Nothing thrilling, but recording them in the attempt to acquire better recall.

In the first dream I remember I was with my mother, grandmother and possibly other family members. We were to view the interior of a basilica, however, we had delayed ourselves and the basilica was officially closed; however, a guard told us that we could still go into a chapel, which was inside the main building, from which we would be able to see the rest but not walk around it. The interior looked like a large, ordinary modern building, perhaps a conference centre, with a bit of gold mosaic on the upper walls. Despite my mother’s exhortations to look at this I was more interested in painting some pottery or papier-mache animals that were in the chapel. I am visiting my grandmother tomorrow, which probably accounts for her presence in the dream.

In the second dream I was back at school, ostensibly in the mansion house, though the corridor was modern. Some sort of a reunion was taking place. My friend Indrani was there, and her favourite teacher, and mine, a Glaswegian woman who taught English. She was pretty fierce but an excellent teacher, who showed more of her human side and sense of humour as you went up through the grades. She and Indrani were chatting like old friends and I wondered whether this teacher had ever, in fact, liked me at all - or something along those lines.

I lost contact with Indrani when she moved back to India and married. She is one of the few people from school who I still think about - our long devotional conversations about David Bowie; her monologues about Jim Morrison and, memorably, the lumbar curve of the male geography teacher; the day she had her fabulously long black hair cut off; the very soggy fried rice we cooked in the senior students’ kitchen; and things that I had better not write here. I hope fate will bring our paths together again sometime.

Next night: quite a long dream, from which I only remember a snippet. Without really wanting to I was going to get a Thai tattoo. It would be in the middle of my upper back, where my neck joins my shoulders. I chose a piece of worn-down translucent, amber coloured soap out of a bag at the tatooist’s stall to demonstrate the size. He was young, good looking and friendly. I think he had charmed me into getting a tattoo. However, when I looked at his flash art I didn’t see anything I really wanted. There was a picture of a masked Venetian which I quite liked, but didn’t want it as a tattoo.

I’ve been asked, and have read a few bemused comments re The Etched City along the lines of “Why are Gwynn and Raule’s names gender-reversed? Is it important?” Perhaps it’s a bit much for me to still be going on about the book so long after it was published, but since people are still reading it (it recently went to reprint in the US) and it’s on at least one college course, on the off-chance that any of the people who’ve wondered about the names ever read this blog, a bit of clarification:

Raule is not the male name Raoul. Different spelling = different name. It sounds masculine to our ears, I know, but in her culture it’s a female name; and it just came to me that this was her name, and once I knew it I couldn’t change it. (Incidentally, I’ve just been reading a book by Rose Macaulay where the female lead is called Neville; I found that the name stopped sounding male to me after a couple of pages, just as “Alice” doesn’t seem female when you think of Alice Cooper.) Gwynn is a Welsh male name. It means “white, shining holy, blessed” - heh. There’s a character called Gwynn (or Gwyn) ap Nudd, who at various times fills the portfolios of lord of the underworld, master of the wild hunt, king of the faeries, a companion of King Arthur on one of his quests, abductor of the spring maiden Creiddylad, and a bit of a bastard who cuts some dude’s heart out and makes the dude’s father eat it - or maybe he cut the father’s heart out and made the dude eat it - I forget. Yes, there are women called Gwynn, often as a shortened form of Gwynneth, but the name is originally male.

More about the mythical Gwynn, from British Goblins: Welsh folk-lore, fairy mythology, legends & traditions, by Wirt Sikes:

“Special traditions have located fairy-land in the Vale of Neath, in Glamorganshire. Especially does a certain steep and rugged crag there, called Craig y Ddinas, bear a distinctly awful reputation as a stronghold of the fairy tribe…The sovereign of the fairies, and their especial guardian and protector, was one Gwyn ap Nudd. He was also ruler over the goblin tribe in general. His name often occurs in ancient Welsh poetry. An old bard of the fourteenth century, who, led away by the fairies, rode into a turf bog on a mountain one dark night, called it the fish-pond of Gwyn ap Nudd, a palace for goblins and their tribe. The association of this legendary character with the goblin fame of the Vale of Neath will appear, when it is mentioned that Nudd in Welsh is pronounced simply Neath, and not otherwise.”

People have also wondered why he carries a sword in a world with guns. There are several reasons. 1) Saving ammunition: out in the wilderness, even when there are trees, bullets don’t grow on them, and if you need to kill the unarmed or finish off the wounded a sword is more economical. 2) A weapon of last resort, when you’re out of bullets or don’t have time to reload. 3) Cavalry weapon: Gwynn’s sword is a yataghan, which is a type of sabre. It is hard to shoot accurately from horseback (or camelback), therefore the sabre is useful to mounted troops. 4) Weather: Cold weather in the north, flying dust in the south, would make guns jam. Swords don’t jam. 5)Ego & aesthetics: a nice sword is a status symbol, a symbol of an officer’s authority, & looks kickass.

