something this foggy day

US Book Depository

2009-12-16T09:36:00.003+11:00

Is it just me who didn’t know that the Book Depository also has a US store (www.bookdepository.com), with the same deal of free international postage? You can compare prices between the UK (www.bookdepository.co.uk) and the US sites, in Australian dollars, and sometimes one is cheaper than the other!

You shall love your crooked neighbour

2009-12-15T10:21:00.006+11:00

I read this yesterday over at Abraham Piper's Twenty Two Words, and was lured in to read the rest. I haven't read a whole lot of Auden, and poems like this one rather make me think I should give up, it's so beautiful. I might turn this verse into a magnet:

… O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart …

-W. H. Auden

Apple heads

2009-12-14T13:54:00.005+11:00

I do think this is rather cool!

(And if you know all about Macs, but don't know your art - ie you have a serious geek problem :) - here is the original, The Son of Man, by Rene Magritte.)

Poetry - The Hole

2009-12-13T15:30:00.008+11:00

I did the second day of my poetry course yesterday and it was just fabulous. I learnt things which were quite a revelation to me, which I will refrain from detailing here because the audience for a poetry lesson is a limited one, but they might appear in dribs and drabs.

Anyway, I thought I’d be brave and give you an original poem, though you can expect better things from this point on, with my increased awareness. I wrote this poem some time ago, and have hesitated to post it, mainly because I thought there are those out there who might question my theological soundness or my personal faith (which I don't think is necessary - though I guess the writer never would - mainly because I think poetry can express the range of human experience, in much the same way as the Psalms do, and still be "faithful", which is a whole other topic that has been discussed elsewhere - and I digress in my own defence). But at the other end I have made some very good friends through this poem, because they have read it and thought “ah, yes” and a conversation began. And that to me is one of the possibilities of poetry.

I took this one along to workshop because I had questions about it and I asked Judith if it worked OK given it’s total lack of structure, and she nodded and said it did because it had a metaphorical structure, so that was interesting. It is not about a romantic scenario by the way - I actually took some of the particulars out of this one, so readers could fill in their own. So without further ado:

The Hole

Today I met someone
Met someone and
found a hole
inside myself

The God-shaped hole
is full
Still there are other holes,
less vital
not less empty
I live (and praise)
yet suffer their void

Till came a sudden
flood of solace
Hole filling
with rising ache
Unknown gap
now craving

***

The filler of the hole
went away
Left me
Sounding the edge
Hole gaping

Since then
I have a map
I know the place
the length and depth
of the hole

Now I know
what’s not there

©ALP 2009

His Tremendousness

2009-12-12T08:00:00.002+11:00

One of the girls I work with likes to read the Obituaries in the paper, so she drew my attention to this curious story. Here's an excerpt:

His Tremendousness Giorgio Carbone was the elected prince of Seborga, a self-proclaimed principality on the Italian Riviera.

He claimed the sovereignty of Seborga (population 364) from the Italian government in 1963 and took the title His Tremendousness. A former flower grower, he produced documents from the Vatican archives to prove that the village was never the property of the House of Savoy and therefore not part of the Kingdom of Italy after 1861. He insisted that Seborga had been a sovereign state since 954, a principality from 1079, and minted its own coins after 1666.

And the best part (I love this motto!):

Seborga has its own flag, a white cross on a blue background, a patron saint, St Bernard, and a Latin motto: Sub Umbra Sede (Sit in the shade).

Freezing roasts?

2009-12-11T09:46:00.003+11:00

I was having some friends over for dinner tonight and thought I’d be all Christmassy, since I never do the real Christmas lunch myself because I always have to travel to family, and have roast turkey. Unfortunately it has now been postponed due to illness, so I now have this lump of turkey that has already been frozen (and defrosted). Does anyone know what happens if you roast meat, then freeze it (whole) then thaw it again? I’m guessing the result would be something rather terrible ...

One of music's finest things

2009-12-11T09:05:00.006+11:00

I know I have posted this on facebook before (and had a conversation regarding the strange blurb about "privatising city hall plaza" on the end) but it would appear I haven't posted it here, and it would hardly be the blog of Ali without it!

