....er, hello?

So it's been a while, my bloggers and bloggettes. Life seems to get more complicated, more surprising, and - who are we kidding - more interesting every year. Since my last entry, I have finished one more degree and started a third, moved to a new continent, discovered at least three new series of books and a whole subculture to obsess over, baked a good deal, and this year furnished my own darling hobbit hole almost entirely with things I got from Craigslist, happenstance and IKEA. (The story of how I bought an armchair on the side of the road, and then lugged it home on foot - with occasional rest pauses to sit in said armchair right in the middle of the footpath - will do for another day.)

So this isn't a real entry - marking to do, don'tyerknow - but merely a casual tentacular wave from the abyss to let you know that I'm still alive and wordier than ever. And with my cephalopodic salutation, I'll leave you with something else to read: Nifty Nat (not her nickname, but I'll work on it) has a lovely homey blog called Dear Little House, full of unique objects, humorous hapenings, sensible suggestions, and delightful design. (Excessive alliteration may not be included). Plus it has the singular advantage that its author updates more than once every three years or so.

The friendly squid is by Kate Beaton, whose delightful work you can find at www.harkavagrant.com

Blank slate

Today's watchword: "succinct."

I know, I know, not what you have come to expect from me! But nonetheless...

The reason for this otherwise unaccountable phenomenon is very simple: November is National Novel-Writing Month.
Aim: 50 000 words in 30 days.
Aesthetic guidelines: quantity rather than quality.
Function: to promote fluency of writing by aiming for something so wholly unrealistic and of such a dubious nature as to render any future writing tasks an achievable and enjoyable task.

Or at least that's what the website says. Now, if only I had some characters and a plot - even one given to such torrents of superfluous verbiage must have something to write about. On the other hand, if today's example is anything to go by, attempting to actually say things results in prose of a most exceeding dullness. Hmmm.

See you in December!

Spudge Surprise

Today you find me covered in flour and with sticky hands, as we attempt to create Dessert. More particularly, I have been trying my hand at a very tasty looking zuppa inglese as there are friends coming to dinner. Baking on a day like today (the Sydney prediction was for 37 degrees) is quite bad enough even when all goes well - for a time the kitchen was so stifling that I was tempted to just nip out for gelato instead - but the fact that I was cooking faster than dinner was a minor inconvenience compared with the contortions that the dessert itself caused. Unfortunately, you see, the first phase of this delectable concoction is a type of sponge cake. Simple enough, one might think. But the Page-Davises are simply not a sponge cake family: give us muffins or shortbread or chocolate pudding or anything else dense and moist and we can whip things up as well as the next amateur culinary clan. But there isn't a single relative I know of that has mastered the sugar-spun-airiness of a simple sponge. (As it happens, Jeannette from church confessed to me some time ago that she has the opposite problem, in that everything that comes out of her oven has a certain spongy consistency, from scones to mudcake. Neither flaw, it seems, is very convenient.)

In an effort to counter the Cookery Curse, I made good use of every special sponge trick and knack I could find - I warmed the bowl, used a metal spoon, sifted the dry ingredients several times - and it still turned out scarcely higher than my thumb (which is distressing in a cake that is meant to be split into three parts). It's a lovely light gold colour, and it smells nice, but that isn't really the point with a six-egg sponge. Its gloomy and disappointing texture reminds me of A.A. Milne's Roo, who happened to see Owl's bath-sponge and exclaimed "Oh, Owl! Owl, it isn't a sponge, it's a spudge! Do you know what a spudge is, Owl? It's when your sponge gets all---" and Kanga said, "Roo, dear!" very quickly, because that's not the way to talk to anybody who can spell TUESDAY.

So as I type this, a new cake is in the oven - a lovely foolproof Jessie Sand Cake where the only instruction is to plop the ingredients in a bowl and beat for four minutes - where you can really get to grips with mashing flour pockets and butter bubbles - and where any excess air merely bores lovely windy fairy tunnels through it. Hopefully this one may actually rise enough to be split in two, and after battling a bit more with custard and cream and strawberries and whatnot I can crown the whole thing with my unique spudge.

List #1: 5 composers whose works sound like fun

Fun to be at/ fun to participate in as an audience member, that is; lots of composers write works that are fun to play.

