just practicing...

In the aim of mental preparation for fieldwork, I have had to fight the urge all day to dig a hole in the ground. I am determined that I will pull off cooking in a ground oven. Like all cultures all over the world, where I am headed men only cook on very very special occasions, i.e., where there is a high likelihood of spare praise to be handed about. On workaday occasions you guessed it .... All the scraping and peeling of root vegetables... it takes hours and is incredibly boring, and the results are a tasteless hot white jelly... mmmm. So if I can figure out how to cook things in the ground I could relieve one of my 'village mothers' some of the scraping cooking tasks... apparently bread tastes quite nice straight out of the ground oven so at least I could pull off that Aussie favourite, damper.
Fish would be pretty easy, but they are not a fishing type culture despite the fact the village fronts a beach with the most idyllic view of two other equally edenic (from a distance) islands and if you look south you can see a perfect cone volcano rising out of the sea.... starting to sound very King Kong.. Oh well I'll pack a rod and reel... more amusing whiteman habits for them to laugh at.

The time my middle class white coloniser guilt got the better of me and I got one of unties to teach me how to wash my clothes with soap, a rock, and a board.... On my first solo effort at the river I swear that in 15 minutes the word had got out to the three villages in the neighbourhood and at a hundred people had gathered on the far bank.. it was raised a few metres above to get a bird's eye view of the craziest shit they had ever seen. They weren't so bad it was the 50 or so kids and their dads that wanted to be so close to me they could hear me mutter fuck off fuck off fuck off with every downstroke of the brush. What really crushed me though, the cheek of the menfolk.... now there's an ethnographer's no-no... lucky I am not one of those... to offer fucking advice. I am afraid to say I lost it. And I just didn't really rinse out my t-shirts properly... much sucking of teeth. And in fact in the fury of it all I managed to not only lose it, but also some of my wash. Luckily my good friend J happened to be paddling over to the co-of and he snared my lucky orange shirt on his oar.

So I am steeling myself for some close supervision at the fire pit, but it may be worth it. Otherwise here is a taste of what I will be eating:

Recipe for baked Alaska
6 unripe incredibly hard green bananas
3 taro
milk of one coconut (not cream, milk)
Island cabbage
Banana leaves or similar
First light a fire in the ground oven with rocks both above and below. Set aside

Get a shell, a small clam or scallop shell will do and scrape all the root vegetable, put aside an hour for this, and don't invite anyone over as this will only feed maybe 3 people.
Sing some songs and talk to your neighbours to pass the time.
Once you have a mass of fibrous gluey goop, open the coconut and mix the coconut milk with the goop to make it that little bit goopier. Lay out the cabbage leaves if it was a pizza base. Smear the goop onto the leaves. You need your greens so add some more cabbage to the top for garnish. Wrap the entire thing in the banana leaves, and take to the firepit.
Take off the top layer of rocks and lay the leafy little package down on the bottom layer of stones. Then replace top layer of stones and leave for about an hour and a half.
When ready, remove top layer of stones and cut open the banana leaves. The goop has now hardened into a sort of hot gelatinous mess. Cut into slices and tuck in. Mmm delicious.

I would practice here, but coconuts are quite hard to come by.... and my landlady is mad for chemical sprays on the lawn so it might cause irreparable damage to the chromosomes. If said ingredients are in your pantry now.... what are you waiting for... get a shovel and start digging.

Oh boy host again

I've grown a flatmate. I didn't want to... I wasn't trying to but I have. I am putting it down to intercultural communication difficulties. The guy who is kind of subleasing my house when I am on fieldwork turned up the other day and said he was dropping off some stuff... Okay I thought he has to be some place for the next few days so he is just preparing in advance.... something I admire in others but off course cannot pull off myself. Then later that night, just when I singing along to embarrasing country music records... I listen to country records until the morning.... name that quote... and I had left the front door open and he was just stanfing there behind me with yet more stuff, and I thought well he has a lot of stuff. And then we talk for a while, quite a while... and he smokes my cigarettes... which many non-smokers seem to think is a sociable thing to do with a smoker. It is not. It is taking up a valuable resource, especially that late at night when the only way to get more is to walk miles to the nearest service station. And I think well he is being sociable... a social smoker... and then he says well I think I'll go to bed now... And then I think God when was the last time I changed the sheets in the spare room and all that host stuff that I shoulda attended to long time before....

Hmm he's gone again today, but he'll be back...

Before he went to bed he did this odd little show and tell with a gift that he was given some time ago. It was a clock that stood on some base, oh a and a thermometer too, and probably a barometer ... do non-meteorologists really know what it means when the atmospheric pressure changes?... Anyway when you turn the base the clock tells the time from many many international cities... which he demonstrated ... New York... Moscow.... Sydney.... Bangkok. I have a week of this.