Gordon Cheng put it up the other day - he has good taste ;) - on one of those rare occasions when for some reason I get on facebook in the morning before leaving for work (very bad idea!) and it made me late. So, here is what I think is one of the very finest moments in music. It is Yo-Yo Ma playing the Prelude to Bach's Cello Suite No 1. For your Friday enjoyment:

Megadoilies

2009-12-10T14:20:00.004+11:00

A few people have been made redundant here today, and while I think I am safe, I am keeping this in mind for my cottage industries back up!

You say Babushka, I say Matryoshka

2009-12-10T10:06:00.006+11:00

So I thought I might be totally out of the loop with the latest craft trends and living in ignorance and that there might be some fine but significant difference, unknown to the uneducated and undiscerning, between Matryoshka dolls and Babushka dolls - but no, they are exactly the same thing! I snuck away to do that research on the side that you do when you're feeling a little unsure of your own position, and don't want to let on in public that you're confused or unfamiliar with "Continental" things, but Wikipedia has now settled it for me, and I can be confident once more of where I stand and that I have some idea what everyone's talking about.

DIY bird ornaments

2009-12-10T09:00:00.000+11:00

I love these! Maybe not in hot pink, because I am a Christmas traditionalist, but I am a fan of all things about birds. The instructions and pattern are here. H/T Apartment Therapy.

The rise of conversation starters

2009-12-09T11:47:00.007+11:00

Has anyone else noticed, in their Christmas shopping rounds, that everywhere this year you can buy little boxes of cards called "Conversation Starters"? They're in stationery shops, they're in book shops, they're in clothes shops (I am sure I actually saw them on a table near the front of the store in Sussan, or was it Portmans, and maybe even in Sportsgirl) and just about everywhere (here's an example). And there are different versions of them all as well, as in dinner party conversation starters, family conversation starters etc. Out of curiousity I have flicked through a few, and the questions are neither extraordinary or profound, but mostly the usual "ice-breaker" type of questions, though occasionally I've come across one like "tell us about a time when you felt lonely", which could get all very deep and serious.

It's probably just that they are the kind of thing on which there would be a huge mark up on production cost, and people would like them if they're looking for those "gifts with meaning", but you can't help wondering, if they are walking out of the shops, whether people are genuinely wanting/needing help with conversation (and have to get out and be more sociable at Christmas time than usual!) or are pleased to have a way to start talking and get to know people that doesn't involve having to be totally direct (I'm tempted to make up a little box of all those weird things I've ever wanted to ask someone, then say 'hey let's play a game!', and blame it on the card).

Anyway, just curious, that's all. I'm hoping we won't need to pull out a box of "family conversation starters" over Christmas lunch this year, but you never know (and I guess there'd be plenty of worse things to do).

Poetry Day - 150,000 crocuses

2009-12-07T07:30:00.001+11:00

I've told you that Judith Beveridge is teaching the poetry course I am doing, so here is one of her poems, from here. I chose this one mostly because it is shorter, and I know blog readers, but you might like to read some of her others also.

The Saffron Picker

It is necessary to pick 150,000 crocuses
in order to produce one kilogram of saffron.

Soon, she’ll crouch again above each crocus,
feel how the scales set by fate, by misfortune
are an awesome tonnage: a weight opposing

time. Soon, the sun will transpose its shadows
onto the faces of her children. She knows
equations: how many stigmas balance each

day with the next; how many days divvy up
the one meal; how many rounds of a lustrous
table the sun must go before enough yellow

makes a spoonful heavy. She spreads a cloth,
calls to the competing zeroes of her children’s
mouths. An apronful becomes her standard —

and those purple fields of unfair equivalence.
Always that weight in her apron: the indivisible
hunger that never has the levity of flowers.

Judith Beveridge

Photo from: http://www.profumo.it/images/foto_grandi/saffron.jpg

Australians are tragics

2009-12-07T07:29:00.000+11:00

Unfortunately, this is true.

