1.09 I Am Astounded

He reads Ray Bradbury.



He reads Ray Bradbury!

1.08 Out to Dinner

The food was passable, I suppose. Not that I paid much attention. Chase was, to begin with, an absolute prat. After a few minutes of attempted conversation, in which the words "hot" and "chick" must have been uttered more than seven times, I retrieved my emergency corrective kit (paper, pen, RED pen). After an abortive attempt to illustrate just how abusive of grammar he was being, and how "like" should be used to draw a complete simile, how hanging participles made my teeth stand on edge, we happily diverted onto a nice subject.

Illuminated texts, gothic handwriting, and antique books, as forms of art. We were very engrossed, and I hardly noticed what I ordered or ate. It seemed to me then that behind his facade of idiocy and American-Fraternity style wit and grace there may actually lurk an interesting person.

Then, as an afterthought, when coffee arrived, he interrupted our conversation to apologetically pull a picture out of his bag. It was a sketch he'd done of my face and bust (Oh shoo, you perverted internet scum. Not in that way). Absolutely wonderful, for a sketch from memory. He really is quite talented. I felt very ashamed of myself; He is in a way open and honest and sincerely kind, while pursuing me with a stubborn indignance. I am there, accepting his attentions against my better judgement, while Cal sits unknowing in Melbourne.

I was intent on turning him down outright, taking my book, running; now I feel that I cannot. I came home earlier than I might have otherwise so that I can talk to Cal, think things out, and maybe push this confusing and arrestingly rude world away in favour of a book. Something light and calming, like "Suyemura, an anthropological look at a small Japanese village". I bought it from a secondhand bookstore a few years ago, and have never sat down to read it properly.

EDIT: Updated to correct errors. That man's making me make basic mistakes, now - it's intolerable. Additionally, I've included the picture he gave me.

1.07 Never Irritate an Archivist

I am finding it hard to recconcile myself with two actions I have taken in the recent past; I was stupid enough to abscond with a work book, and I was absent enough to reply to the comments earlier with a spelling error. I had to decline some irregular Greek verbs to deal with my frustration.

But, rest assured, the Braze-Wilde Project will proceed unhindered by the loss of what is little more than absolute tripe. I suppose that the collection of all these texts will result in a catalogue that the Alexandrian Library might turn green at the thought of, but why such absolute nonsense has to be included is beyond my comprehension.
I suppose I should simply trust to the power of a larger system than my singular brain, and know that it will be useful to someone, sometime.

The sky was blissfully cool today. Although I do miss the coffee and books that Melbourne kept me in blissfully unaware supply, I have to say that Canberra as a town is easier on the eyes. Not as many beautiful old buildings, of course, but it lacks the frantic pace of traffic. It lacks transferring between two trams, one train, and a bus to get from A to B. There is space, and silence, and air. Shops and buildings aren't scrambling over each other for space in remnants of the past, but are resting placidly in purpose-built structures. There is calm here, there is peace.

I might just be associating my personal preferences with the cities, though. A public servant's city contains admittedly more literacy and a more bookish society. Although a workmate passed on what is perhaps strange trivia; Canberra has the highest number of hardware stores per capita. I am unsure of what to make of this city, but it calms me.

There is a surpisingly large number of local artists, writers, and filmmakers. I suppose that with a large population of University graduates and students this should not be a surprise; I mustn't have thought very hard before I ventured outside.

I visited the ANU today, and saw some of the permanent installation art around the campus. Some of them are quite arresting, and so absorbed into the landscape that it seems natural. This entire city has been sculpted, and while I can understand from motorists and homehowners a slight indignance regarding building regulations and transit routes, I am appreciating the atmosphere.

I wonder how much of our identity is tied into the buildings near or within which we live? Am I seeing this place as lush and relaxing merely because I lived within a contracted grid of grey and brown houses? Would a visitor to Melbourne see beauty in the old buildings rather than old run-down stores and mold problems?

I think that I am becoming an amateur philosopher in my apprehension over the weekend. I hardly ever throw myself into new situations like this. I have, though, complained that I only meet interesting people through organic and accidental ways; here is a person I have met by chance, and I should endeavour to make the most of this.

1.06 They Made Me Do It, Your Honour.

Cal is gloating. I have to go out. I have to talk to someone. He's not upset that Chase seems more interested than he should be, not at all. He's sitting in Melbourne with a cup of fresh coffee, nearly soiling himself in his mirth. I hope he does; that I tend to put people off of, well, talking, or listening, is not funny.

I hate going out. First one has to dress uncomfortably. Then there's transport to, transport home, chosing the food, forcing the conversation. Although I'm sure that if I managed to blunder along on the bus absently without him interrupting me we must share at least one interest. But still, I don't like going out. Even when I go out with friends, there's always someone being vulgar or splitting his infinitives at the table next to us.

I think that I'll just make sure I zip my corrective pens into the inner pocket of my purse, so I don't correct the menu and get us kicked out before we've sat down.

The nights have been blessfully cool, and I'm hoping that I never have to suffer another summer here. I might keep an eye out for cheap evaporative coolers.

