F1

The success of Kimi Räikkönen is one of those things I was so drastically wrong about. I saw him interviewed after a race, sitting next to Schucmacher. He was 21 and I've never seen anyone who was so tough and undaunted. I thought, ecce homo. Raikkonen is very successful, its just that based on what I saw, I thought he was going to be untouchable. And now there's Lewis Hamilton. Its all very Kieren Perkins - Daniel Kowalski - Grant Hackett. (I suppose from a British point of view, its very Stirling Moss.)

Get me out of here

Is there anything more unspeakably horrible, more rackingly guiltifying, more agonising, desperately small and pointlessly tragic than unrequited mild dislike?

The International Australian Conspiracy

This morning award-winning Australian Crime Fiction Writer, Gabrielle Lord phoned. I tell you that she is award winning (she won our most prestigious Crime Fiction award, the Ned Kelly Award... yes, we are like that; we built a memorial swimming pool in honour of one of our politicians who drowned) because I've never heard of her. It turns out she didn't want to speak to me, so much as to my boss, who had also never heard of her. So I was sent to do a rekkie. It turns out that, like many crime fiction writers, faced with, as her web-page says, 'savvy modern readers', she likes to do very hands-on research for her novels. As far as I can tell, she's spent time with everyone from forensic pathologists to the good people at ASIO. (For non-Australians, that's our Secret Service. Perhaps they do such fine work that we never get to hear of their successes; but the fact that we do get to hear of their failures means that they're not taken very seriously. To give you an example, they put an agent provocateur in my Mother's University English lit tutorials because they got a hot tip that the International Jewish-Communist conspiracy was turning up to 9 am tutorials on Dickens. Comedian Shane Bourne, who attended the same university, claims ASIO took him in for questioning when he was 19 because he was laughing 'suspiciously'.)

Anyway, the point is, Gabrielle Lord wants to come here to see true Irishness, and instead, ironically, she got me; we're insidious that way, we're everywhere. When she clocked the accent she was a little non-plussed, but oddly, over the course of the very brief conversation a strange and entirely unvocalised comraderie was established:



GL: Oh. Hello. I've been trying to get through for days, I think I had the wrong number.

Me: We try to keep it secret.

GL: You're doing a good job. I thought maybe you'd all died.

Me: Feels like it sometimes.

GL: Don't say that!



A part from the fact that she seemed genuinely appalled at my 'feels like it' comment - this from a woman who writes gory killings for a living! - I really took to her. All the more so when I discovered that she had included on her web-page a quote from Peter Craven which said:


'Gabrielle Lord has the option of becoming a master storyteller who can put real faces in a fabulistic frame or of becoming another blowsy Antipodean hack — all wind and obviousness.'

Not a snow ball's

I'm a librarian in an academic library and since we are now mid-exams, t'is the season of rampent insanity. Conversation with random physics undergrad ran thusly:

Me: Do you know about your fines? (chirpy and non-confrontational tone of voice)
Boy: Eh?
Me: You have thirteen euro in fines from, oh, from January of '06 and Decemeber of '05.
Boy looks at me, I look at boy.
Boy: But that's like ..........a year and a half ago? Is it?
I look at boy in a 'what the hell does it like to you my job is' kind of way.
Boy goes away.

Short time later boy comes back.
Boy: I won't be able to, you know, take books away, em, home with me cos of the fine, will I?
Me: (Back to chirpy mode now) You won't be able to borrow books till your fine is ten euros or less.
Boy: So I won't be able to take books home with the fine?
Me: (speaking slowly with hand signals) You have to give me three euro or more and then you will be able to take out books.
Boy looks at me blankly, draws breath and then wanders off.

For this librarian's money, the poor bastard doesn't stand a chance.

Duds & Suds

Quick ethical product update.

I am not at all sure I'm good with Lilley's (or however you spell it, the spelling in the original post is correct) laundry liquid and this is because I am seriously suspicious of the smell. Possibly not the best of reasons but a valid one if I have to wear stuff that smells of it. It's not even a herby, essential oily smell which I could more that live with, it's that it leaves my cloths smelling slightly musty. It's getting the benefit of the doubt and if after one more shot it's still no good it's out and I'm going back to e-cover. Lilley's washing up liquid is however excellent.

Speaking of which, can't remember if I said their (E-cover's) fabric conditioner is really good. It is. If Lilley's make fabric conditioner I can't find it.