The why of studying poetry

2009-12-05T21:10:00.004+11:00

So I had day one of the poetry course today. Afterwards I went to the Finders Keepers design markets, and now I want to give up my day job and just be all metaphorical and creative. The course was very good. Judith Beveridge, who is head of the school of poetry at Sydney University, taught us well about such things as imagery and lineation. Then the workshopping was all very encouraging but very instructive as well.

She also reiterated that poetry is a hard art form, that it’s difficult and has a high failure rate. Scary – but I think a lot of people believe that poetry should happen by magic, and doesn’t require earnest investment from those with the gift, which is simply not true. Granted there are those who will be poets and those who will never be, irrespective of training and effort, as there are those who will excel in pole vault and those who never will. But there is a skill and technique to poetry worth learning, which is precisely why I went to the course.

I came home to find this somewhat surprising quote from Christian Bok on the Poetry.org facebook page. You can read it in full here on facebook (the previous paragraph is amusing):

The more delicate components of the work pay attention to craft. I’m probably very technically oriented and it seems to me that among the poets that I know, many are very lazy and very dumb. I always joke with my students that poetry couldn’t possibly be as hard as they think it is, because if it were as hard as they thought it was, poets wouldn’t do it. Really, they’re the laziest, stupidest people I know? They became poets in part because they were demoted to that job, right? You should never tell your students to write what they know because, of course, they know nothing: they’re poets! If they knew something, they’d be in that discipline actually doing it right?: they’d be in history or physics or math or business or whatever it is where they could excel. I find this very distressing that the challenge of being a poet is in effect to showcase something wondrous or uncanny, if not sublime, about the use of language itself - that we tend to think that because we’re conditioned to use language every day as part of a social contract, we should all be incipient poets, when in fact people have actually dedicated years or decades of their lives to this kind of practice in order to become adept at it. And I think that craft and technique are part of that. If poetry weren’t informed by models of craft then nobody would need take a creative writing course. I joke with my students again that if it was simply a matter of saying, “You known you’ve written a good poem just because; you’ll know it’s a good poem when it happens.” To me, that’s tantamount to telling your students that “You should just use the force, Luke” in order to write a poem. I don’t think it’s very helpful. But to be able to say “Here’s a series of rules of thumb that always work under all circumstances and if you adopt them slavishly, blindly, you can always be assured of writing something, producing something of merit.” It’s important that students are at least reassured that there are some technical aptitudes that they can adopt.

Anyhoo. Practice, practice, practice. But I came home and for some reason decided to make the biggest mess ever rearranging my room. I like it though. It's more open, and now when I sit at the desk I can look out the window at those plants I lugged here from my moving friends and beyond.

Poetic fashion

2009-12-04T21:49:00.004+11:00

I am going to the first installment of my poetry course tomorrow. I just found myself wondering what to wear so I look all poetic, which probably just disqualified me for the art. Experience tells me that the poets, or all the creative writing sorts, are the very least “artistically” dressed. They’re too sort of lost in a world of symbolism and metaphor to notice, or maybe too absorbed in expressing what they want to say in other (non-visual) ways to care about what their clothes are saying (who was it who said “if I don’t want to listen to you, why would I want to listen to your sweater”, or something like it? - could I market that on a t-shirt?). They’ll probably all be sitting there in the most comfortable outfit they have, because who wants to be distracted by stupid (ie non-functional, irritating or superfluous) articles of clothing, with their sneakers on.

Dependent relationships

2009-12-04T13:57:00.013+11:00

Overcomers Outreach this week was another great night. I just love being there and listening to people share their stories. Because we are an umbrella 12-step program we don't delve into the details of specific addictions/self-destructive behaviours in the actual meeting, so some of them I want to find out more about later.

One of the addictions I am curious about right now is "co-dependent relationships". I listen and I think, 'isn't just about everybody in co-dependent relationships?' - OK, so I know there are degrees of such things, but I wonder whether most people would have times in their lives when, for one reason or another, they veer into that scenario, or some kind of "attachment" problem etc. So I am curious about what exactly this addiction is, or where these things cross the line into something that takes you off to a 12-step group. I came home with yet another book to read, so I will see how that goes. (If anyone has anything they'd like to say or recommend about such things, go ahead.)

