"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, painting, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: 'it's not where you take things from - it's where you take things to'."

- Jim Jarmusch

Fever, sure has got me good

My brain is a messy collage of desires and ambitions and lusts and general feelings of frustration and excitement and indulgence. Today at work I clucked like a chicken and told the more adventurous of my female residents that I needed a man in that way. "I have needs too!" I said and winked and they laughed raucously. So much for the generation gap. Later on my favourite girl to work with (though she is in her 40s and has two teenage daughters) told me about her first sexual encounter with her husband over a packet of menthol cigarettes (ugh! I was too lazy to go inside and get mine). We both commented that it was an odd day, we were strangely scatter shot Alices in Wonderland and our residents were holding up the sane, oddly calm end of the bargain. Was it lack of sleep? Was it the claustrophobic humidity? Strangely satisfying nonetheless.

I bought new copies of frankie and RUSSH to read on my lunch break, and when I thought about it, completely agreed with Pip Brophy's 'top five essentials for the sunny season': 1. A cute boy 2. Blueys beach (any beach would do right now) 3. The sun on my face 4. BBQs on balmy nights 5. Sunday afternoons with friends that you wish would never end. I am strangely excited about the forthcoming summer in a way I find strange and foreign, I am trying to analyse why, but maybe I should just go with the flow and let my skin go gradually brown.

Also, there are lots of pretty things I am liking the look and sound of. This sort of miscellany is the glue that actually holds me together...

- Kylie Minogue - Fever
- by Alexander Wang

- lots of necklaces at once
- dark-haired boys in navy-blue suits
- perfect weather for maxi dresses
- new white hair on saturday
- this girl in this dress (by Vivienne Westwood)

- lustlustLUST (think Pj Harvey's This Is Love)
- tacky red fingernails
- fish & chips & tomato sauce


...In less exciting news, this is why I can't afford to FIX & REGISTER MY FREAKING CAR!!!:
Gas Bill (quarterly) - $230
Electricity Bill (quarterly) - $133.50
Internet Bill (monthly) - $113 (don't go over your bandwidth children!)
Foxtel Bill (monthly) - $66
Insurance Repayment - $200
Repayment for Smash Repairs - $100
That's $842.50 worth of bills and repayments in the first week of November. Ok, the last two come out regularly, but seriously, that's still $542.50 without them. Grrr! I don't think frustrated really covers how I'm feeling right now.

How-to

It's best to just let what's in you come out.
- Paul Hewson

Blueprint

A few pointers on writing short stories from Kurt Vonnegut's Bagombo Snuff Box:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last pages

Decisions, decisions

"I'm divided as to whether one likes to have books, or to write fiction without interruption."

- Virginia Woolf

Thinking in pictures

I have been thinking a lot about art, the flat visuals feeding into my thoughts seamlessly and stirring up sediment and memories from years ago; recalling fondness and passion and making me realise that geography and layout can dictate a certain type of sensory experience.

From my bedroom window I can see Mt. Stromlo, where Rosalie Gascoigne lived with her astronomer husband. She moved from the wet hills of Auckland to this struggling little outpost in 1943, mastering ikebana and reforming waste into beauty. The telescope is still there, they restored it after the fires in 2003 but the hill upon which it sits is still naked. Its barrenness reminds us of whole streets destroyed in minutes. Plants are slow to grow, things take time to heal, longer than we think (or allow).

Rosalie Gascoigne, Suddenly the lake, 1995

p1

We don’t talk about my sister anymore. She came out of my mother’s womb with a question on her tongue, but it was five years before we began to hear it. After that time the question banged and rattled so loudly that it was impossible to ignore. Those blank, dumb eyes staring out from deep cauldrons of unknown origin, the distorted movement of her branch-like limbs spinning like uncontrollable pinwheels. We were scared of her and she knew it.

With thick hair curling around her neck like caramel she moved through the house like a youthful Ophelia, gorgeous and demented in her world which she carried as a shield around her. It was like the wind, this world, we could sense its whispers, feel its bitterness roar through us, but never actually see it; we knew it was there but could never pin it down to anything corporeal in nature.

Sometimes, when the fireball inside ceased to burn, she would turn to me and smile, and for the briefest of moments the soul that lay trapped inside would tremble and wake and she became more human than any human being I have known before or since. These moments were eternal; yet, when I recall them I realise they could not have spanned more than the few seconds it took for her to stretch her muscles into a grin and flash her teeth like a freshly painted picket fence. Whirling away like a wild animal, her matted her aflame in the dying embers of afternoon light, I was left to wonder at what I had just encountered. Which was the real girl? Was this untamed thing just a shell, a trap in which something more delicate was caught, or were these exploding limbs a mere physical manifestation of the currents running wild in the limbic region somewhere beneath her thick crust of skull.