Last night I came home to an empty garage and a light on in my kitchen instead of outside my front door, and my small, serviceable flat was swarmed with flies. They must have got in through one of my less-than-serviceable windows and flocked to the light. Do flies do that?

Anyway, they’re still here and I don’t know how to get rid of them and I feel kind of like that character in One Hundred Years of Solitude who is followed around by butterflies all the time, except that mine are flies and no matter what I do the fuckers won’t follow me outside.

I’m reluctant to kill them all because I kind of have Buddhist pretensions, and I also don’t have flyspray in the house or a fly swat, and anyway it would take a long time to kill all these flies. Buddhism aside, killing this many flies feels too close to genocide for my liking. I know that’s dramatic, but there are lots of flies here and they seem to constitute a group, or at least part of a group.

So I’m just going to leave them there, attached to my roof and the walls and the leaves on my plant. They are not moving a lot and are starting to feel like a big group of low-maintenance friends. And it also feels like I’m kind of living and working inside a metaphor, so maybe if I leave them there I’ll figure that out.

I left the outside light on and the window open when I went to sleep last night, hoping they’d move toward that light, but they didn’t. This might be because I also accidentally left the cooler on, so now they’re just feeling docile. When the sun gets higher here today, I fear they’re going to wake up and start buzzing me – start becoming more like a metaphor for a big group of high-maintenance friends, or for the mania that has been my life lately.

That’s it! For now I’m going to sit among them and write my journal and let them remind me to calm the fuck down.

…

#literaturesbiggestwankers (meme tag via @BenPobjie)

I woke up yesterday to this Word of the Day on my phone: ‘felicitate’. I really hoped it would mean ‘to facilitate beauty’, because my understanding was that ‘felicity’ basically meant ‘beauty’, which is incorrect, unless you agree that the state of ‘being happy, esp. in a high degree’ is the same as the state of ‘being beautiful’.

So I opened dictionary.com and before I could type in this wonderful new verb I was hoping to find, I noticed the world ’spirituel’ was already on the screen, and in the search bar, as though someone had actively searched for what appeared to be a ridiculous hybrid of ’spirit’ and ‘gruel’.

I’m obviously meant to find this word, too, right, so I paid attention, but I still read the phonetics wrong and laughed, ha ha: ’spir-i-chool’, I thought it was, the hybrid now ’spirit’ and ‘cool’, as in ‘Like, yeah, man, that beat was so spirituel‘.

I thought this was too good to be true, so I pressed the audio button and heard the female voice of a mid-West US Bible instructor saying ’spir-i-choo-EL’, like ’spirit you well’, like ‘I’m going to spirituel into the country in Delilah, C, and we are going to build a cubbyhouse in the forest’.

If you’re anything like me you have no way of deducing the meaning of this word from its spelling or phonetics, so I’ll tell those of you it means ’showing or having a refined and graceful mind or wit’.

So after writing this gunk about ’spirituel’ I finally looked up ‘felicitate’, which, as I said, I was hoping was a fortuitous hybrid of ‘facilitate’ and ‘felicity’, therefore, ‘to facilitate beauty’. Do you know what it means? I can’t fucking believe what it means. I think I had actually died of sleep-deprivation and gone to heaven, where every word is beautiful and unambiguous and able to be defined as anything, depending on your mood at the time, where everyone understands you nonetheless.

It means ‘to compliment upon a happy event; congratulate’, but the archaic meaning is ‘to make happy’. I didn’t even know there could be a word that meant this, and am both shocked and exhilarated by the implication that happiness might be something that can be done, that there is a verb relating directly to happiness.

I had always thought happiness was the lucky consequence of being good, leading The Good Life, a few steps removed from any one action, more like the culmination of a series of actions that weren’t overly mean.

So there you have it. Perhaps a sentence might read: ‘Finding these words has felicitated this weekend’s beach outing with the ever-spirituel C.’ [This is incorrect – see NB II below. If I insist I'm using the archaic sense, then perhaps it's correct, but I'm not sure.]

That sentence is infelicitous, but hey, these words are new to me and I’m yet to savour their mouthfeel enough to know how to use them properly. And I guess it’s not one of those words you could ever use in a conversation without sounding like a dickhead.

Gawd … ‘mouthfeel’: I sound like my dad talking about wine.