I use Lush for shampoo and shower gel and that sort of stuff, they do a good range of moisturisers and cleansers and things but I have to say I'm allergic to the former and don't find the latter as effective as my usual brand. My skin's a bit nuts though. Most companies that make serious claims to be animal friendly would wait four years or so for a given supplier to be clean of animal testing before dealing with them. Lush are quite upfront about not doing this and dealing immediately with any company that ceases the practice. I assume the idea of the wait is to ensure that a company is committed to ceasing the practice of animal testing and to ensure that a company doesn't just stop for a short period to fulfill a particular contract. Lush believe that the waiting period is a barrier to companies reforming. You'ld have to make up your own mind. More information on their website which is where you'ld expect to find it. They have a decent fairtrade policy as well.

Lush is very conveniently located on Lower Grafton and Henry's Steet and their stuff smells beyond fantastic as long as you don't mind being mugged by their sales staff. I've found Henry's Street less bad for this than Grafton Street.

Take Two

Right well I lived through it, more it or less. I still have a job and have signally failed to ritually burn my laptop. These are no doubt all good things. By the by, I am feeling that I spend too much of my time these days wondering if I've accidentally offended some minor deity (dissed their totem or something?). Anyway Hannah demanded that I explain myself and so I shall. Even if it does mean publicly (?) admitting my own shoddy research technique. There are probably a number of lecturers who wouldn't actually be all that surprised.

This refers to my 'Interesting Things' entry about sheep and the counting of them. Now I actually originally got this from Hannah (whom I failed to reference - presumably the demon guardians of historical realism have already left the house). This was during one of our many long rambling conversations while waiting to see flats, in this case sitting on the front steps, fighting hypothermia and trying to ignore the Italian woman who was glaring at us, I think because she thought we were queue hopping. Lady, I just wanted to sit down. We were there for two hours, in a good money after bad kind of way, so the conversation of necessity and shortage became a bit esoteric.

Anyway I misremembered what she said, I remembered base eight when her actual statement was more or less what is stated in this post. The funny bit is that I know myself well enough to have checked my recollection out. I did this in the time honoured and rigorous fashion of Googling it. And I found the physics professor's tutorial notes, in which he is explained based systems of numbers etc and using the example of the sheep. It was Berkeley I think, so I took it as reasonably reliable, to my regret. Although as Hannah says it is funny, I'm just not sure in a ha ha sense.

Acts 26:14 (another arcane Australian music triva reference title)

Just ran into my ex-boyfriend who was borrowing books on Synge. You wouldn't really think that'd be enough to knock a girl off balance, but the world is an amazing place. (In the interests of strict accuracy, I should say that it didn't knock me off balance so much as make me hide behind a bookcase.)


In the last few weeks I have been looking around at the remnants of those of my female friends (excluding those in the City of Ladies) who have attempted relationships and I'm wondering if possibly girls aren't really doing very well in this area. After thinking about how my male friends are faring, its possible the world no longer has to worry about over-population. No one seems to be doing very well, everyone seems to be quite scared and I don't really know why. No one is scared of making friends... although, no, actually, I am sometimes... but most people aren't, so I'm not sure why this is all so fraught. hmmm.

Thank you and good night

My thesis is rubbish, work sucks, I'm randomly, accidentally offending people at a rate of about two a week. There is no way I can ever get everything that needs to be done, done. I'm not going to have proper birthday presents for two of my closest friends. I can't find a cd-rom that I desperately, desperately need. Bloody, bloody, sod this.

This year the AFL draft coincided with Ramadan which meant that several players were fasting at the same time that they were supposed to be impressing the selectors. Australian Islamic leaders take the position that if fasting interferes with the work they are exempted from it, but in many cases the players themselves wanted to fast, despite the dispensation. This week the player at the centre of all this, Bachar Houli, played his first game. Apparently he played well, although I didn't get to see it because the Australian pub I go to in Dublin (only, ONLY when compelled by the need to see the footy) has decided to play soccer instead; I feel this is unforgivably culturally insensitive. Anyway. Yes, anyway, this has inspired the sport journalists at The Age to write a series of articles on Islam and football, followed by another series of articles about how Houli is just a footballer and about how religion is private, about how he is not the first Islamic Australian Rules player and most of all about how other journalists are fascist in their desire to make Houli a pin-up for multi-cultural Australia when making a fuss about it demonstrates that we're not as multi-cultural as all that.

Whatever. They're right, all of them are right. There really shouldn't need to be all this fuss, but there is a need. By and large, Whitefellas don't know much about Islam and we are scared of it, but at least on this occasion, we are doing our best to understand and to do the right thing by him and his religion. Which makes a change.


