Feburary

Alas, our long evenings are shortening. For the last week or so I have been noting each and every of the earliest autumn leaves on the ground. February marks the end of summer. It is always hottest once all the little people return to school, drink bottles filled with cordial frozen over-night by intelligent guardians, both destined to sweat it up and melt. I was worried about my first summer in country Victoria, but I have rather enjoyed it more than the three days of summer which Hobart generally delivers. Cold showers are fun, icy poles can be for dinner, fruit salad improves throughout the day, and raspberry fizzy is medicine. Here are some things from my summer, in not order and just off the top of my head
1 through 10.

1.     Pinky Pale Hair

2.     Watermelon

 

3.     Wearing a boater everyday

4.     Yellow

5.     Bikes

6.     Driving 

7.     Icy poles

8.     Mini Golf

  If you can only listen to one hour listen to this one

9.     Stories

10.   Thinking about space the universe and everything

1.Hair  a,

2.Watermelon  a

3.Boater  a

4.Yellow  a, b,

5.Bikes  a 

6.Driving  a

7.Icy poles  a

8.Mini Golf  a, b

9.Stories a, b

10.Space a, b, c

Time Without Clocks

Oh, Picnic at Hanging Rock how I wish I could transport myself to either melt into your pages or dance in your stills.  I really liked the book as a teen and I remember watching the film many times. I just loved the dreamy state it would induce. I have recently relocated not far from the Hanging Rock as today being Valentine's I was tempted to bunk off work for a picnic. Unfortunately the universe had different plans and my Valentines has consisted of waking with puffy eyes fromcrying to much during this film, my BF singin me (a rather misplaced and off key) Happy Birthday in my place of employments, due I think to a coma like induced state from working double shifts for the last two weeks, and I am now home alone eatting tacos, and looking at pretty internets 1, 2, 3.

 I have also been reading about the author Joan Lindsay, as I was trying to find evidence of a vague story I have had in my head. While travelling with her partner, she had a vision on nuns running through a paddock. She later learned that this place was the site of a convent which years earlier had been destroyed by fire. This is the kind of thing that will stick in my head, but I will never know how it found its way in.

While internet digging I found these lovely photographs. Lindsay used her school days as a base for the story of Picnic at Hanging Rock; I think you can feel it from the photograph of them as young women. I rather hope they bunked off class.

'Three Remarkable Women' is inscribed in pencil on the reverse of this photograph in Leslie Henderson's hand. Marion Boyd Wanliss (1896-1984) became a medical practicioner, Leslie Moira Henderson (d. 1982) became an author and niece of Vida Goldstein and Joan a'Beckett Weigall (1896-1984) later married Sir Daryl Linsday and was an author of several titles including 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' and 'Time Without Clocks'.

 

I like this poem

 Haiku

Upon Kissing You After You Vomited.
Upon Walking You Home and You Pissing
in Your Pants. Upon Asking a Complete Stranger
about Our Situation. Upon Reading Issa’s
Prescripts “Issa in a State of Illness,”
“At Being Bewildered on Waking” and Realizing
the Haiku Poets Were Not So Laconic and How
Could They Be? Poem Before Dying. Poem
Shortly Before I Head to Dinner. Poem in Which
I Enter Drops of Dew Like a Man with Tiny Keys.
Hitomaro has a poem called On Seeing
the Body of a Man Lying Among the Stones
on the Island of Samine in Sanuki Province.
Kanyu’s short poem is called A Poem
Shown to My Niece Sonshō on Reaching
the Barrier of the Ran After Being Relegated
to an Inferior Position. Poem Louis Aragon
Would Be Proud Of. Poem I’ll Never Show You.
Poem Written in a Bugs Bunny Cartoon as the
Plane’s Controls Come Off in My Hands. Poem
that Jerks Around Like a Hamster in a Bag. Bashō
wrote a haiku for his students that he claimed
was his death poem. The night before
he said that for the last 20 years every poem
he had written had been his death poem. Upon
No Longer Recalling My Thoughts When I Was a Boy
Within My Father’s Stare. At Being Exhausted
at Having to Explain Why Using Slang
Is More Fun Than Reading a Dictionary of Slang.
The poet Saikaku once wrote 23,500 verses
in 24 hours. Bashō saw Mt. Nikkō and said,
“I was filled with such awe that I hesitated
to write a poem.” Upon Looking Past You
into the Mattress, into the Faces of Prior Lovers.
Upon Trying to Cultivate My Inner Life While
also Killing My Ego. On Watching
a 200 pd. Endangered Orangutan
Rape My Wife While She Shouts at Me
Not to Shoot Him. On Seeing a Bloodshot
Spanish Boy Who Was Not Even Crying He Was So Sad
and Not Even Crying He Was So Sad. Poem
in Which I Embody a Moment So Vividly, So
Succinctly, Yet Decorate It with Such Sills,
Such Elaborations. Upon Doodling Your Name
Which Became Your Face Emerging From Day-Old
Coals. Upon Reading that Bashō Believed “A Haiku
Revealing 70 to 80% of Its Subject Is Good, Yet
Those Revealing 50 to 60% Will Never Bore Us.”
On Finally Leaving My Attic and Hearing English
for the First Time in 20 Years and It Sounding
Like an Animal’s Cry Before It Attacks. Poem
in Response to Flying all the Way to Rome
to Meet You and Being Dumped at the Airport.
Poem about the Next Two Weeks We Spent Together.
Poem as I Sit on This Curb with My Head
in My Hands. Poem After Learning the Japanese
Word for the Simultaneous Feeling of Love
and Hatred. Poem for the Mountain at the End
of My Street. Poem in Response to Some of My
Recent Poems that Seem to Have Been Written
Inside an Aquarium. On Spending a Week in Silence
at a Monastery and Not Being Allowed Pen or Paper.
On Meditating and Feeling Like I Was a Blue Flame.
On Getting Up and Scribbling Something in the Bathroom.
On Stopping at the Train Tracks and Having a Deer
Break His Head Through My Passenger Window,
Stare at Me, and Then Run Back into the Wood.

by James Shea

“Haiku” originally appeared in Star in the Eye (Fence Books, 2008). ISBN: 193420014X
57 pages.

You must be in it to win it

Honey Kennedy has done it again, another fab giveaway LINK

Oo La La SUMMERLAND is such a super great shop!

I've been inlove with the If I Only Had A Heart Dress forever so that is definately my favourite favourite,

 and the Blame It On My Wild Heart Tote has also been on my wish list.

I'm also curious about Shayne Case's Sacred Space and other essences

and I think the Wilderness and Lichen It tea towel's are super sweet.

So what does your heart desire?

Things I found at the Market today

I set out to the market this morning with the desire to purchase a carnivorous plant; I have always wanted something akin to Morticia's Cleopatra seen here. 

Unfortunately, a quick hunt proved fruitless so I shall have to wait until next week. 

What I did find was a punnet of local blueberries, a nasturtium plant, a wonderful horror album filled with stills from 1919 through to 1971 of the best horror films and a copy of Colin Wilson's Poltergeist. So I walked home reading about Fairies, Elementals and Dead Monks, not a bad unplanned Sunday.

The end of everything

While browsing in Paradise Books, I came across a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, which I am sure, I had never seen. Andre de Dienes is the photographer and the photos where taken in either 1952 or 1953. The text stated that Monroe had called de Dienes late one night unable to sleep and in the grip of a dark depression. He picked her up and they took these shots in the dingy back alleys of the Hollywood hills. The cars headlights light the shots. Monroe told de Dienes to title the shots The end of everything. They seem like stills from a dark little fairytale.