1.05 Public Transport and Calamity

I shouldn't be posting this from work, perhaps doubly so, but I need an outlet or I will start re-living the events over and over again in my head. I've stuffed up....

I never stuff things up. I take my red pen of righteousness to them, and I draw a soft and noble line through the things that other people stuff up.

I was catching the bus to Lyneham to visit Booklore. I'd heard from a friend that they occasionally carried the Loeb series, and I was thinking of reading another Greek text. This man, and here I must commend Canberra for its' population of long-haired men as I think I have seen two blondes and three brunettes just in the last few days, sat down beside me and began to strike up a conversation.

I wish I could remember it, because he seemed reasonably lucid and coherent, but I was occupied with much more important plans. I am not sure if any of you in Melbourne or my new online contacts have encountered the amusing text of A.E. Waite, but I had a copy of his book that I should not have removed from my workplace, and I was holding this in both hands to both remind me of what fun I would have with a red marker in Photoshop that night, and to ward off the effervescently giggling teens. The pink ones, as these were, tend to flee at the sight of anything beyond the mundane.

I think that I am digressing in my panic right now. It's only a stupid, nearly worthless book, but if it is discovered missing I could lose this job.

I talked to the man about something, in the way that I do when I am not paying attention. A spiel on grammar, or Akhilleus versus Achilles, or perhaps the taste of coffee in this city. He seemed to be incredibly bored or incredibly interested. I kept thinking of my scanning and dastardly corrections as an aside to the cataloguing of the images I was set to do, and watching the trees of the huge and grid-like parks of Canberra amble past the bus.

When I saw the street I had to disembark on, I must have begun to gather up my work bag and drink bottle and other sundries while still talking, because I don't think I ever did say goodbye to him. I just had this moment of fear when he didn't seem to realise that I was trying to get to the door, and I could see the shops slowly trickling towards us.

And then (try to contest my use of "and", and I shall wave my kai and de, and explain how Greek grammar works. As it is a part of our language, I am allowed to use their rules.) I hurried down the aisle, dismebarked, and spent more money than I should have on books.

I have a copy of a series of papers on the Athenian theatre, called "Nothing to do with Dionysos." It looks very interesting. But when I had sat reading the first article in it at home for an hour I realised that I wasn't reading the Waite book. I must have left it with the man. I can't think of anywhere else I could have.

I didn't fancy riding the buses until he appeared again, so I searched. After all, if I have a blog, and others have blogs, perhaps someone had posted. I didn't even begin to look at those, though, because Google books has a copy. I feel like I did when I first translated "moira" as "deadly fate", and felt the weight of Hektor's future heavy upon my heart. I am a fool, I am absolutely dim! I didn't need to take the book at all.

And now it is gone, and I have no idea where. If anyone knows a generic guy, or perhaps more specifically one who has a copy of "The Book of Black Magic" by Arthur Edward Waite that is not his own (who lives within Canberra, preferably), please push him in my direction.

1.04 Books, Life Often Overrides Desperate Yearning. Hopelessness of Tepidity

I haven't really established a base of friends or acquaintances here. Cal expounded upon the virtues of comradeship and company earlier this evening when he called me, but I have never felt the need to connect with new people. When I do meet somebody, it is always meaningful; I have read their book or seen their artwork or discovered their company when attending a conference either in the flesh or on the electric waves of my machine. I meet individuals as people that I would enjoy spending time with to the exclusion of others; I don't cleave to others in a strange desparation to prevent my own exclusion.

I highly doubt that I could meet anyone outside of my workplace here that could be eligible. I don't want to sound snobbish, but if there is one true thing about this town, it is that Canberrans keep to themselves. The intellectuals at the think-tanks here keep within their own faculties, within their own disciplines, sometimes even within their own sub-specialisation. Their are clubs and societies for every known interest and personality... provided that you have the fortune to meet one of their members at the right time.

But that merely brings me back to the manner in which I enjoy making company; either by serendipitous accidents of space and time, or by a lucky coincidence of interest.

Do I indeed sound standoffish? I apologise. Cal has made me feel in an entirely illogical way that somehow my habit of not visiting dance clubs - although I have heard that in Canberra they are merely drink-and-stumble clubs - is antisocial. Bah. Bah Humbug! We all know that the true connections of the human spirit lie in abstract ideas and not in physical realities. We wouldn't be using this medium as a point of contact if we did not.

I think that this hot weather is making me irritable. I'm going back to my book; it will distract me from the weather and draw me back into a world which is, surprisingly enough, all about guns, germs, and steel. I am enjoying it, though I feel that a deeper look into anthropological and prehistorical journals would expand greatly beyond the content that Diamond has seen fit to include in his work. After all, it is a popular science book. Popular biological anthropology, of all things. It can't be well researched or thought out. Perhaps I have merely become disillusioned under the effects of all the others I have read, and this book will be a salvation of faith in some small way.

1.03 Veritably Foul Day

Most of today was long and tedious. Cataloguing can only hold one's interest for so long when one reaches a series. Collection of inscriptions in Attic Greek, volume this, number that, series such.

It rained yesterday. No, now it rained the day before yesterday.

