't know. I thought it would put us in the fish=food hunter state of mind; I especially liked my heart shaped fish. ( more fishing and wining adventures ) And of course I found the bookshop. A fine copy of Horace's Odes, published in 1874. 1874. I almost fell over, especially when it was only $5. It is now mine. And the second oldest book I own. Oh. The joy. No-body understands. And I spent far too much money on food. And wine. And more food. And even more food. And I had to work from home today, because it was the vic-chancellor's christmas party. Ick. Too much politics for me to handle :\ ?

[28 Nov 2008|02:11pm] Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine. p95. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides ?

[19 Nov 2008|05:50pm] Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees. p63 Am reading this on the train, and on the way home a lovely young man with blond hair and blue eyes and a soft face kept looking at the title of my book; I'm sure he thought I was reading something utterly salacious. I do rather like reading wild books on the train (Fanny Hill, My Secret Life, any Marquis de Sade, Lolita); shock the suburban refinements of the commuters. So, good looking men travel on the 2.45 and the 4.04 trains. Must remember this. ?

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