'What's in puttanesca?'
'Whores.'
'Really?'
'"Puttana" is Italian for whore. They used to make it for their customers, you know, afterwards.'
'So you get a happy ending and then you get a meal? That's what I call service.'
'That's nothing. At some places you also get a slinky.'

I've been a bit busy with stuff (mainly hiding under a desk until The Thesis goes away) to update. Actually, no, I lie. If I had sat down to write a missive to the interweb in the past few weeks it would be about how great Lowan tropical muesli is, especially with Bonsoy, but such sentiments really are best expressed on ABC metropolitan radio when one is in one's golden years.

But if I was to blog, here are some of the things I would blog about.

- PhDos and PhDon'ts - it's that time of year and I'm so very confused. What are the best schools? Why are there so many centres for the research of applied this and groups for the study of globalised that? Should I apply for masters and then convert? How important is a PhD proposal? Why do they ask so many questions? KP, you better believe you'll be getting a call from me later in the week.

- Went down the coast with the Ramps and it was heaps ace. They'd rented an old girl guide camp (!!), complete with bunks and countless teapots and a teabagging ghost named Annie. While they recorded I sat at a groaning old table and prodded away at the old thesis. I haven't done as much as I would have liked so far, but terror has given way to apathy/an inflated sense of my own abilities and I reckon I'll have it all done. I could use another motivating shot of terror, though.

- It seems I left my hair brush and my beautiful old child beatin' belt at the coast. Sigh.

- A Maltese terrier named Morris who bites my shoelaces when I walk home from the gym.

- I require: a toothsome boy to fold my washing and clean out the fridge, a haircut, an eyelash tint, summer-appropriate footwar, and a good lie down. Oh, and someone to pop down to the markets for some mushrooms and apples, thanks very much in advance.

Miss Chlo told me recently that the beautiful, the amazing, the loud Erase Errata will be touring Australia in November, with Macromantics no less, and I really do urge all of you to go. I'm thinking of going to the Canberra show on the 16th, as the venue is smaller and I hear photogenic Canberra scene darlings Young And Restless will be making the rest of us look badly dressed and fat, erm, supporting. But they are also playing on the 18th at the East Brunswick Club, and on the 17th at Spectrum in Sydney, yes, Jobe, I say this so you will attend, yes, I know how you feel about Macromantics, I'm sure you can get a beer or something while the supports are on.

This show will be teh radness. I am very excited.

Edited to add: Animal Collective are touring early November and I will go to the show even though I have a painful, sadistic amount of assessment due at that time. Who's with me??

It's been a couple of weeks of little indignities and constant misfiring. It peaked on Thursday when Blockhead, as always, talked me down from my agitation. But I'm better now, and here is a list of things.

- KP and her handsome doctor friend took me to the Melbourne Uni anatomy museum. My word, there is a story about my struggles to get into those rarified walls, but it is boring and bureaucratic. Suffice to say, never use the words 'Haraway,' 'Butler' or 'taxidermy' around an anatomist if you want to have a look at their bits (... heh). While I was a little frightened of getting caught, the museum was awesome. The highlight for me was holding a plastinated hand and forearm that was the exact size of my hand and forearm, and a deformed midget skeleton playing a piccolo. Pulvis et umbra sumus indeed.

- 'Chutes Too Narrow' is far better than 'Oh Inverted World.' Yes, I'm the last person in the world to realise this.

- One night, while I was waiting for a tram, an older, balding, white man and a younger, roundish, Indian-looking man crossed the road. They were holding hands. The younger guy whispered something in the older guy's ear, and the old man laughed and affectionately stroked the small of the young man's back. It was unexpected and made me oddly happy. Maybe the young guy was a rent boy, but I didn't think rent boys would be that round, nor would they wear Birkenstocks. Maybe they're just two people who found each other. I like to think it's the latter.

- I went swimming today for the first time since I had my lip pierced and it was rad. I also have some nice swimming goggle pink eye going on, too. A rather cute, androgynous looking woman checked me out while I was getting dressed afterwards. It was hard to miss. She turned around while she was getting into the shower, looked me up and down, and smiled in a way I choose to think is not sleazy. My self esteem has ratcheted up a little. I am superficial.

- Crushes on strangers are awesome. Crush du jour is a man I see around campus sometimes. Once, in a cafe, he asked if we knew each other. We don't. He is a silver fox. He wears a little black hat, a la Dexy's Midnight Runners, and he looks as though he may have been a bit of a new romantic back in the day. Considering the sophistication of my seduction skills (they are limited to 'want to come back to my place to listen to Morrissey and stare at our hands?') I suspect I don't stand a chance with a sharply dressed older man, but a girl can dream, can't she?

To brighten up your morning. In no particular order.


Will Oldham, aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. He isn't actually the unabomber, but he unabombs my heart.


George Negus (furthest on the left - sigh)


Pop superstar Pink. What they don't tell you is that her husband is actually a woman, and by woman I mean me.


Countrified beardy hip hop hunk Buck 65, who is not actually the Johnny Cash of hip hop, thank you very much loud good-for-nothing man in the audience.


Channel Nine's pants-free sex god, Jim Waley.


Kilt wearing former Talking Heads frontman, and all around rad guy and silver fox, David Byrne.