1. P.D.Q. Bach
The obvious choice, and Professor Schickele's greatest discovery. I always wanted to see Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice (an opera in "one unnatural act") and various other works live, because on the recordings there is plenty of laughter from the visual side of things alone. A friend of mine was once at a "serious" concert where each audience memeber was handed a paper bag containing a balloon and a pin as they entered the auditorium - P.D.Q's version of the 1812 Overture was on the programme and someone had to supply the canon sounds!

2. Gerard Hoffnung
Not a composer as such, but an impresario, presiding not over works but extravaganzas... Oh for the Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival! Have you ever seen a picture of Hoffnung's specially-made personal tuba? The thing is about as big as a single bed - how he ever managed to get enough air through it I shall never know. I would have loved to have seen the accordion so long that two people had to run across the stage to open and close the bellows, and the works for vacuum cleaners, not to mention a live performance of the Surprise Symphony (With Extra Surprises), the least of which is when an abnormally large bass drum is torn through to reveal a children's choir within.
(Come to think of it, 2008 would be the perfect time for a 50th anniversary rerun of the Hoffnung Festival - to whom would I speak about that?)

3. R. Murray Schafer
I first discovered Schafer, a Canadian composer because (why else?) his work The Princess of the Stars, which takes place by a wooded lake at dawn, includes instrumental imitation to induce live birds to sing. This is part of Patria, a cycle of music dramas that Schafer has been creating for over thirty years now - but personally, I think they sound much more appealing than the only other thing I know of that sort of size and scope, Stockhausen's Licht (which was over a quarter of a century in the making). There are lights, lamps, boats, beautiful colours - in various other parts, audience members become initiate priests of Ra (complete with robes and headdresses), create and later harvest (and consume) a garden, and take part in an 8-day forest ritual to which they return every year as part of the same clan. Cool.

4. Alexander Skryabin
I can never remember which of his works really get into the crazy theosophical and synaesthetic vein - I'll take a stab with the Poem of Ecstasy - but they do sound marvellous, if you can manage an authentic light organ and all the incense and things that are supposed to go with it.

5. Trevor Wishart
Another composer discovered in the process of Birdy explorations (British, this time), and another one whose music is almost more like performance art at times. Wishart's Tuba Mirum is scored for psychiatric patient, bureaucrats, props, and tape, while the rather jollier Beach Singularity and the dreamy Forest Singularity come under the heading of "site-specific events". (The latter ends in total darkness, leaving the audience to find their way out of the forest by themselves, to the best of their abilities.) There's even one scored for teddy bears.

If I could add some more, I'd probably also include the Futurists and anything done at Le Chat Noir or the Cabaret Voltaire (the homes of French randomness and dada, respectively) as well as those Russians - whose names I can't recall - who wrote industrial music for several factories at a time, the idea being that if you stood in the middle of the steppes separating them it would all come together somehow. What a great opportunity for a picnic!

Melting moments (AKA Ephemera part 2)

I caught my first whiff of summer this morning. I can't say exactly what it smelled like, only that it was early and just starting to heat up, and the breeze carried past me one brief moment of unutterable fragrance. It faltered a second later, replaced by the old heavy smells coating the air: petrol fumes, sickly-sweet jasmine. Two years ago I had a similar moment – a group of us were in the city, I forget why – we walked and walked and as we came up the hill and over, and saw the harbour glittering below, the salty wind came gusting up to meet us, calling out holidays!

Other small things sighted this morning:
A schoolgirl from one of the stricter private schools, still a week and a half to go of winter term and sweltering in a heavy serge tartan tunic, long sleeves, sensible stockings and a silly hat.
An old man, his arms full of calla lilies, crossing the street to get to his back gate. There were more crisp, curling flowers heaped on the back seat of his car. Wednesday doesn't seem probable for a wedding – a funeral, perhaps?
Our own little peace lilies are still hiding in their furled casings, like miniature green umbrellas.
The alternating rain and sunshine has meant that the ivy being trained onto heart-shaped trellises for my sister's wedding over a year away is finally starting to get thick and glossy.
The tree in front of our house is skeletal still, spindly and bare, the last one on the street to remain so.
Bare feet on the paving stones are only advisable before 11am, and again after 3, unless you like burnt soles.

Constructive Criticism

Huzzah!

I got the marked and annotated version of my thesis back the other day; the two tiny errors that worried the life out of me have been noted, of course, as have rather a lot more that somehow slipped through the Patented Davis Text Sieve. An insignificant typo and a few footnote problems were found, as well as one overwhelming grammatical Issue which not only deserves its own capital letter, but also a parliamentary representative and a postcode - the Vicious and Recurring Split Infinitive.