…

NB: The desire to rise from a sudden, dawn-time wakingness to start this post was inspired by a wonderful comment on the other day’s post, by Pierz Newton John, and the inspiration to complete it came from the existence of Clementine Ford.

…

NB II: I originally misread ‘compliment’ as ‘complement’, rendering ‘felicitate’ incorrectly as ‘to complete or make perfect a happy event’, sans congratulations, which was incorrect. Thankfully, it was difficult to misinterpret the archaic meaning – otherwise I’d have had to delete this post, which would have been disastrous, obviously.

I just woke up from a terrible dream, into a wakingness I resented because it was still 4 am and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep – I was suddenly too aware, not groggy like I’d just woken up, and immediately my mind started racing, and I felt compelled, as I have many mornings recently, to get up and overhaul SIB.

The dream ended with me pulling a dude out of the back of a van – my van, possibly, Delilah – his face hitting the dirt, and him standing up with a bloodied nose, then falling over, fainting.

I tried to wake him up, but he was out. There were other guys with us, all of whom were hating on me pretty bad, for yet other reasons prior, so one of them stormed up and shoved the guy, let’s call him Edwin, into a deep pit of about a foot of ice slurry and a range of beers, other drinks and soggy egg cartons.

I guess he did it to shock him awake, but Edwin immediately turned into a Nippy’s orange juice bottle, rendering him too far away for me to reach in and save him, the juice bottle, from drowning. The guy who threw him in there had longer arms than me – he reached in to, I thought, grab him, but came up with a Lipton Ice Tea. Then I woke up, terrified that if I stayed in the dream he would die, a juice bottle drowning in an ice slurry.

All this happened because I had done some shit to damage one of my friend’s fishing rods, so I spat the dummy and stopped drinking their beer, deciding to protect it, instead, from various other vultures who had appeared at a party earlier. We were on the west coast, so when my guarding started to piss everyone off (I had started guarding my friends from their own beer) I had said ‘Fuck it!’ and decided I would hitch back to Adelaide.

At that point I didn’t have Delilah there, but then I did, so I was driving along behind them for some reason, but steering over the front seat, from the non-existent back-left seat. Retarded, I know. Soon I was in their back seat, with no steering wheel now, but with pedals that weren’t working. I freaked out before we goddamn crashed, and told them to slow down and pull the fuck over.

So we all got out and they started hating on me some more, which is why I dragged Edwin face-first out of the back of Delilah.

Various things to note: I recently went fishing on the west coast, over New Year’s, without much tackle of my own, and without having paid cash up front for the supplies my friends had organised; I recently drank a Nippy’s orange juice and passed on Lipton Ice Tea for some obscure ginger beer I can’t remember; I have bloodied people’s noses before, and always felt terrible about it, aaaaaaages ago, back in nineteen tickety two.

So I’m overhauling this blog, by which I mean stripping it back and leaving it raw. For a while there I thought we could make it about youth literature: reviewing youth literature, as I define it (’literature created by youth, for whoever’); critiquing the publishing industry on ways it could nurture youth literature more; and generally trying to create a niche market of ideas about something we’re passionate about that doesn’t get much coverage elsewhere.

So I’m abandoning a niche – feel free to take up residence.

I’m doing this because basically it would have required: reading a lot of youth literature specifically to review it, a reading style I’ve had enough of for a while; bitching about the industry; and promoting the blog so the niche extended beyond my disparate network of friends and workmates.

All I want to do lately is read good writing, write good reading, and learn to meditate. Promoting a blog is not conducive to good meditation practice, especially if you can neither meditate your way out of your own wet mind nor plug your blog out of obscurity.

I’m going to leave it at that for now, and tinker with the meta data for a while before I go to the gym then try to get some more sleep, which I am sure I will fail at. I go to an EFM gym, which I highly recommend if you don’t like traditional gyms. I’ve got a post lined up explaining why I haven’t been around much lately, but I hate it when people open their three-monthly blog posts with ‘I’m a naughty blogger’, so I’ve wended it into a musing on an internet-doomsday book I’m reading at the moment. Sleep well.

Diddums!

We were lying in the fields on an overcast Saturday, 28 degrees, the sugar of iced lollies dribbling down our hands and hoping the sun would bless us for long enough to darken our transparent skin. Beautiful people surrounded us on all sides: impossibly thin; impossibly well dressed in that garage-sale chic kind of way; impossibly camp in their mannerisms. I had decided not to wear a hat and was regretting this when I saw the ocean of varied head adornments riding atop these sculpted hairdos. Then I remembered that I had lost my favourite hat in Edinburgh, and started feeling lonely instead.

