[1]. Today I am 27 years old on the 27^th day of the month. 27; the number of current amendments to the US Constitution, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the age at which Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Alain-Fournier died. There are 27 bones in the human hand and 27 member states in the European Union. I was born when my father was 27 years old which makes this the only remaining year when his age will be exactly double mine (unless he lives to be 108). When Dad was 27 the Falklands War was just beginning, he was working as an electrician installing emergency lights into the stairwells of skyscrapers in London, and he listened to Dire Straits on Capital FM. At age 27 today’s news covered the outbreak of Swine Influenza in Mexico, the United States and New Zealand, I am still studying for my PhD and I listen to the music that I’ve most recently downloaded.

I have been feeling a bit apprehensive about this birthday. All birthday celebrations have something of the apotropaic about them, a mealy cake offered to the hungry world as bargain for the birthday-ee’s continued safety and luck, but this 27^th seems particularly charged. A distinct geometric motif speaks to the feeling - that this is a hinge year. A corner is coming up fast and I’ve no idea if the momentum means to push me nose-first into a hard plane, or turn me out into some new landscape. The edginess of things.     

[2]. I am living in Perth, in the house on a steep hill that belongs to my parents. The incline makes it difficult to get out of a car. Postmen weave up the centre of the road throwing handfuls of mail in the vicinity of the houses because if they stop, their bikes roll backwards and topple. The plants I grow slip two inches down the hill every year, peeling back fresh garden-bed at the top of the block in Spring. I had intended to move out on returning from Holland last year, but with my PhD thesis due in December and no sensible share-house room becoming available I have negotiated a compassionate rate of board to stay here until the end of the year. I have partially converted the upstairs bedroom that used to belong to LG into a kind of study space and I am sleeping in the basement. During the day I work with an eye cast to the garden and the blind collie we keep, who walks into walls and fights ghost-cats. I talk to her through the open window and she flicks her brow the way dogs do, searching for the hand that matches the voice. Her sense of audible distance is impaired now too.

In some ways this the ideal work environment - insulated and isolated. In other ways, it is a lonely place. The dog doesn’t like to be inside anymore and usually there are no other people walking along the suburban street during the day. Routines establish, decay and re-establish. A month ago a dry windstorm came down the coast during a green-waste collection, when all the heavy litter was laid on the verges. I was trying to hose the front lawn (useless, backwards water-flowers) when a child’s playhouse, what used to be called a Wendy House, came hurtling down the street as if it were on coasters. It crashed into a electricity pole near the bottom of the hill in a spectacular chrysanthemum of splinters. But no one else was there to see it with me, except the unseeing dog. All night the stumbling of air currents, the wind with its feet stuck in its trousers. These are the sorts of days I like here. Today is a bright still day, the sky a colour only nature has language for. Clouds come in like rays in the evening. Last year the weather was colder. 

I have become a bit houseproud recently. Not that this has had a huge discernable impact on my living environment, but I notice an increased enthusiasm for the purchase of things that have no practical use-value - for example vases and bonsais. I have bought three vases in the last three months, but I have no local florist. Possible, dendritic origins of this desire: firstly, there is some sense that this place I am living is not my place, or at least not a place that the adult me feels ownership over; secondly, I have acceded to the simple, visceral object-pleasure one gets from weighing an excellent soup spoon in the palm of one’s hand, quite apart from any economic or intellectual ideas about the worth of such an object; thirdly, I am mainlining the financial stimulus message being pumped from the halls of power presently; fourthly, I am artificially flattering myself for having some kind of ‘taste’ to make up for not being able to go out an exercise such taste in the public sphere (I’m housebound with the thesis at the moment); fifthly, the lived temporariness of being here is being beat back by a woman holding a vase in each fist and shaking them at the ceiling. Either way, I’ve now made a long-term commitment to a miniature fig-tree named Thumble.    