Would you believe that, having been brought up in a grammatically-minded household, and having spent virtually my whole life in formal education of one sort and another, I still had absolutely no idea what a split infinitive was? Except to know vaguely that they were Bad Things and To Be Avoided At All Cost. Hitherto I had laboured under the delusion that this manifestation of linguistic ineptitude involved some sort of double-bunger verb dislodged by miles and miles of sub-clauses, like you find in German. I didn't know that the infinitive needn't be split by much; a one word gap is quite sufficient. I didn't know that they were so easy to recognise. And I certainly has no idea that I used so many of them. However, 99-odd pages of pencil scrawls tend to illuminate things to even the most stubborn of repeat offenders.

For the other ignorami floating morosely about in the ether, a split infinitive occurs when something disrupts the normal verb form. I don't know if this is the normal practice, but my issue seems to be with adverbs. Example: the verb "to grasp", when applied "fully", must end up "to grasp fully" rather than "to fully grasp." Simple, yes? So simple that I am reminded of the time when I was unable to distinguish between pronouns and Proper Nouns. Although, in my defence, I will add that we were never really taught grammar at school, and that they do both start with "pro".

Aside from this new addition to my constructive arsenal, I hope to soon gain - pardon me - soon to gain an extra benefit from my new-found knowlege. In short,
Do you tend to inadvertently split your infinitives?
will shortly be joining
Are you a complusive proof-reader?
and
More facts than a Cliometrician
as part of the projected advertising campaign for - alas! - the as yet unfounded Sydney Feuilletonists' Society.

Learning Curves really do straighten you out.

Pictured is the saving grace of puntuation - but who can save us from the appalling grammatical monstrosities visited upon us the the form of stupid little phrases like "my bad"?!!! Bad is an adjective, not a noun, people!

Ephemera

Here are three beautiful things that I have experienced recently:

1. Flowers
There are some lovely flowers out at the moment. It is, of course, freesia season, which not only looks and smells simply delicious but also throws me into a perfumed sea of reminiscence. Band champs, for those of you who were there. On my way to and from work I go past the most amazing azalea bush; so full of almost translucent white star-flowers that it looks like snow. And this is along the highway, mind.
But my favourite is a story-book image: at my grandmother's, I used to read a picture book called Snow White and Rose Red, in which SW and RR lived in a little cottage with their impoverished mother, and they had one red and one white rose bush growing over the door. (They later recreated this horticultural feat on a grander scale when SW married the prince and RR the prince's brother and they went to live in a much-turreted icing-sugar palace). There is a block of flats, also situated on my path to Profitable Employment, which replicates this with camellias on either side of its front gate: those fat, white pearly flowers like gardenias, and the deepest, brightest red camellias I have ever seen. Red like rubies, like blood.

2. Squeaky Shoes
I suffer vastly from squeaky shoes; there are few things worse that walking through a silent library with your feet kicking up a rumpus. So needless to say these delightfully noisy specimens of footwear do not belong to me; they have been seen - and heard! - twice on the feet of a very sweet little fifteen-month-old girl who goes perambulating around the local shops with her grandfather. The first time I experienced this marvel, I initially thought (bird-brain that I have become) that there was a nest of squawking baby birdlets clamouring for food. However, the closer I got, the more I found that the sound rather resembled some psychotic rubber squeaky toy. However, it was eventually traced back to the just-a-hair's-breadth-from-tripping trotting of the aforementioned childer. Put this way, it doesn't sound particularly attractive, but mix in her little red coat and innocent joy in her musical feet, and the benevolent smile of her grandfather, and it was a magic moment - happily repeated the next day!

3. Jessy the Cat
Some of you haven't had the pleasure yet - this is Jess, my cat. And while I haven't only been enjoying her company recently, she is nonetheless a Thing Of Beauty and a Joy Forever, always ready for a scratch under the chin and a nice cosy doze on anything soft and fluffy (preferably my dressing gown). Plus she has a wide range of very distinctive noises which make conversation with her remarkably easy. Examples:
"Feed me!"
"Look! A lizard!"
"Chasing a camellia bud is almost as satisfying as biting your fingers."
"Help! Scary birds!"
"Argh! Scary local cat!"
"I spent all night in that laundry and you can't even pick me up and give me a cuddle?!!!"