Okay. Back to novel #2 and moving house.

One book I am leaving here is Takato Yamamoto’s Alter(sic?) of Narcissus, a slim, handsomely presented hardback I bought in Tokyo. Yamamoto’s work is delicate, erotic, often kinky and sometimes gruesome. Happily for little ol’ perverted me, some of it is online:

http://www.mondobizzarro.net/gallery/artists/yamamoto.php

http://www.aestheticism.com/members/gallery/yamamoto/ 

http://japon.canalblog.com/archives/2006/11/04/3077668.html 

Google images 

It’s raining! Yippee! It rained the night before last, and again last night, and now the sky is covered in thick lead-grey clouds and it’s raining again. There hasn’t been enough rainfall to make a difference to the catchments but parched rural areas have received desperately needed millimetres.

From The Age: “Absolutely magnificent — it’s about 33 years since we’ve had rain like that,” said Grampians-Wimmera water board member Frank McClelland. “Our tanks are overflowing.” He said the rain would be “an enormous relief to the town (of Horsham) — you’ve got no idea, people were getting frightened”.

Has the drought broken? No. As the article says, it’ll take more than this. But even a crack is something. A respite, at least, and some time gained.

I am now staring glumly at a pile of 70-odd books I am very fond of. I can’t take more than half of them with me. One I’m regretfully leaving behind is Light Verse from the Floating World, a collection of premodern Japanese senryu, compiled and translated by Makoto Ueda.

A few favourites:

with a black dog
for a lantern, he walks
along the snowy path

maple viewing:
his mother tells him not to do
what he did last year

“My old man
still wants to go north
instead of west”
(The Yoshiwara was in the northern part of Edo. The Buddhist paradise was believed to lie in the west.)

when they’ve finished
praising the winter moon
the slam the door on it

starting to kill himself
the actor stops to watch a fight
in the audience

her only pleasures:
tormenting the daughter-in-law
and visiting the temple

“Don’t go out
with that fellow,” both fathers
tell their sons

the love letter
from a man she doesn’t care for -
she shows it to mother

“There is no hell” -
to his mistress, the priest
tells the truth

locked up at home
his dreams roam
the pleasure quarters
(a parody of Basho’s deathbed poem: ailing on a journey/ my dreams roam / a withered moor)

his head drooped so low
the reprimand passes
far above it

According to BBC news, singer Sheryl Crow, in a campaign against environmentally irresponsible paper napkins, has ‘designed a clothing line with what she calls a “dining sleeve”. The sleeve is detachable and can be replaced with another “dining sleeve” after the diner has used it to wipe his or her mouth.’

Yes, I can see this catching on amongst all the best people. Before the fires of fashion start to rage, however, a small voice in the head, probably belonging to the shade of one of my great aunts, murmurs something about cloth napkins and, in their absence, handkerchiefs. I know, I know, it’s so 1937. But good cloth napery is classy. Wiping your gob on your sleeve is not. Even I know that.

I got a reply back from Expedia telling me to call a certain number. The number didn’t work. I wrote back to them asking if it was an Australian number. They didn’t answer that, but gave me another number. It also didn’t work. Finally they say it’s a non toll free overseas number. I’m currently talking to an Indian call centre over a staticky line. I’m on hold… ah, now she’s saying they did give the airline the ticket number. Of course. Impasse. Nothing I can do, really. Perhaps they’re telling the truth, however, I haven’t been impressed with Expedia’s service. Won’t be using them again.

In the queue at the ticket counter I got chatting with an American woman. Our talk got onto politics (they had been in Bhutan, which is about to vote for the first time) and I mentioned that a federal election was coming up in Australia. She didn’t know that voting is compulsory here and was very surprised. How did we enforce it, she asked. Well, we don’t have squads dragging people out of their homes and marching them to the polling booths, but if you’re on the electoral role (which not everyone is; some people never register to vote) and you don’t vote, you’re fined. There are exemptions for the elderly, the ill, people who are overseas and others who are unable or incompetent. She gave the impression of thinking it a bit much to require people to vote, and said she didn’t know how Americans would react to compulsory suffrage. So often, she said, there’s no one you want to vote for. She saw voting as a right which you could choose to exercise or not. I couldn’t think of a defence of Australia’s system until after I’d left the queue. The answer, of course, is that where the people are sovereign (never mind the Windsors), it’s perfectly logical to think of voting as a duty more than a right. Sure, most of the time you’re choosing the lesser of two evils, but that’s part of a sovereign’s job. As I’ll be overseas again by then I won’t have to vote, but I’ll be putting in my postal vote anyway - choosing the least worst of two untempting choices. (NB - not a criticism of countries with optional voting, just a stab at explaining why we make it compulsory.)