[3]. I am currently sitting at the desk my study, flanked on all sides by highlighter-streaked articles and notes. I often can’t understand my own notes, but take pleasure in the delayed surreality of their interpretation. One reads ‘the anxiety of clearings’ (exclamation point), another ‘Sappho, the brackets (boom>?)’ and another ‘Ophthalmia Ranges - seeing and naming, and not-seeing and naming’. On the wall there are some dymaxion maps, landscape photographs and print-outs. One print-out is Kafka; an excerpt from a letter to his friend Milena Jesenka. Another print-out is a quote from Amy Hempel’s short-story In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried. Another is a poem by Sean O’Brien. There is also a brown envelope with half a rabbit on it and a relevant timeline of dates and word-counts.

I am wearing a green t-shirt, black running pants and white socks as I have just come from the gym. No jewellery. Two days ago I dyed my hair recession blonde i.e. an accidental carroty flax. Since last writing this address I have acquired a tattoo on the top of my left foot. The image is a series of calligraphic lines that form a bird, although I have also been told that it looks a bit like a character in the Arabic alphabet, a boat on the ocean (a local government logo?) or a flame burning sideways. I slightly ashamed to say that the image comes from a collection on Shutterbox. The ambiguity of the design was part of its appeal, and the choice of a bird had familial connotations that it isn’t worth digressing into here. It did hurt, but I never expected that it wouldn’t. My sister has the same tattoo and whenever I feel the breath of trouble on my neck, I look down at my shoes and feel a bit stronger.

[4.]      I have changed my diet since last year by cutting out all meat other than fish and reducing how much dairy I have, particularly yoghurt which I used to eat for breakfast every day. The reasons for doing this were equal parts ecological, ethical and health-related. I weigh 58 kilograms, no more or less than last year. There are still times that I feel the presence of my body as a impairing influence - an experience I’m certain everyone shares regardless of whether they are male or female. Times when the thoughts flare ‘they’d take me seriously if I was really tall, like formidably, intimidatingly tall (with a Modigliani neck)’, and ‘how should I be standing so that no one looks at my nearly-thirty knees?’.  It’s true, age and confidence do not diminish the background noise of self-criticism cultivated in a private girls’ school. Somehow I thought there would come a day when my body was somehow, less conspicuous to me. At the same time, when I’m running or stretching or dancing or meditating, I completely love this scaffold. I’m as healthy as I’ve ever been if you put aside the tide-lines of stress. The last thing I ate was tom yum soup. This afternoon my dad is making me an ugly/delicious walnut cake and in the evening my mum will cook my favourite meal of salmon and cold, spiced pumpkin salad. 

            As for my mental health, studying the end of the world through flood hasn’t always been conducive to stability in the last year. But like my physical health, I decided to make salubrious brain chemistry a priority in a year when external pressures are so high. Whereas I thought this would involve a cloying process of self-involved (rd. selfish) deconstruction, I’ve discovered the merit found in a certain degree of detachment - not remoteness or erasure, but a better response system for dealing with what is internally over-hyped. I am the haruspex of my own strange habits. As was pointed out to me by a good friend recently there’s no control specimen of yourself against which to compare yourself, so you might as well embrace the curious, contradictory paths your mind takes.        

[5.]      I have quit all other work obligations other than my thesis this year, with the intention of just doing one thing well. The work is coming along, but it’s still far from being finished. Or perhaps not that far - I think I have lost the ability to see within the territory populate-able by the subject matter the territory that I will ultimately claim. All of the work needs to be finished by December so I am bunkered down with it now. I have an excellent supervisor and unlike many other final year PhD students I do not now hate the topic area of my thesis. If anything, I find it daily more and more interesting. In other thesis-related achievements, I gave my first lecture to an undergraduate class of eco-philosophy students this year. I am giving a conference paper on the ‘Mare Incognitum (Unknown Sea) in Australian Cartographic Imagination’ in Perth in June, and another paper on the ‘Photography of the Catastrophic Seascape; Some Implications for the New Ecological Uncanny’ in Cardiff in July. With luck and diligence in one week I will be done with a complete draft of the exegesis, and will return to the creative dissertation.

