Visual Diary #20

Frog Maiden, Carrot Mage, Gretel's Mean Streets, Different Times, The Blob

Reader,

First up, a reminder that I have zines and collage postcards for sale here

Second up, a reminder to pause. Do something nice for yourself amid the hurly-burly of Xmas. Have a damn fine cup of coffee. Make some walnut pesto with a hand-operated chopper bought from a two dollar shop. Read poetry.

I’ve been house-sitting and dog-minding and working on unruly writing - a novel, or maybe novella - a ghost story? - I want to finish over the summer. Lately I am almost always wondering if I wouldn’t be better off gardening or kayaking or just sitting in the sun. When I’m engaged in paid work all I can think is whenwhenwhen will I have time to write? Then time opens out and I become a blob. Not writing is a really extreme form of self-protection. No amount of writer-self-help/creativity books can make a dent. It’s why I’m still writing this newsletter (newsletter as trojan horse). After a couple of days of blob tactics, I went to the AAWP creative writing/teaching conference - I got a bit revved up, and felt purposeful, but then back in the flat the drift returned. I realised the only way to make it go away was to write. So I did that. I’m always encouraging my students to share their favourite bits, so here’s something.

According to Mum’s witchy friend Janine the world is full of ghosts. We walk through them every day. She said if everyone who’d ever died rematerialised the streets would be chockas like the MCG on Grand Final Day, or kids lining up for the Christmas windows at Myer. Ghosts appear because they want something; this tethers them to the living. So what did Frank want? Had the demolition set him loose? I peered ahead in the dark. I tried to see the dead, I wanted to be psychically open, there for them, but no forms materialised, no lights flickered. I swiped the air, and air was all I found.

On my ‘retreat’ I also drank coffee and ate swiss cheese in flat bread. I watched the movies Life Burns High - the Charmian Clift documentary (Great), A Dangerous Method (just ok), Monkey Grip (see below) and Cactus Flower (here’s Johnny Wesley with Needs to be Bee’d With). I watched an episode of Grand Designs Australia where a folk-singing couple made an earthship-inspired house in Cygnet, and nearly lost their minds. But they got there! (I think they always get there, don’t they?) (Maybe I should build an earthship?) I remembered the great Ethan Coen mid-life crisis story Red Wing which starts with a man running through the woods carrying his dead wife’s head and *spoiler* ends with the words “I feel so very lost.” (There’s a recording of it here.) I read The Moomins & the Great Flood by Tove Jansson and This Woman’s Work by Julie Delporte, and two books not yet published by friends, and The Museum of Words by Georgia Blain and The Warmth of the Heart Keeps Your Body from Rusting by Marie de Hennezel and I thought about the quote attributed to Charle DeGaulle “Old age is a shipwreck.” I watched Sarah Wilson’s Ted Talk on how to live with societal collapse and I listened to this episode of Press Colour. I looked after my ward, Gretel the poodle, (see below) and I painted the following pictures.

This is Nora and Javo about to get together in Monkey Grip. I hadn’t seen the film for so long. I forgot how weird it seems that everyone calls everyone ‘mate’. The film felt long and almost storyless but still really watchable. I couldn’t believe how young Noni Hazlehurst was in it- I was a young adult when I first so it, so I always thought of her as old - all of them, really. They were like people my parent’s friends age - not that my parents had such friends. Javo really was a dick. Alice Garner is all charm. I loved all the houses - the shifting around- the way people didn’t have so much bullshit stuff. Just pianos and paperbacks….. Kmart used to just sell undies, but now it’s full of wall-hangings and objets. And everyone has houseplants because no one can afford houses. In Monkey Grip they’re all artists and hedonists, and they drift around and throw the I-Ching and drive to beaches and put on plays, and they can afford to live in cities, and it doesn’t matter that there are big cracks in their walls because they’re not paying two-thirds of their income in rent. Whenever Nora is upset with Javo she writes him a letter. Chrissie Amphlett’s great in it. 1982. What a time!!

This is Saint Mary McKIllop on the side of a building in Moor St. Nuns make me a little nervous but I like the way her image hasn’t been tagged over. Look - there’s a walking tour of Mary McKillop’s Melbourne. Maybe I’ll do that.

This is Gretel the poodle. She’s a funny dog. We got along, although she did wake me up every morning very early. When she runs her hair flops up and down - it’s currently styled in the manner of The Byrds. (Aside: Check out the Cros! Bring back capes!)

This is a street-scape that got a bit confused. The sky was not actually red, The building was a bit blue though. I didn’t walk as much as I thought I would. But every time I did I saw something notable. Like, I saw a girl carrying (and stroking) a very large frog (possibly a toad), and, later, I saw a man carrying a very large (as in person-sized) carrot. He was totally blase about this, as was the frog maiden. At night I could hear merriment and carousing, and I would have liked to join but I had work to do.