One of my students gave me a present — a Yoshitaka Amano weekly art calendar. She apologised for it being a 2009 calendar, but of course that matters not when it’s Amano. It has a booklet of 52 pictures, many of which were new to me. Quite a lot of them are cute and cartoonish, including several adorable ones of Vampire Hunter D in chibi style.

This is the calendar -

And here is the company that made it -

Art Vivant
- but I can’t find either this or a 2010 calendar, though I’ll check back from time to time.

The Amano section of their site has a gallery of small pictures. To see more works (on the right), click on the link below the pictures with the numeral 10 in it. There are also some small prints (or just postcards, I’m not sure, but they seem to be limited editions) of D and other subjects — some of the links show you extra pictures — but I can’t see any price or ordering information. And if you’re a diehard fan with time to kill, clicking on the top link here will open a navigable advertisement with even more pictures.

On the subject of art, on a recent look-in at Who Killed Bambi I was taken with Al Farrow’s reliquaries made of firearms and ammunition, Claire Morgan’s bird falling through a roof (or planar field) of strawberries, and Shi Jinsong’s nasty nursery furniture.

Or maybe I’ll call it Made in Malkuth.

Well, I’ve basically tidied up We the Enclosed, and I’ve been through all the surreal stuff like Maldoror Abroad and other bits and bobs, including some poems that I want to include, and there isn’t much left to do on all of those. Heart of a Mouse and Saving the Gleeful Horse are too new for me to see what might need doing to them, ditto the story for Baggage, Vision Splendid. I’ll probably wait for an editor’s opinion on those three.

Which means I have four stories to really work on: The Art of Dying, The Love of Beauty, Beach Rubble, and Between the Covers. I want to get them fixed by the end of the year. Yeah, I know that’s a lot of time for four stories, but I know my own sluglike pace, and Preston and I are still working on Book#2, which, I can now reveal, is called The Floating World.

I’d also like to get a couple more new stories down. I’ve only got 73k words, which doesn’t leave much room to cut material, and I think a couple of fresh, not-published-elsewhere stories would be very good to have in the mix. So I could fiddle with them this year and work properly on them next year, and hopefully have 80-90k by mid-year.

In other news, I have plants! Someone was moving house, and I acquired a whole lotta greenery at a bargain-basement 1000 baht the lot, plus ceramic pots. Some of the greenery is rather large; the biggest, a golden cane palm, reaches the ceiling and bends down to overhang the coffee table. We’ve put little paper-lantern party lights in it, which gives a bit of a tiki bar effect at night. There’s also a giant spider lily and an exuberant lady palm, and sundry smaller plants, including a badly sunburnt bird’s nest plant that I’ve put in the bathroom to convalesce (apparently it likes moisture much).

The latest report is that she hit one of the staff and escaped again, using her Jedi superpowers. Assuming cosmic proportions, she went on a stomping rampage through Melbourne, mistaking it for Tokyo (she wasn’t wearing her glasses), tearing up skyscrapers and shooting lasers out of her eyes. Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, seeing (though a periscope in his bunker) my aunt’s potential as a weapon with which he might realise his dream of destroying Adelaide, deployed a crack unit of parking inspectors to capture her. Pulling the dome off Flinders Street Station and the spire off the Arts Centre, she made a mortar and pestle with which she ground the parking inspectors into a hearty (and livery, and bony) soup. Then she wandered west and destroyed Adelaide* anyway.

Mum is none too pleased and has hired an outside carer with ninja superpowers to keep an eye on my aunt. However, in fights between Jedi and ninja, the Jedi usually wins.

*Speaking of Adelaide, South Australia has passed a new law allowing the cloning of human embryos for research, and the mixing of human and animal genetic material. No longer will Adelaide be known as the City of Churches, but as the City of Flying Dog-Men. And you can grow your own dope there. For Baphomet’s sake, does that sound like the kind of place that should be shut down…?

Reading The Age this morning, I came across this: Australia has put together a national advisory group, comprising a psychologist, a child health expert, a Federal Government minister, a model, two fashion retailers, and one current and one former magazine editor, with the task of improving the body image of young women.

“Over the next five months, the group will draft a voluntary code of conduct to look at making magazines and media outlets use a wider range of body shapes and sizes, tell readers when they have retouched photos, and set industry age limits on models.”

Willfully leaving aside the question of how much a “voluntary code of conduct” can “make” anyone do anything, this sounds like a good idea. It would be great if a wide range of figure types were given a positive image. I can’t help thinking, though, that behind this worthy project there is a blind eye turned to the greater problem of our culture’s obsession with beauty, particularly the beauty of young women. The fact that this advisory group has been formed tells me that we think it is terribly important — a matter of national significance, in fact — that young women be able to feel beautiful. And it is that important, because we have made it so. Beauty and the body were mental health issues for some women before the 20th century, but in our image-saturated age so many of us are afflicted with disorders related to perception of the body that the need for public and government action is obvious.

Shining a positive light on different shapes and sizes sounds like one good tactic to employ in the necessary fight. But what if we could also somehow distract the focus of attention away from looks entirely and find ways to praise and glamourise accomplishments, intellect and good character? What if, in other words, we could convince ourselves to stop caring so much about whether we make the grade as sex objects and start caring more about the entirety of our being?

I’m closing my eyes and imagining a world where our natures and deeds, not our looks, would be the bedrock of our self esteem. Where, for those of us who are peacocky, style and flair in personal presentation would be more important than the figure and features that nature’s lottery gave us. Where we would understand that every moment we spend obsessing over the flesh is a moment we steal from the nourishment of the mind and soul.

Opening my eyes, I go back to wishing I had longer legs, a prettier hairline and better teeth…