The Peel sessions are over

One of the great arbiters of pop music has gone. John Peel, dj has died. When I was a lad and a bit of a shoegazer and desperately wanted to make important i.e. indie music my dream was to be in a band that was invited to make a Peel Session. Never even got close, though my old friend Madeline and I did perform our two greatest hits, there's something gothic about you and mr hit and misses at her 21st, me on guitar and her on ktichen percussion, starting off I might add the trend for female drummers that rocked the indie world and has resurfaced with the white stripes. John you would have been proud.

two forms of torture

So I spent my weekend searching in vain for that file. I did not find it. Instead I read a book about serious music in the twentieth century. Minimalism is returning to a neo-romanticism that was at its root all along... Apparently... Did you know? The book was supposed to be accompanied by four cds which I thought would be rather charming like those books we used to get with the record when we were kids, and Tinkerbell would tinkle to tell you the turn page. My favourite was the gingerbread man, but now of course I think of his wife waiting at home on the cookie tray like a homebaked Penelope.. I digress. The cds were missing and so it was another form of torture as I was particular desperate to hear the works of Crawford a mid twentieth century composer who was an uncompromising something now serialist maybe? oh I forget. She sounds like a pretty tough coustomer. She won some big scholarship to go study in Europe and she took the money and went to Vienna or somewhere and then refused to sign up for classes because she said now that she finally had the time and money to devote herself to composition so why the hell would she waste it going to yet mroe classes... and I also wanted to hear from a second half of the century Polish guy L something with another l with a bar through like Lodz, which I believe is pronounced something like Wodge. His scores were beautiful to look at and would like nice on a wall and he had as far as I could tell some interesting ideas about time. Then I go to looking at the listings for the missing Cd and the Pole got a look-in but Crawford did not despite the fact the book bemoaned how overlooked she was...

Got to work this morning and found the goddamn file was where I had put it all along anyways.
So there are two forms of torture for you.

lost and not lost and found

Well the file was not found, but am holding onto a skerrick of hope that its somewhere at work. But I did find an olde version of it which means I only have to rewrite 11 pages of the bugger. But at the same time I found on another file a whole bunch of stuff that I can use for the same document...

Long weekend here, and I have to say last night for whatever reason was a long dark night of the soul. Couldn't even be arsed watching the rugby final, and my local team, as mercurial as they are, couldn't get it together to win. Perhaps the Schmerz is region-wide....

lost files of atlantis

Wouldn't you know it, I'm procrastinating again. I am about to begin search for crucial file that appears to have disappeared. It knows that I have to hand it in to research team leader in oh about three weeks and if lost permanently it will mean rewriting in record time, while I have several kizillion things to organise for fieldtrip including signing up for Larium which will of course drive much closer to paranoia and psychosis than anyone really needs to be. Put that on top of possble culture shock, and the no-way-out weather patterns of the island, and I fear runs amok at circumcision festival type headlines.

I am also suffering a mild case of rejection. I thought I hadn't put much store in it in the first place, but apparently... My first reaction was to disregard the kindly tone of rejecter and really launch into him about ... and then I stopped and realised that these were all assumptions of mine anyway, and then I really thought to hell with it... What's so wrong with bitter... Ah well these wounds shall heal, shallow as they are and there is the work to be done... the consolation of philology ... meh...

On a lighter note, E and M have asked me to be the Godfather of the imminent arrival, I was so taken aback that I didn't negotiate the conditions of my acceptance, i.e., middle naming rights. But thrilled, nevertheless. This brings the godfamily to two. Unfortunately neither will be living that close to me for a while. Speaking of babies Jasper will be returning from Sweden with his insanely beautiful mother and my old flatmate, Damage who will raising him up for a life of entitlement... He's a nice guy though, but a disturbing flatmate. Once in a bar, he told me how he often used to have wetdreams about me, hmmm, and then having warmed up with that one, preceded to confessing to masturbating every morning in the shower. Now I take privacy issues seriously.. as the post below illustrates ... but perhaps the other flatmates should have been warned... He also used to just get up in the middle of the night and knock on the female flatmates' doors on the offchance that they might be needing some sex, which sounds very unselfish of him, but he was actually partnered with one of them anyway.... Thinking about it, it is now obvious that it was his desire to maintain separate rooms not R's all along. Subsequently the women used to wake up in the middle of the night and go in sleep in twos for mutual defence. Sounds like a French farce with a corridor of ten bedroom doors... If they had read Moliere (forgive missing diacritic) or even Shakespeare I guess Rachel and the other four could have performed a bedtrick on Damage unfortunately all lawyers with narrow reading habits New Weekly, People, Court circulars, that sort of thing ... I make him sound like some hideous mastabatory wanna be predator, but he is actually an acutely charming boy, and his international lawyering on behalf of the whales offsets these foibles...