Pros and cons of home:

+ve: I can drive.
-ve: I have to drive everywhere because nothing’s within walking distance.

+ve: tree-lined streets.
-ve: Bloody fucking felching leafblowers. What’s wrong with a rake?

+ve: velvety quilted toilet paper.
-ve: no hose.

+ve: I can understand everything I hear and read.
-ve: I can understand everything I hear and read.

Apparently there are some mysterious bills on out credit card from Pierre Herme, a well-known patisserie in Paris. I remember my translator telling me I must have a macaroon there, but I never did The amounts of these bills? 450 and 700 Euro - and there were two more transactions that the bank caught and blocked. Now, Pierre Herme may not be cheap, but that’s still a hell of a lot of gateau. I had an instant image of the culprit - a lonely, whalishly obese person carrying cakes and biscuits home by the carload then eating them for days and nights on end, slowly pushing fistful after fistful of carbohydrate into their poor mouth, unable to stop, reduced to credit card fraud to feed their addiction.
Or perhaps it was Mr Creosote.

The flight back to Melbourne was pretty good. Getting on the plane I’m standing behind a guy who looks like a Tom of Finland drawing. The queenly steward, who looks like the Cat from Red Dwarf, dressed in the spiffy Malaysian Airlines green suit with brocade peaked lapels, grins and drawls lovingly, “Welcome aboard, you’re looking good…” On the Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne leg, which was a night flight I had a row of seats to myself. I stretched out and got a pretty good sleep of 4 or 5 hours. My father in law met me at the airport and filled me in on things here at home - which means the drought, pretty much, and the failure of the federal and most state governments, meaning both the major political parties, to do anything about it. I’ve been following the newspapers, but since they don’t report everything I’d hoped that a bit of work on the problem had quietly been going on. Apparently not. I will hopefully get time to write about it properly later on, but the news in brief is that we’re looking at the cut-off of irrigation in the Murray-Darling basin and the shutdown of a major hydroelectric station this year. Here in Victoria the state government backed a desalination plant - then apparently forgot about it. In Queensland they’ve recently decided to recycle sewage for drinking water - which is already done in, of all places, soggy England. It should have been made standard practice in Australia years ago. This is a dry continent. We know little about its historical climate patterns. Water conservation is therefore prudent, whatever the weather happens to be doing in a short-term timeframe.

I’m boxing books, DVDs and CDs. 30 boxes so far. I think I’m about 1/3 of the way through. Then there’ll be notebooks, sketchbooks, and those tangles of electronica that accumulate in geek-occupied households. My parents came down from Castelmaine and helped me yesterday, which made a big dent in the work. I’m cataloguing everything so that we know which box it’s in, which slows things down considerably but might save some trouble later on. Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, abbreviated, is City of S&M, which made me smile and made me wonder if Jeff will ever write about the sex dungeons of Ambergris. Packing everything up is somewhat melancholy. When my parents were here my mother said, “And when you move back permanently you can…” I had to say that I wasn’t sure we would be back permanently. The hard part is deciding which of my favourite books to leave here and which to take. I’m allowing one box. I hated packing away my Yoshitaka Amano artbooks, but they’re the kind of large format floppy paperbacks that will get battered if I haul them around with me. The only DVD Ireally want to take me is Bastard!!, for some reason. I have a voice in my head saying bad things will happen to me if I pack Dark Schneider away in a box.

Well, I’m still in Bangkok. Whether this is the fault of Malaysian Airlines or Expedia Travel remains yet to be determined - the airline says Expedia didn’t give them my ticket number, causing my ticket to expire, and Expedia hasn’t replied to my email yet - but I can at least bask in the warm righteous glow of knowing it isn’t my fault. I’ve rebooked my flight and will be leaving this evening. Anyway, I thought I’d check the news back home via The Age newspaper and ended up reading this travel blog post about toilets overseas and at home. Bog standard stuff, really; I’m only mentioning it because the writer reminisces about wondering what the hose in a Malaysian toilet was for. Toilets with hoses are common in Thailand, in fact we have one in our apartment, so I can offer enlightenment.

It is for:
1) Washing your bum (obviously?)
2) Filling a container with water and using the water to wash your bum
3) Washing anything else
4) Cleaning the toilet
5) Flushing the toilet in case of no other means, either by direct application of water pressure or filling a bucket
6) Using as a water cannon against cockroaches, giant centipedes, children, slaves and any other creepy crawlies in your bathroom
7) Home colonics. Colonics are an expensive spa treatment in Thailand; why not do it yourself with your trusty hose? (only for areas where water supply is clean)
8] If you have two toilets next to each other you can have a water fight (though this practise is not encouraged, as seen here and here, where the adjacent toilets lack hoses)

The key is to be creative. The uses of the hose are limited only by your imagination.