Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Last month or so has seen me well productive! Have been writing and reading like a demon.

A couple of days ago, I sent a fresh poem to my online chum @gabfran who keeps a terrific blog called Law and Shoes. Sure, I might be biased as to why I think it’s a good blog, but let me try to persuade you otherwise:

1. it’s a themed blog – this lady loves shoes.
2. oddly enough, we garner personal history through her relationship with the various pairs of shoes she owns
3. she frequently has guests posting about their shoes

Themed blogs, and hers is definite inspiration, is one of the reasons I decided to start writing mini-reviews on books I read this year.

When I woke up yesterday, I found that she did me the honour of posting my greenstick poem (which has a good lack of shoes in it) on her blog. I very rarely post my own work here so I must confess it was quite a nice surprise.

I’d love to know what you all think. I’ve started editing it, so in my mind, the ‘more definitive’ version looks a little different to what is there.

Also, it’s still in baby stages but two of my closest friends and myself have started a food review blog called Eat, Drink, Stagger. It thus made my day when The Local Taphouse featured my newbie Ale Star post on their blog. Makes me wish I took better pictures of the beer bottles! But, no matter, from here on it’s nothing but improvement.

Grant at FoodStuffMelb was kind enough to do a shout-out (cheers, we’ll be adding FoodStuffMelb blog to our blogroll as soon as we get that sorted!) for us. Grant was a chef in a former life, and occasionally reviews eateries in Melbourne. I like his blog because even though he has ties to the food industry, he is warm and approachable. I’ve pestered him with my blog comments and he always responds.

So yeah, if you’re looking for some good, theme-focussed reading, there’s some suggestions!

More Neil Gaiman, more Dave McKean. It took me a while to fully embrace the grim world of a boy remembering his childhood spent in Portsmouth – at first it seemed slow-paced, and the art is schizophrenic, and very, very creepy.

What I like best about The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch is that it focusses on what must seem to be an innate fear we all have – what on earth is it about fairgrounds and carnivals that we all find so sinister? I actually spent my summers in Portsmouth when my family still lived in England, and I was terrified of the carousel. I was scared of the actual ride, it being so high and so fast, and also of getting lost and being separated from my parents. I didn’t often have separational anxiety, so even today this strikes me as odd.

In any case, McKean and Gaiman do a fab job of tapping into this almost primal fear. One cannot help but wonder how much of Gaiman’s childhood is in Mr Punch.

Just a short update – I got shortlisted for the Varuna Longlines competition. Alas, I didn’t get into the programme, but it was nice to hear that my folio was considered for a good while. Apparently, six or so poems at the end are weaker and need to be replaced with some better ones. Hopefully, I can do that, and reapply next year. Yea for some healthy goals!

I also found out this week that my poem ‘Knot’ will be showing up on the Optus Board in Federation Square as part of the Overload Poetry Festival, which runs from 3-14 September. I’m very excited and I don’t even know if I’ll actually be able to catch my own poem up there as it’s a electronic feed sort of thing.

I was lucky enough to attend some fabulous events as part of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival this year – more about that soon.

It’s not overly impressive, just what I came up with in writers’ workshop on the topic of confidence. The reason it’s not overly impressive is that it’s not fiction but my thoughts, which aren’t overly exciting, haha. When it was my turn to read my bit out, the old birds really enjoyed it…they really dig this sort of thing.
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Pretty straightforward, as the title suggests. I wrote from the point of view of my feet in about half an hour before class this morning. Again, the usual slight editing applies. Oh and it’s absolutely autobiographical, hahaha!

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The straits be dire. I was actually cruising MySpace for poetry groups that’s how badly I want some near-professional criticism on my work. I’m sorry about my previous entry. Amazing what an overnight sleep, a cuddle from a cat and little purple pills can do to somewhat restore the balance. I’m still heartbroken and fucking want to leave this horrid, cursed place (my parents’ house or Australia? haven’t decided) but lack of funds prevents that from being a reality.