I forget that we're living in a drought here; I spend most of my days indoors in one place or another, and it only really strikes me when I go outside with friends or have oddly exciting thoughts such as the elation of rain. I love the sound of rain, its thuds and shudders on open glass windows. How it dances a staccato beat on a rooftop while simultaneously collapsing exhausted with soft yawns on the grass; how it laughs at the solid and stagnant man-made lakes of this city and throws handfuls of confetti-like drops down at them.

I've finished The Historian, which has highly improved my opinion of at least one dark and gloomy creature of the night. That he had to enlist someone else to catalogue the stuff, in the end, was a bit less awesome.

I've started reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond as a workmate who studied anthropology and classics reccomended it. I have to say that his ideas of our society - at its most base level concerning our complete impossibilty of being - are striking a chord within me. I haven't read enough to determine whether his theories are what I would consider solid, but the tone of his prose and his views on religion are bringing out wry sympathetic laughter from my mouth.

He does misuse the word "history", however in the prologue. By definition, History is a term used for the human past that has been recorded in some form of text. When he addresses the lack of attention to prehistory, he should have known enough to call it prehistory rather than "History before the emergence of writing". He also claims that not enough attention has been shown to prehistoric societies, where any archaeology or anthropology student will vehemently argue that there are nowhere near enough records or physical evidence to argue for any prehistoric social organisation; it is all extrapolation.

Aside from that, I think that I will be able to read this book at least without cringing nearly as much as I do with most.

I wonder why our literate society keeps evolving culturally away from competent editors. Why, when science fiction was young and novels were still novel, any editor worth his or her water content would be cutting whole passages and shifting chapters and paragraphs around; in essence rewriting the entire text. Today we're luck if they convert the document to Word and run it through the American spellchecking program, with its horrific attempt at grammar analysis.

I'm going to see if I make it to the renaissance in this book before I have to close it in anguish. I hope that everyone else enjoys their "let's-put-a-holiday-between-Christmas-and-Valentine's-day" weekend.

1.02 Connected and Disconnected

I never did really explain myself in that last post. My first post, really. I'm posting here now so that all of my old friends in Melbourne can keep track of my rants and ravings as if I had never left. Lurkers may, of couse, lurk as they wish; I will expend no effort on you, but feel free to read a little now and then.

It's so abysmally hot here. I drip. I dribble off of my chair. I tried to sleep, but found the darkness suffocating in this weather; I tried to phone Cal, but there was some out of service error. After weather checks, news site checks and many sleepily panicked text messages, I was left without anything else to do. He is fine, despite the mass blackouts and hysteria that has ensued from a day without The Simpsons or even a taste of the duplicitous joys of the internet within his general area.

I wish I had been there, with a megaphone of justice. "Go and read a BLOODY BOOOK!" I would have screamed, standing on a cardboard box of academic seconds - I don't think I could stand on a soapbox and maintain my sense of personal pride. Honestly, this dependance on television and electronic amusement is causing more hair loss from personal removal than Bush's tantrum in Iraq and the film "Troy" have (and that is a considerable amount).

Even so, I feel a similar dependance. Under my self-imposed rule, without which I might never stir from my bookshelves, I have another three hours of "sleep time" in which I cannot read. But I can't call Cal.
I think that I should try lying in the dark and waiting for the dawn.

1.01 And My First Post Will Be About...

Hold that thought.

[edit]

I was initially intending to post verbosely and eloquently about the prose and content of "The Historian", which I am currently lost within, but I found an article on women in the oikos in Athenian texts, and I had to run for Perseus to check the original greek in Medea. I do feel slightly heartbroken that I am still saving up for hard copies of most greek texts, and ashamed that the only Homer I have (in the flesh, as it were) is that ungraceful collection of pages in the J.A.C.T book I used as an undergraduate.

I wonder why we humans - or perhaps just us scholars - have such a rabid desire to possess ideas (for that is all that books and poems and essays truly are) in a physical form. Is it truly more efficient to print and pay and bind for what is merely an afterthought not hours after we have turned the final page?

Given the databases that we can create and consume and distribute much easier in an electronic form, what draws us back and back again to the solid page?

A friend of mine, a History student I think, talked to me one day long ago about the sudden advancement of trades, science and literature through the development of rudimentary literacy. Almost in a logical progression, the Roman occupation of Britain brought in higher literacy and thus greater transferral of knowledge; better bridges, better mills, more efficient copies of forging techniques.
With the loss of this literacy came the time we call "the dark ages". It seems to me as if we were on the edge of an age of light, of complete transparency of ideas and near absolute equality of mind. Pushing, almost bursting through into an entirely new format of words and visions.

I don't think that I can stand that thought. Let transcendancy lie in the bosom of spiritual thinkers, and let me lie down in my bed to sleep if I can. It is flanked currently by Haruki Murakami and Susannah Clarke, who sit on top of my constant companions, Euripides and Homer. I need the comforting feel of their rough old pages, and the scent of a hundred past readers, to truly settle into a good day's reading. Yes, even if Perseus is so accessible and useful, I think that I feel safer, perhaps, looking at the printed word.