Football is a major vehicle of social change in Australia. After the Collingwood vs St Kilda game, infamous because the racial sledging prompted Saints legend Nicky Winmar to do this:

Collingwood completely changed its record.
Footballers are part of our mob; that's the end of it. Or to put it as a very dear friend of mine and life-long Carlton supporter (trust me, as someone who barricks for a soft team, being a Carlton supporter is doing it tough)- did, 'The normativity of football is such that it can bring anything within the hegemonic discourse.'

Petition

BlueJ told me the coda to my blog from yesterday and I'm calling on her to write it up; it's too funny, in a life-imitating-art, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction, if-you-step-on-a-butterfly, thinking-makes-it-so kind of way to remain unblogged. What I will say is that apparently there is a physics professor in America who uses the shepherd counting system to sizzle* his classes. I love it when physicists make things Fun. (My old supervisor used to say 'Its not going to be Fun, is it? I hate Fun' and I'm with her on that.) The only way you could hook students with the shepherd counting system is if you had me in the class, and no one would want me in a physics class. The entirety of my knowledge of physics comes from a combination of Douglas Adams and having gone out with a physicist once. I can barely count; witness my use of the shepherd counting system.


*See 'Get This' with Tony Martin and Ed Kavalee on Triple M.

Ways of Seeing (why make up a title when there's one just lying around waiting to be stolen.)

Just saw BlueJ's note about the base eight shepherds' counting system. I've never heard of that one before, which is surprising because, embarrassingly enough, as a kid I was quite interested in shepherds' traditional counting systems. I first came across them in Joan Aiken's 'The Cuckoo Tree' in which there were a group of highwaymen, each nicknamed after one of the numbers in the Celtic (I'm almost sure to have used the term incorrectly, so apologies in advance of being slagged off for that) sheep-counting system; yan, tan, tethera etc. From memory, I think that's a base twenty system. When I was learning to juggle, I used them to keep count and also so I didn't go out of my mind with the boredom of it. (Being an acrobat, which was my ambition at the time, is not as entertaining as you might think.) The Celtic system is much more rhythmic than standard numbers, with more rhyme and assonance, so its very good for juggling. Its the aural equivalent of the four vertical lines with a fifth drawn horizontally through them. (There must be a name for that - does anyone know what it is?) I've actually not done much shepherding, but I would imagine that these qualities would also be an advantage in that situation.

It's interesting that a base eight system because unless I've completely mis-remembered, the Greeks worked out that people tend to recognize things in numbers up to eight and after that as 'many'. Classical temples often have more than eight pillars on each side for that reason. That would make base eight very practical for herding. But most of all the thing that fascinates me is the idea that it comes from the space between the fingers; does this mean that shepherds, like jazz musicians ('its not so much what notes you play, its what you leave out, man'), are more aware of negative space? If its true, and all jazz aside, that would suggest a different mindset on the scale of Ong's conception of Orality. I suppose that it is the job of a shepherd is to notice absences, that is, that absence of sheep, but that doesn't really account for such a massive difference in ways of seeing. Essentially, when I'm asked to conceptualize an absence, for example, a Black Hole, I imagine it as a thing. I know that this is not an accurate conception, but that's still the way I imagine it. My conception of Black Holes, by the way, is not that different from the 'I've got a hole in my pocket' moment in 'Yellow Submarine', which is to say that I've turned it into a tangable presence.* So recognizing the spaces between fingers is the exact opposite of the way I imagine absences (re-conceiving them as presences) and consequently reflects an entirely different mindset. I'm going to be wondering about this all week now.

*There are a number of things which most people mis-conceive because it makes the world easier. The idea that the internet is an ether which you can tune into gives you more reasonable expecations of what's likely to happen when you open Internet Explorer than an accruate conception would - if you've ever tried to teach someone over the age of 60 with no computer literacy at all to use email, I'll recognize the truth of what I'm saying. I think the same is true of molecules. Most of the time, its easier to get the world to work if you don't think of it as being made up of molecules.

Ancora imparo

As an Australian woman, being subjected to machismo is my birth-right. I was driving out near Clonmacnoise the other day and blew a tire. I was driving in a rental car which, as I discovered too late and at my own expense, had no spare tire. I’d been there about two minutes when a bloke stopped, produced a spare, changed the tire and drove off again without even pausing to patronise me.

I felt deeply cheated.

I had to fight down the urge to yell "come back and rock on your heels, hands in pockets, and pontificate, you bastard!" At the very least, he could have made up some technical terms to explain the problem. I mean, all I want is a little respect, you know what I'm saying?