So anyway, ages ago, I handed out a copy of most of my verse novel (novel where the chapters are poems) to some friends to read. The idea for at least a few was that they read it, write notes and comments, then hand it back to me.

That never happened. So I thought I’d come up with some amusing theories as to what happened to the paper my work was printed on.

• Someone’s dog ate part or all of the manuscript.
• It was all stapled together and then donated to Japanese businessmen who are filthy rich but choose to live in cardboard boxes to have a simpler, unfettered life – they used it as a blanket of sorts.
• That guy in one of my musicology electives accidentally got hold of it and tore the pages into strips which he then ingested (I’m not kidding).
• Someone’s dog ran out into the garden, decided to get into an altercation with a household cat and ran around the house like a whirling dervish, smudging so much mud on it that it was rendered illegible (this happened to one of my poetry assignments at uni, would you believe).
• The blank side was much more useful and a draft of something else got printed on it.
• All its pages were used in some weird Dance of the Flaming Arseholes orgy – you roll up some paper, stick it into your plughole and set it alight. I once knew a very fat and very rude (that’s a quotation from Four Weddings and a Funeral so I’m not being gratuitously nasty) girl who claimed her hippy father did this.
• Became cat litter. For a cat that lives in a Melbourne suburb called St. Kilda with an IAMS obsession in desperate need of an apronectomy.
• Became emergency toilet paper in scungy male sharehouses. No, not all males are scungy – in fact, the neatest people I ever lived with were all male. It was the females who were somewhat…festy.
• It got published in a parallel universe…sigh! No, that would make me happy, can’t have that.
• A really lame grindcore band took it, changed some words here and there, and turned it into mediocre commie song lyrics.
• A black hole got it?
• Lastly, it was placed in a coffin and busted out before the person was buried, and became famous in the same way Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market is supposed to have become known – I think. Or was it her entire oeuvre?

It wasn’t a wasted exercise – two professional writers took a look at it, one was even a published poet here who said it had some merit about it. There were only a few people whose opinions really mattered to me who didn’t give feedback as expected. Some meant to, but you know…more important things come along.

Poetry, why oh why did I have to start writing poetry? I could have a happier life as a punk rocker or something, but it had to be poetry. Probably because it’s so connected to music. But there’s so many other bad poets out there, I don’t fancy adding to the bunch! Hmm. I should start working on my verse novel again, I really miss it. It might not be any good, but it’s been so much to work on.

Damn it, what is it about submitting my poetry that makes me so pukey?! I mean, makes me want to puke. Last night, I was preparing 2 submissions to literary journals and it didn’t involve anything too stressful, just printing out copies of things, but I got so nauseous and sick in the stomach for about 3 hours.

No fun. But they are in the mail now so nothing I can do about it. Seriously though, I need to get over this if I want to start submitting more stuff. I can’t just go around having panic attacks willy-nilly – pah, what a baby!

Even more appalling, I got grossed out by an image in one of the poems I wrote. Uh, hello it didn’t gross you out when you wrote it? In fact, I’ve never been grossed out by anything I’ve written. It’s not a ‘nice’ poem and I’m pretty sensitive about who I let read it but sheesh. I wonder how long people submit things for before getting something – anything – published? Why didn’t I start this whole thing earlier in life. Who knows, might even have given Fat Cow Poet a run for its money. Admittedly, cultural background and one’s, ahem, socio-economic status have a lot to do with it but…hmm. Oh well, fingers crossed I get some feedback from one of the journals (seeing as they do that). Just have to keep trying and drowning my disappointment in…lipgloss. Or martinis – it’s been too long, sigh!

Naturally, because the writing stuff is picking up, a whole bunch of technological stuff has to go and be all difficult on my lumpy arse.

I tried this awesome fangled feature to try and get some old e-mail accounts deleted – but it transfers all the old e-mails and contacts to your existing account. Did it work? Of course not.

Then the forum I frequent where I’m trying to promote my beauty-related writing goes offline for over 3 days because the old and new hosts can’t get their acts together.