On a similar, but perhaps completely different note, I was interested in the way Tim Keller, in the talk on singleness I mentioned below, talked about the 'interdependence gift' that most women have. I want to listen again and think more about that, because that seems to me to be of importance when you're saying anything to single women, in particular (eg encouraging them to go out and take initiative in ministry or some such thing).

(Anyway, here is yet another half-baked blog post for you! I'm getting good at these - so much easier than having to actually finish or resolve anything or reach any kind of conclusion. You can blog things before you've actually got anything to say, and then not come back when you've done the hard work.)

Spam

2009-12-04T12:42:00.001+11:00

I just turned word verification back on for comments. I turned it off and the spam started coming (3 so far today), so I am going to see if this stops it.

Singleness from Tim Keller

2009-12-02T17:05:00.008+11:00

It's been a while since I mentioned singleness here, so here it is. I have been meaning to visit Redeemer's sermon website since the free sermons went up, and yesterday Ben mentioned some of Tim Keller's sermons, and since work has eased up a little I decided to have a shot at listening to one (you just plain can't listen to a sermon and read something else at the same time, but when I don't have to actually read something, I can catch a lot of it). So I listened to the one on Adoration nearly three times yesterday. And I'm going to listen again - ie, it's good!

Then I noticed that he had sermons on singleness. It's a little myopic perhaps, but I thought I'd give those a go. It's more of a forum, followed by a Q & A than a sermon, and I am still digesting all of it after one listen, but he says some really interesting things about the "relative goodness" of singleness, self-image, mast*urbation even (red face over that word - but what he says here would also apply to por*nography too perhaps I think, and his wife gets in on this one), idolatry (but it's not the run-of-the-mill idolatry stuff), the re-organisation of the "four loves", the way women are like studios and men like one-bedroom apartments in friendships (that was helpful!), whether or not it's "unspiritual" to change situations to meet people, marriage (I don't think you'd need to be single to get a whole lot of stuff out of it), and a response to the question of "what do single people do to grow emotionally then since everyone goes on about the sanctification/maturity that comes in marriage and family" etc. I've sat here with the tissues out and I am definitely going to listen to these again too.

Here's the link that will take you to both. And you can read an article on Tim Keller in the New York Magazine too.

The fight for joy, and other books

2009-12-01T07:00:00.001+11:00

I’ve been a bit remiss here, because some things I take as givens, but in case you haven’t noticed through reading here, Jean has been blogging her way through When I Don’t Desire God – How to Fight For Joy by John Piper over at the EQUIP book club. She’s put in a magnificent effort and, as she says in this compilation post, many of the posts stand alone, without requiring that you have read the book. It’s challenging and encouraging stuff! I confess to having only read the separately-published chapter of this book When the Darkness Will Not Lift (by John Piper), but I am going to work through the book, and revisit Jean’s posts soon.

One of the great things you can do over at the EQUIP book club is go through the list of books on the left of the site, click the book cover, and bring up all the posts for that particular book, so if you missed it at the time all is not lost. And if you wanted to start your own live book club on one of the books you can use the relevant notes for prompts. Coming up Rachael is going to take us through Beyond Greed, by Brian Rosner, just in time for Christmas! And there is my little advertisement of sorts, though the benefit is all yours :).

C.S. Lewis's through time

2009-11-30T20:40:00.006+11:00

So I told you I was fiddling about doing some "research" on CS Lewis, just because I want to (and there is a formidable amount of material that he wrote himself and others wrote about him to fiddle in).

On Sunday it was the anniversary of his birthday, so articles on him surfaced here and there for that. Here is one such article that I read and liked (which also makes a case for errors of portrayal in the movie Shadowlands, which I like as a movie anyway), if you want a brief history of his life and influence.

At the moment I am in The Problem of Pain and also reading about the influence of his service in the war (which like most he tried to suppress) on his poetry in Spirits in Bondage. Fascinating.