I was reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, which made me miss ‘Catch-22’, maybe only because it was about the war. Sentences toppled over me like lego and I was without a building guide. What is this book about? Where are these characters taking me? Is the author talking about a dog, a person, a place, or an idea? I had felt this way before when reading Pynchon. And a glance around told me that this was the general sensibility of our time: a chronological period where the more nonsensical the t-shirt slogan, the greater the cred.

Security through obscurity is a principle used by computing systems. Applied to literature, I am basically talking about the text becoming an insular entity that the author alone can draw meaning from. I know this is an old idea tackled by many literary theorists, but I am seeing a tangible manifestation of it more starkly than before.

Can any text that inspires confusion, deliberately mind, be valuable beyond being comment on the disparate nature of individual existence? If the style moves the readers to pocketed pastiche rather than collective communication, then isn’t this book and others like it just furthering parochial division? Shouldn’t literature be a gateway to further the communication of ideas, more in line with Kerckhoffs’ principle, where ‘it is necessary… that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe’? Or would this lead to a stylistic plateau?

There are many pages still ahead of me, and maybe they will hold instructions for how I am meant to build a doorway into this text. Or maybe next time I go to the fields to read a book, I should take a boating hat and surrender myself to these seas.

So, Delilah had a case of Spontaneous Tyre Explosion going on yesterday morning:

Bah!

I guess I should consider myself lucky it wasn’t the bald tyre on the front, while I was driving, which has happened before. Except I was going to replace the bald tyre with the spare tyre, so that Delilah would be roadworthy and I could finally get her registered in Victoria.¹

I couldn’t really believe it when Matt came downstairs and said, ‘Dude, what the fuck happened to your tyre!?’ and then pulled me out the front to witness this:

Feck!

The picture barely does it justice, but I thought I’d chuck it in there again, in case you missed how absurd this really is.

Matt’s not the sort of guy to fuck around about something like this – that’s Jesse – but I still wondered if he was having me on: he knows how much of a balls up my life has been lately, not least with regard to Delilah, so maybe he thought it would be funny.

Alas, he wasn’t taking the piss.

That little bit sticking up – it looked so much like a cartoon that it just didn’t make sense.

‘What the shit?’ I said.

‘Did you hear that shit in the morning?’

Yeah I’d heard it – Delilah is my bedroom, and sometime that morning I had been woken up by something that sounded halfway between a bazooka and someone slapping a thong on my brain. I dismissed the sound and went back to sleep, as you do.

‘Yeah I heard it,’ I said, ‘what the shit!?’

‘It must’ve exploded in the heat!’ Matt was in awe – this guy is interested in everything, and loves to imagine how things work. This would have been a marvel to him. Shit, it was a marvel to me, and I care about as much about the mechanics of tyres as I do about spreading peanut butter on my arse and running around in front of a pack of malnourished chihuahuas.

‘In the heat?’ It was 27 yesterday.

We stood around looking bamboozled for a while, looking at each other and saying ‘What the shit!?’ in as many variations in tone as you can imagine.

Why would my tyre explode like this? Why is the shrapnel sticking up in such a cartoonish fashion? Where did that long bit even come from anyway? Inside the tyre? I reiterate: what the shit!?

1. Who am I trying to kid? She’s perfectly roadworthy, and there’s more chance of me growing a beard than there is of me transferring the registration unless someone forces me to.

we’re squatting because yesterday we got rained out of the camp grounds. the place has new carpets, so we take off our shoes. 

the kitchen is partially carpeted, and a light came on behind the locked door when we got the electricity going. I wish I could still imagine Rochester’s wife or something equally sinister, but it was just rising damp and lots of sawdust. 

it was either this place or the theatre, which has been turned into a toy store and maybe a dept store and then left defunct for a couple of decades. 

it was labrynthine. I found a clown on a swing and an old Frankenstein. there was a hole in one of the ceilings that peeked right up past the old curtain and up to the dome roof, which looked a lot like the inside of a coal-plant boiler. we might go back. 

if I walked along that gutter, I could climb into the festival club. I won’t, because it’s slippery and I’m not really in the mood for talking. I just facilitated a panel and I always enjoy the relief from that sort of pressure to say something. 

so I’ll sit on the hill for a while longer and listen to the next band that comes on next door.   