But nature loves balance, and the real result of this incident was that I had a little bit of being patronised owing to me. It arrived yesterday and in spectacular fashion. As an Australian woman, I thought I’d seen machismo in all its forms and manifestations. I thought that I’d been patronised on every topic, from football to the subject of my own doctoral thesis. But as Prof. Kent (and Michelangelo) used to say, ‘Ancora imparo’.

I was in a greengrocer’s on Nassau St. yesterday attempting to indulge my love of avocados, when I was awoken from my reverie by the fruiterer asking me if I wanted a ripe avocado. That's a pretty stupid question under the circumstances and my mother didn't bring me up to be polite. However, I must have picked up some manners somewhere because I indicated that I did, though in such a way as to signal that he should desist from his inquiries. It was not to be.
With the air of allowing a novice to see a miricle it has taken a master years of dedication to perfect he ushered me into the shop, felt around in a basket and triumphantly produced an avocado.

I thought it was an ok avocado.

Mainly it was ripe but there was one patch that, with a little prodding, was revealed to be too soft. So I declined it. A cloud of furious disbelief passed across his face. He tried to stare me down - what a waste of time; I've taught in rural Australian secondary schools, there is no point trying to intimidate me. Finally,

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

He stormed out. Storming out of your own shop means that you lose your home-ground advantage but more importantly, that you look silly. Or, in his case, sillier. After a few moments, he did the only thing he could; storm back in again.

“You really don’t believe me?”
“No”

A thought occurred to him and his face and voice softened.

“Do you understand the difference between different kinds of avocados?”

I half expected him to add ‘little girl.’ I said that I did. He spat and stormed out again. Some people never learn. He had to go through the ghastly business of storming back into his own shop again.

“I’ve been a greengrocer for twenty-five years, and you don’t believe me.”

He moved to storm off again, paused mid-disgusted head-shake, and turned back.

“I personally select the avocados that we use in the shop every morning. Personally. And you don’t believe me.”

I flirted briefly with the idea of assuring him of my belief in his ability to fill his underwear on the assumption that the avocado-fixation must be a displacement. I dismissed the idea because I’ve never been any good at lying (something else my mother never taught me to do.)

The conversation deteriorated.

In H.G. Well's Star Begotten, the central character discribes himself as a young child trying to be overcome with awe and wonder at the mystery of the world. I don't find it difficult.

Alright maybe it is them, but......

Right, so I’ve being giving this thing quite a lot of thought. A post a while back brought pretty unanimous disagreement and indeed, affectionate outrage from the rest of the Ladies. There are many posts about it, it’s just that no one’s got beyond the draft stage and most haven’t got beyond the ‘rant in pub’ stage – protoposts?

So what I’ve being thinking about is what exactly are the differences in the way we’re looking at many of the same issues. There are no doubt, many pressures obvious and subtle acting upon women to behave in ways that are indeed restrictive and probably oppressive. I think the crucial difference in our viewpoints is that I believe the way to deal with this is to stop responding to those pressures and just refuse to play ball, the opposing view believes that those pressures aught to stop. (I am so going to get totally creamed for this.)

In the interest of self-preservation: I am utterly sorry if I’ve misrepresented anyone here, I remain completely willing to revise and clarify.

I think probably the latter might be considered to have the right of the situation but possibly, mine has the virtue of being practically efficient, actually thought might be more accurate here – I’ll come to my rather obvious conclusion soon.

Just to be clear this does not apply to professional or practical discrimination, i.e. those situations where the state of mind of the woman involved would make no difference to the practical outcome. This is relevant to those things we end up somehow not exactly agreeing with but end up acquiescing to, all those barely conscious pressures that make the lives of so many women unnecessarily miserable.

So some examples might be; one must be thin, must be ambitious professionally, must be excellent mother, must be fantastic hostess/housekeeper, must not be hysterical/irrational/emotional, must not be frigid/unemotional/logical, whatever you’re having yourself.

Many, in fact probably the majority of women subscribe to some or all of these beliefs, while simultaneously believing them to be unfair and restricting. This is most often explained by women being helpless in the face of the barrage of both subconscious and obvious messages they have been brought up with and live in. But, if we’re going to be fair about it here, it has to be applied to all parties equally. Is the case not the same for men? Surely their latent and conscious attitudes have been formed by precisely the same processes, and yet we fully and justly expect them to get over this. And this of course is correct, I am not justifying or endorsing the continuance of any form of prejudice. What I am saying is that we must have the same expectations of ourselves. The patriarchy, and by the way this is not a helpful term folks, it just not getting anyone anywhere, is at about fifty percent female because that’s what society is, it’s about fifty percent women.

I still believe my solution has the virtues of speed and efficacy but as always the real answer is probably more in the middle ground.