Icing on the cake is HTML script in Wordpress funk. I had to put a password on two pages because the text and forms were not appearing as they should when the magic “Publish” button is pressed. Even worse, I know where all of this is leading – I’m going to have to talk to my friend/admin and it’s not going to be nice. Let’s just say that it will most likely result in me having to find a new host for this blog, as well as pay a professional for their technological expertise whenever I run into problems.

It’s not going to be doing me any favours to look like a hack when people are actually paying attention to my writing.

Oh, and I got a rejection for a submission – I only sent it on Monday! I’ve received a rejection before, but this was…really cold. There’s polite and then there’s…hmm. Caught me off-guard I guess. No, it wasn’t rude – not at all. Kind of odd that I took it personally at all.

But don’t worry – at least I’m feeling regular-person dismayed which is way better than depressed-person anything.

Are the gods shining the nice light on me at the moment?! Well, they better not come too close lest my unruly Indian eyebrows scare them off!

Yes, so my bath article has been chosen as part of the Culture Focus for Aug 15th 2006. Me = ecstatic. I also saw on a pal’s Live Journal this big-arse list of 1001 books you should read before you die. I got so anxious about it that I started to have a panic attack though I’ve read roughly 93 books on the list – surely I miscounted? But if it’s indeed true (and I missed a heap of books I’d read during my initial scan) then that’s almost 10% of the list, right?

It still sounds pretty awful for a lit major. Can I get extra credit for having read some of the French titles in the original French? Trust me to have the beginnings of a panic attack…over a sodding “must-read” booklist – how lame can you get?!

I also noticed that someone I don’t know (but who is a fellow Blogcritic) put up a link to my blog on her blog. Curiouser and curiouser…it occurs not long after a comment I made on blog popularity and how in a fatalistic manner I’d just assumed no one was going to Technorati link me. It’s cooler to have friends and readers that every now and then say they liked your post about, say, Blur (quite a few people liked that one! vintage Blur had it going on!). Especially when the readers/friends are intelligent.

Oh, even more pimping: -->

Ah, at last! Excuse the title, I was feeling silly.

Finally starting to get some work done! It’s been a nice, laidback weekend, and I’ve been up all night watching amusing television and writing up bits and pieces of reviews for Blogcritics – the beginnings of a concert review. I’ve also received a work in PDF format so I can start reading it straightaway.
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I’m soooo happy!

The second Blogcritics article I put up was featured in the masthead and in the Spotlight column on the front page! I was pretty damn pleased about that!

I told a few people about it via e-mail, and tried to call NMD, who is after all my best friend, to tell him. He’s swotting at uni because he has some big project due as usual. He said he’d have his mobile phone on his person, but when I tried to call twice, there wasn’t any answer. It was a little deflating, not being able to share my good news with him immediately. I should be used to it by now, though…

Anyway, I got so excited, I even took screenshots. Very silly. Besides, I should be thinking of my next article. The second article will be going up here soon; thought that I should let it be up exclusively on the other site first, then post it here a week after. It’s just waiting patiently in the draft folder…

Gee, it only took a month, but finally I submitted my second post for Blogcritics.

It was supposed to be a post about bathing, and when I first got it typed out, I fecking hated it. I mean, really hated it. Usually, when I’m up to the typing-out stage, it means that once it’s typed up, it’ll resemble something indicative of my intellectual faculties or abilities. Well, you know how those damn things work. They let you down.

But after three days of persistence, whinging, rereading, and much more rereading, I don’t want to so much even think the word ‘bath’. I selected the ‘pending’ post status and clicked on the scary save button. So it’s now in the bowels of editorial purgatory. A week later, I’ll put it up here and hope that my faithful reader-friend types will forgive me my utter suckdom. Though, I do feel it’s in better shape now. Phew.

Alas, I must depart. It’s 2pm on Wednesday afternoon, and I’m still in my nightclothes and was supposed to hand in my dole form on Monday. If you’re inclined to be religious, please pray for me: I’m not sure my car has enough petrol to drive me to the social security office.