Oh well the search should begin, I am predicting tears.... Or perhaps going for a swim.

If i hear that fieldwork sounds like paradise one more time

to my colleagues who may have crashed this blog... shut the fuck up it is not a five month holiday in the sun. YOU would not cope without electricity, hot water, privacy, YOU would not survive the disgusting food, the heat, the rats that treat you like you live in their house, the spiders, the.... the.... the......

some Jewish guy + some catholic school girl in trouble = me

Because I have so much to do to get ready for fieldwork I find it is even more important to think up procrastination devices. To that end I have written a letter to my father well to my are-you-my-father in Australia. I tried to contact my birth mother some time ago, and she was so evasive it was ridiculous. When I asked if I was speaking to JF she said no, even though I had just heard the operator say 'This is a call for JF'... then she said I don't know anyone of that name and nor does anyone in my family... Hmm I know the names of every single person that every single member of my family has ever met... You can test me...
So I gave up for a while and then I tracked down this guy who she married less than 18 months after I was born. I knew through family discussion that my birth father was Jewish ... And my bm is catholic... Probably contributed to something to the issue of adoption, I'm guessing there... And this guy she married has pretty Jewish name as does his father according to their marriage certificate. Now the Jewish population in these parts is incredibly small, so if he is not my actual dad she must have gone out of her way o find another nice Jewish boy and get him to fall in love with her... So I think the story goes something like this. They get together. She gets pregnant. Hey or she freak out. One other or both split and I am born far away form prying eyes in hideous small town. Then when things calm down a realization hits them that mutually they are the one... Hear violins, and they decide to get married. One other or both keep guilty secret that their firstborn could have been part of this family all along but they freaked out to soon...

So I wrote a letter to this guy who I think is my father. They appear to have been divorced for some time now and live in different parts of Australia. I've written before but never posted it. The dilemma it seems to me is that she made it pretty clear that she wants nothing to do with me. And I respect that whatever, her reasons are. I assume that when you put up a child for adoption back then, you didn't expect your details to ever be disclosed. But am I interfering with her rights by contacting someone else about the whole matter. Her right to privacy might be more important than any of my rights. After all I wasn't asked to sign anything. If this guy doesn't know, I will reveal something that somebody clearly didn't want to know. Maybe he has a right if he is the father. Bit if he is not, how can this be anything but an invasion of her privacy.

Hmm. I am going away in three weeks and I should do something before then....

my epitaph

I am not that morbid... okay maybe I am... but I often think about the words on my tombstone... Currently I am trying to decide between What are you looking at? and I died wondering.

bow down before me, I am admin that I am

Aargh! I am writing a budget for my fieldtrip. Number crunching. What I really hate about this is the fact that my institution has to approve my budget even though the money is coming from an outside funding source. What the... the administrators of this university think they rule... and I am sure they dream of writing graffiti Admin rulz. A student I am supervising was filling in her ethics form today, and she had got through all the nasty questions about are you going to keep tissue samples.... excuse me? Can't you get a different form for the humanities? And explain why you want the exact number of participants... The last question....

q.171 (okay I am exaggerating slightly) Why do you want to do this research?

I thought this was about ethics. She was thinking about writing either 'I pulled it out of a hat' or 'because I won't have to keep tissue samples for this research', but after some consultation we decided 'Jesus made me' might be a good answer.

school's out sort of

Classes have finished for the semester. Last classes so bittersweet.. hmmm well actually this time they were. FM is always that way as we say goodbye and thank you to the consultant. This year particularly so since the students weren't so crash hot at the technical stuff but they really warmed to T, the consultant, and they performed the dance she had taught us pretty well, especially the Japanese student. My other class made up of most of the same as FM got the last class party buzz and bought me presents and food.... I have just read their final assignments and now feel somewhat stink that I have to give them low marks. They could have their presents back except for the fair trade coffee I'm afraid I have already absorbed that.

So just exams and marking to go and then I'm out of here. Back into the field. My new American colleague is not quite as fully amped as us as apparently in American schools you leave not to be seen again until the following academic year. Sounds good, no wonder tenure is hard to get. We still have to front 4 days out of 5 over the summer... but not me. Six months of sunshine, hurricanes and horrible food. Fieldwork, here I come... Actually should start the mental if not actual preparation for it.

On a sadder note, my non-colleague friendship (in this town) tally dropped back to zero. Performed at S and J's going away cabaret. God me on stage... my slide show was pretty cool and they seemed to laugh at my version okay adaptations of the Dan Rhodes' monologues... J's little piece based on a story Caroline's daughter the excellent Dusty told her was amazing. It was cool to see her on screen too...

So back to work for a while, I might force myself to watch the ever smug Nicole Kidman on the telly....

Shh don't tell anyone I mark and watch movies at the same time....