Dear Twitter,

What we had was thrilling for a while, but then it got lame. I’m sorry – it’s not you, it’s everyone else.

You gave me the confidence to publish longer blog posts at Socratic Ignorance is Bliss, but there’s something … something about you that makes me feel squeamish now.

I know, that’s rough, but I have to be honest – you gave me the confidence for that, too.

Maybe we could continue seeing each other, but it would have to be an open relationship.

Remember how I had a drink with Networked Blogs on Facebook? I can’t even remember how it happened now – I was so drunk. But it was good, and we’d like to keep seeing each other. She sees a lot of other people, so it wouldn’t be right for me to shut off any options that might come up.

Have you considered polyamoury? The strictures of traditional love can be throttling sometimes, considering the lifestyles we all lead in these big cities.

Like I said, it’s not you – it’s just that I feel so violently bombarded by everyone else when I’m with you, ya know.

I’m gonna wanna post about Socratic Ignorance is Bliss on you, it’s just that I won’t be publishing as much inane stuff.

I understand that maybe we need each other. We always did find such interesting people to talk with when we were together – it was weird, you’re like a magnet for nutjobs. But maybe we’ll just have to settle with whatever comes of this thing with SIB.

She doesn’t have the same shapely public timeline that you do, but there’s something special about the way people come to her specifically, to read what she’s got. It just seems so much more … intimate. In contrast, you seem quite promiscuous, which is why I find it weird that you’ve reacted this way.

I don’t want this to end on a bad note – shit, it’s not even ending. I just wanted you to know that, for me, things need to change. I totally dig you, but who knew that all that early fluttering would peter out without so much as a flash fire? There’s too much else in the world, ya know, so much to distract us: it’s hard to imagine we’d spend any longer than our twenties together.

There’s still heaps of time. We should hang out, just you and me and everyone else. We’ll be okay – you’re better in crowds, I’m better one-on-one. Seeya just above the blogroll.

Love and democratic self-determination,

Ryan xo
September ‘09

I went to see this guy last night:

The Great Urban Cowboy

Here’s a video of one of my favourite tracks:

And a link to Tattooing the Surface of the Moon, Sean’s blog.

I fell in love with Sean M Whelan’s work when he was performing with The Mime Set. Pepped up on sangria on holiday in Melbourne years ago, their performance at the (now closed) Spanish Club blew my brain.

Great surrealist romantic poetry to rock music!

So it turns out this Lee Siegel fella might be a total douchebag.

He got busted for sockpuppetry at his blog for The New Republic, was hounded out of there and proceeded to get angry about internet anonymity, among other things wrong with the internet, in his book, Against the Machine. That this book is subtitled, ‘Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob’ should have said enough. Siegel’s posts have been deleted from The New Republic.

I though I might have found a discerning, dissenting view of the internet, which I have been extolling the virtues of endlessly, lately. But the more I delved into this character, the more I realised I was dealing with the sort of person who rallies against baseball caps for affecting ‘a lazily defiant casualness’.

This reminded me of Andrew Bolt hating on tracksuit pants once, which unfortunately I couldn’t dig out of the archives.

I’m dismayed that there is another person out there like Bolt. Maybe I should still give Siegel a go – Socratic ignorance and all that. But it’s hard to respect a guy who began criticising the internet when he found himself challenged by the unwashed masses of ‘blogofascists’.

I’ve been interested in this guy Lee Siegel lately, since I found his critique of What is the What and the cult subculture that Eggers has spawned with McSweeney’s.

This was the first well-considered and in-depth critical review of the whole phenomenon that I had read since feeling awkwardly contrarian in criticising What is the What myself on The Book Show. (There is another one here.)

Siegel has written a book called Against the Machine, which seems to be an outspoken, sarcastic and scathing critic of The Internet. Ray Bradbury would love him – Ray Bradbury, the guy who reckons we should burn books, but burning The Internet’s alright.

And I’m reviewing a book called Say Everything, a book about ‘how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters’.

And I’m starting this blog, obviously.

According to Three Degrees of Uncoordination, something is about to pop.

Meanwhile, check out this short video of Siegel acknowledging that he would never want to punch the internet in the face – ‘there are two many faces – it would take me a lifetime to do that’. The guy on the left’s a cack – he’s gotta be on coke.