:(

2009-11-30T10:11:00.004+11:00

A friend's brother died early this morning. He was nineteen years old. After a long and courageous battle leukemia took him home. As my friend quoted in the message I had this morning:

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Revelation 21:3-4

Looking forward to that.

Wisps of fog - #2

2009-11-30T07:00:00.006+11:00

So Ben over here tells me not to let not having anything worthwhile to say stop me filling up my small patch of cyberspace, so here goes (and I will even make this some kind of list):

1) I think my last crochet IQ was a little too easy, so here is another one for you. What do you think I am making? (You could be forgiven for thinking I have some kind of fetish for crocheted pentagons, which is not really the case, but this also happened to be made with pentagons - the options are endless really. Note: one of these is a hexagon. In this photo I am "blocking" them. These were particularly wonky, I think because I used two different kinds of wool.)

2) I have enrolled myself in a short poetry course! I have been thinking more about doing further study lately, and this is a taste - it's run by the head of the poetry school at Sydney University - and something stimulating to do. (And I found a course that is not entirely composed of workshopping!)

3) Shopping for pre-teen girls is hard. The "stuff" out there at the moment for teenagers is just plain weird. For example, Emily the Strange. And she comes with a very bad attitude. My nieces love cats, but I don't love cats with skeletons visible and stitches on their face. They also love stationary, but they won't be getting Emily's "stamps of disapproval" featuring "shut up" and "get lost". What happened to nice things?

4) Shucks! This post, and it's winning entry, makes me want to run a competition. :) I just have to work out what it is I would be offering ...

(Nice tactic really. Have a prize and make men prove why they should get it. Once upon a time, or maybe only in the fairy tales, that is perhaps how these things worked.)

Forgetting, or not remembering

2009-11-27T13:16:00.003+11:00

On Tuesday I came to work without my phone, on Wednesday I left my iPod at home, and this morning I went into the IGA on the way to work to get something for lunch, got to the check-out and realised I didn't have my wallet. I feel like I am on the cusp of becoming a list person!

Poetry Day - The Lanyard

2009-11-27T07:00:00.001+11:00

Today I have another poem by Billy Collins, called The Lanyard. And if you enjoyed last week's youtube of him reading Litany (I fail to see how anybody wouldn't! - though pardon the element of Schadenfreude involved) you might like to listen to him read this one also.

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Wisps of fog

2009-11-26T14:11:00.010+11:00

For want of anything better, some spacfiller:

1) It's now officially babysitting season - that time of year when parents have to go off to a plethora of Christmas parties and events. What this means is that I catch up on some of the kids movies I have been missing. Lately I have seen Hollywood Chihauhau (in the beginning this was excruciating, but it started to improve when the Alsatian who used to police dog came on the scene), Snow White (I think we all have a handle on that story) and Robots. There are definite recurring themes in kids movies. There's the don't-judge-people-by-their-social-status theme featured in just about every high school movie and there in Hollywood Chihauhau as the little princess learns to see the good in the back-yard dog types (running a nice parallel as the prissy human niece falls for the landscaper), then there's the believe-in-yourself-and-you-can-be-anything theme in Robots, oh and there's always the reasonably obvious goodies and baddies ...

2) I am on standby this week incase things come unstuck for my sweet cousin who is on schoolies week in Sydney. Schoolies week seems like some kind of necessary misdemeanor to me, but perhaps I am getting old. I often look back on my teenage and youth group days and am a little awe-struck, with hindsight, at the amount of effort our youth group leaders must have put in to pull off such fun. And you know what I did for schoolies? One of our youth-group leaders and his wife took me and my friend away for a few days. Is that not amazing?

3) There are strange people in this world, and amongst the strangest are barristers. Yesterday I got the oddest email from a senior member of the Bar. And it wasn't odd because it was full of high-faluting legal terminology that I just didn't understand. Oh no. What was odd about it was that it was in large pink font, on a pale yellow wallpaper, complete with music and a continually blossoming and sparkling pink rose. It began with the words "your wish is our command", with the "our" referring to this (male) barrister and his cat. There was even an animated cat waving it's tail. Between the blossoming rose and the tail-waving cat was further oddness. I think I have met a crazy cat gentleman.