Mr Ice T. "This is my Jew." Hee.

I am doing three things tonight.

Listening to Sufjan Stevens.

Half-waiting for the phone to vibrate.

Revising the Alan Jones paper. Yes, again. I can't shake the cunt.

There are a great many things I could tell the internet about. For instance, the rather satisfying meeting I had with the Fucking Latte Left
(tm), in Fitzroy, no less. I could mention seeing Pony Up and the Ramps on Saturday, watching two girls progress from innocuous leaning to hand holding to snuggling to neck nuzzling at one and eating home-made gingernuts at the other. And there's also my new found brain crush, Mark Dery and his lovely meditation on decapitation.

But, no. I'm in my room, Sufjan is singing something about Jesus, my phone is silent, it turns out there is quite a bit of scholarly stuff out there on La Jones, and the internet is right here, comforting and amorphous as cream. So here you go, internet, another little bit of pathos, another discomfiting, lonely night, joining a chorus of discomfiting, lonely nights.

The second I heard my housemate come home I toddled downstairs with my newly-borrowed book on the La Specola waxes under my arm.

'Check it out!' I said. 'Pretty gnarly, huh?'

'Yes, it's very-'

'They're totally made out of wax! And they're really, really old! And they're, like, in Italy! And they were modelled on cut up hobo! And-'

'Rach, I've got to-'

'And I'ma do an assignment on them! And I'll scan these pictures and cut them out and stick them on some cardboard! With gold stars! And scratch and sniff stickers! And I'll write it all in Comic Sans! And my teacher will give me an H1 and-'

'Yeah, I'm kind of tired and I think I might-'

'Heh, you can see a doodle in this one.'

'Heh, doodle.'

'Here you can see inside his ass!'

'Hur hur hur hur hur hur ass hur hur hur.'

'Hur hur hur hur I like asses hur hur hur hur doodle.'

So it's been another productive night, really.

Yesterday I had an appointment with some archives, something I've never done before but figured I am should seeing as I'm taking two disconcertingly non-theoretical history classes. I know that history is about looking at old shit, so that is what I did. I looked at some old shit.

Actually, I looked at a very old book called 'The Answer, or The World as Joy,' by a glorious nutbag named William Chidley. This book is at once a treatise on eugenics, degeneration, philosophy, and sex. Basically, in his words, 'for many years the writer has seen that the human race has fallen into an error in their mode of coition, and this is by no means his first attempt to make a great truth known.' What is that error? According to Mr Chidley, boners are bard. He goes on for a few pages about how all animals copulate 'via suction,' which is to say the vagina is meant to actually suck in the flaccid penis, and then discusses how people might do the same thing.

I love him.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to attempt what he suggests, redolent as it is of Mr Freud's vagina dentata,* but I just love that people like him existed, wrote books like that in all seriousness, and that I can sit in a silent, calm, bland room and giggle like a silly little girl.

I go back on Wednesday, and I have some other very exciting little research trips planned, possibly involving dead people, y'all.



*Just as 'Snakes on a Plane' has become our generation's zen koan, vagina dentata has long been mine. There was once a time when I was living in California. I lived on a diet of Pabst and cigarettes, my hair was long and sun bleached, I had a crew of some of the finest souls I will ever meet, most of them gay men, many with unnatural obsessions with the Olsen twins, and we would cruise around in my friend Alex' SUV hate criming sorority girls and hippies by shouting homophobic slurs from the windows. My drunken party slut ways were getting me nowhere in the love stakes, and one of my friends suggested I might have a vagina dentata. Vagina dentata, man. Just say it a few times. It's all good, what can you do? Vagina den-fucking-tata.

And not in the good way

I must: write a 6,000 word chapter draft on risk, representation, the abject and child obesity. I planned on doing this by analysing the TV show 'Honey We're Killing The Kids' using the various theoretical lenses kindly provided by a number of Frenchy, wordy, densey people. 'Honey We're Killing the Kids' was broadcast between mid July and late August of this year. There are six episodes in the series.

I thought: I had the whole thing recorded and waiting for me when I finished my Very Dry Policy Chapter.

I have: Three episodes. The Tivo-that-isn't provided by my Foxtel employee housemate recorded two episodes, and the DVD I had (don't ask how) of two episodes didn't work, so only one of the episodes was recorded.

Fuck.

Ass.

SYPHILIS.

I can: again explore the avenue I used to obtain the faulty DVD to see if I can get some of the missing episodes. I could also contact Network Ten for the vision, but I know from experience they will charge like wounded fucken bulls for the privilege. One of my housemates, bless, is trawling through BitTorrent sites for me. But still.

It's okay. It's okay. I have a date with some archives tomorrow morning for another paper. I have a mess of Frenchy, wordy, densey theory just begging to be misunderstood. I have more red bean buns than is really necessary for one person.

Everything's fine. Just fine.

...


Maybe I could drive a taxi. Taxi drivers always seem like cheerful people.

I was mooching on the couch this morning reading a book of short stories by Milan Kundera when I came across this little bit that seemed highly pertinent.

'The irresistible proliferation of graphomania [compulsion to write books] among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: "We are all writers!"

'For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

'One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.'

That was written in 1978.

DISCUSS, BITCHES