Oh – before departing, I must tell you of the fun letter I got today, just now. My student debt. 25000 AUD or so owing. The narcs are SO not seeing any of that in the near future. Scabrous dogs.

I remember my friend S bewailing the fact that certain pharmacological/statistics parlance was starting to creep in to American English, and one such word was ‘normalcy’. I groaned in contempt alongside him, as it was pissing me off a bit too.

Another weird word popping up now and then (I saw it on Sephora a while back) is instead of ‘addictive’, we have ‘addicting’. I think it’s cute when Asians use it, because English is not their native tongue. But if I’ve learnt one thing from Melvyn Bragg’s fantastic book The Adventure of English, I shouldn’t criticise: it could be indicative of language and its nature to constantly morph, colloquially or formally.

So what’s my rant about? I’m starting to feel…normal. I get up earlier, and go to bed at a decent hour. I’m still not quite settled in my bedroom, but am managing to sleep well. I’m trying to spend as much time at home as possible because every time I put pressure on myself to make it out for something, I let others, and myself down. It’s weird how in not trying, or forcing myself to be ‘ready’ sooner than I am, I actually get better.

Most of the week has been focussed on trying to write some reviews. I sat down to watch the Metallica documentary, thinking that would be good to review, but found it as laborious and as painful as therapy. Plus, one of the band members was a complete tosser. No review.

I also received two books from the States, one of which I’ve committed to reviewing for Blogcritics and have started to read – Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, by Supervert (yes, that is the author’s name as appears on the book at least). Bit of a brainspin but am enjoying the ride. I wish I could work a bit faster – I’ve 2 blog posts that need typing, and desperately need to do another Blogcritics one, or at least, feel like I need to. I hope they don’t think my slowness to post is about me being lazy, it isn’t.

Yesterday, I had some sort of Adobe Photoshop breakthrough and can now place multiple photos so that they appear in the same workspace. So instead of cropping lots of little images, you can have them appear side by side or arranged however you like. Well, it was a breakthrough for me! Especially as I went from being a complete dumbarse to being able to do what I wanted in a short space of time.

Feels great to be reading again. But damn, I never did find that bloody Jameson essay.

So yesterday, still not quite over seeing my massive Sir Thomas Wyatt-inspired work appearing in print in Chelys Australia, I wake up to even more good news: I’ve just been accepted as a reviewer for the online Blogcritics site!

Such mirth! It also means I have to get writing, and perhaps delay the upcoming post I’ve nearly finished typing…

I’m still very groggy however so this will be a test of sorts, and I’ve not forgotten I owe some dear people (including O who I cancelled on, shame on me) communication of some sort, which I promise is coming! Starting to think I might need uppers! Joke…

Still a sleepy monster. But for once, with some good news.

I received a copy of the yearly journal of a society I’m a member of and – must have completely forgotten about it – it had a lengthy piece of mine published. It was sort of scary to see it in print, perhaps because to my mind, it still had so many flaws. But still, it was kind of cool, too. I can think of a few people I can’t wait to show it to. It does also mean I can’t submit it to another journal that it would have been very suited to. Eh well.

I also got my first spam comment. Yea. It had me a bit confused. I’m officially significant enough to spam! Eh. Not to mention some spam snail mail from the University of Torture (no, I mean the one I went to).

Having a bit of a possession dilemma…have this odd urge to get rid of a whole bunch of girlie makeup things I have, in a mass exodus. The time for comfort spending is drawing to a close, and it might also have had something to do with the fact that I was reading about Ayurveda on Wikipedia. Feeling very wasteful of late, even though I’m not actively wasting anything.

Gosh, getting sleepy again! At least it means I was able to write another blog post which will be ready for publishing really soon. Writing in the middle of the night has its benefits, even if it means you end up going nocturnal. A cat nap is in order, methinks. Please let tomorrow be normal! There are so many things I really should have done at the beginning of the week, groan.