Superman versus Derrida

Watched the news last night, interested to hear how the network summarised Derrida and his contribution and/or the backlash. But nada, zip nothing... but ten minutes on Christopher Reeves. I guess Superman is just so much more real.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second,
it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident. Arthur
Schopenhauer

The Lady Mayor of Damascus

Well, spent the weekend incubating this cold and marking essays. Took occasional breaks to go out in search of coffee.. Actually ended up at the one good restaurant in this town, so of course it was empty, and was asked if I would like to sit near the two only occupied tables because I might like to watch the kids playing... Now I like children, I even like children I am not related too, perhaps a little more, but my first reaction was as if I had been invited to be some kind of pervert, and then perhaps they thought, ah he's on his he can look out for the kids, see they don't break anything.... And then I realised she thought I must need some entertainment... But I had the newspaper and we have just had the nationwide Mayor idol... I mean elections, that's right our country exchanges mayors all on the same day, its amazing how many of them have been mayor of more than one town... itinerant mayor seeks chains ..... hmm. So I checked out which of the semi-urban middle class types had got the gong and yes our new lady mayor ... another disgusting phrase looks likes like some sub Penelope Keith type snob with pearls and not much in the way of lips... ah well no power lippy for her... but I am sure she will make an excellent mayor and resolve the burning issues... what to do with the floral clock... and how to get those poor people away from breeding rottweilers and encourage them to get on with nice golden labs or a border collie ....

Should have stuck with minding the kids.

One of my colleagues is the type always concerned with other peoples' sexual orientation. I personally find this a dull pursuit. I think it really is something that occupies those who came like her very late to their own road to (Gay/Lesbian/trans/takatapui/whatever) Damascus.... but she spent the whole afternoon convincing herself that this guy and that was secretly craving well ... cock I guess.

And on that note I think I'll leave this post.. trying to decide which is more depressing these phantom legions of men all on the down low or her trying to second guess their M.O's

Well, well and unwell

So I received a comment.My first. And from Prof B. My hero. I know I know I can hear Bertolt in my head - Unhappy the land that needs heroes. Still words of encouragement are always good.. Though I would hate the good professor to get the blame if I now unleash a torrent of whining... Could there be more you ask - about my doomed sexlife, this hideous town and this ridiculous job.

Have actually got quite a bit of work done today, despite the fact that the flu which seems to have been waiting in the wings for weeks is about to grab the spotlight. But I promised myself that I would work hard last night but succumbed to couch and takeaways after explaining online a particularly intricate and elegant theory which is usually accompanied by complicated diagrams which we had to just keep in our heads I felt extraordinarily ... over it. I shall do some tonight. I promise I will lock out the TV, home to all my friends, and turn off the phone, it actually now rings, which has brought great relief to the market researchers.

What is wrong with youth today: the evidence

So I accidently strayed into a blog discussion about Vin Diesel. You will have to believe me about the accidently part. There is some rumour apparently that he is gay. Oh my God. Really? Many of the apparent teen commentators on said rumour could not possibly believe it because he is so buff. Here are some actual quotes from the comments:

is vin diesel really gay! someone pleaz tell me! he cant be gay he is so sexy and hot when my friends tell me he is gay i get really pissed at them cause he is not the kind of man that would become gay with that body. he doesnt even act gay. so if someone could tell me the truth i would be so much happier :)!!!


i heard that vin diesel was gay and in fact he was going out with another man that played an extra in xXx. can anyone tell me if that is the truth cause he's got the body to not be gay but who know's he might be just into guy's

Vin Diesel is gay, i know because i had sex with him, his penis wasn't all that, but it was good enough for sure........oh just FYI, he likes to swallow .

i waz watching a thing on vin desil and they said he waz gay cuz on friday nights he is a stripper at a gay bar

And there's...

of course vin diesel's gay he's my like boyfriend he haserious abs and mad mucels damn and fyi he has huge penis

Ah the voice of teen reason...

oh and another thing, i didn't know people "become gay"........did you become straight sara?

Hello blog. Nothing to report

I would ask you what you had been doing while have been absent from making entries, but you might turn the table on me and break with my adjacency pair expectations and answer a question with a question.
So I have neglected you. But you're not mad with me? Are you?
Have fallen into a bit of a hole of my own making. While finally having a social time of it here in Palmengrad I know that it is only temporary as my new found chums are old buddies from elsewhere acting as artists in residence in this joint. I have been reallys truggling to get any motivation to get any work done. I am supposed to be orginasing a field trip, finishing of a publication and well you know same as you... I think that I set a lot of stock in my students in that I expect them to inspire me to work. And I have forgive me, an uninspiring bunch. Nice kids, but hella lazy, except for one. And I seem to spending my time thinking about my *fantasy* football league heh heh. Well what awaits ...some proofreading and student reassuring.