[6.]      In terms of a personal ethos, I imagine that I am now more environmentally minded than I used to be (a foreseeable corollary of my studies). My current academic/writerly crush is on Rebecca Solnit, an American landscape writer. I am starting to think about what long term ambitions I have outside of defining a set of intellectual preoccupations and the tonic-note motivation of simply being a better writer than yesterday. I have some abstract ideas about setting up an Australian version of the Centre for Land Use Interpretation; a sort of cross-institutional think tank outside of the academy, but that is a distant ambition at the moment. There are few universities with a strong eco-philosophy school in Australia; certainly nothing like some of the Canadian universities (Trent for example), or the University of Vermont in the United States. The University of Newcastle shows signs of being ahead of the rest back home. I am hoping that the Cardiff conference will be instrumental in helping me define these intentions more concretely. I would like to write more creative non-fiction in this field though, and am currently working on preliminary research for a short (but getting longer) cultural history of the burning tree in Australia. Some of the ideas that are expounded in my exegesis may well be applicable outside of the waterscape sphere, the possibilities of which are exciting.

[7.]      I am not religious, and much to my grandmother’s chagrin I did not go to church this Easter (sometimes I tell her I’m a forest Christian, which only perplexes her further). I have however, been reading a lot of apocalyptic literature for my study this year and have had cause to dig into religious texts for relevant references (the book of Job particularly “who shut in the sea with doors, who can tilt the waterskins of heaven?”). The world ending in deluge is a distinctly biblical exemplum, with parallels in most of the world’s major religions (for example, in the Islamic tradition Noah’s boat rests on Mount Judi during the great flood (Suras 11 & 71 of the Qur’an), the Hindu Puranic story of Manu, the Deucalion in Greek mythology, the Prose Edda and Ragnarök in Norse mythology and Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Murray-Darling Basin on the Eastern Seaboard of Australia the Indigenous dreaming traditions tell of a great frog that drank all the water and then flooded the land when it laughed etc.). Thomas Burnett, writing in The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684) considered it significant that the ocean is absent from the Garden of Eden, omitted from the Judeo-Christian concept of paradise. As a morally punitive element the ocean only appears in the Biblical tradition after Noah’s flood and although it retracts, the sea remains in the basins of the earth as a persistent reminder of the wickedness of mankind; godless, unpredictable and the subject of divine augury. The ocean is the void into which human beings and human things are plunged in order to be cleansed. The antediluvian world washed. My main interest however, is in the spatial vocabulary of apocalypse. It is the landscape beneath the landscape that rises in the apocalypse; the shaking off of built contours to reveal a literal and figurative underworld. Cities razed by fire. Floods raised by divine will. The environment takes on a kind of morally punitive agency that is distinctly theocratic. The very word apocalypse comes from the ecclesiastical Latin, in turn from the Greek apokalupsis; from apokaluptein to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’. The apocalypse does not come down from above, or arrive diachronically from the future. The apocalypse is located beneath the land, where it shares synchronicities with ‘underworld’. For apocalypse to materialise, we move through the catastrophe either in the form of a catastrophic event or as the culmination of incremental change. So the underworld ascends and civilisation sinks into a Boschian Garden of Earthly Delights like a city into a swamp. Importantly for my purposes there is also that other constant in the palimpsest of the land, for underneath everything, imaginatively bonding with the apocalypse there is water. McCarthy in The Road: Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence. But if this interests you, you’ll have to wait until I’ve finished writing it.      

[8.]      Love. I started to write point eight as a reflection on fear and a kind of future-tense nostalgia for things which optimism promulgates, but evidence tempers; and then I realised that actually, in summary this has been a beautiful, beautiful year for love. Love in the smallest gestures; the intimate weight of a sleeping friend’s head on my shoulder in a plane, weekly swimming-dates, the return of another friend to Perth who had us all crying and laughing ridiculously into our books, the overseas contingent of departed friends who still call me on days when I’ve locked my keys in the car, nights spent sitting on basketball courts with the fabric of our clothes closely touching, not quite looking at one another. And other kinds of love too of course. I’ve dated some completely amazing men this year; talented, gorgeous, desirous, intelligent, kind men. I’ve feel so privileged to have shared time and closeness with these people. Kindness now, is a virtue I value above many others. Kindness, honesty and assertiveness. At the moment the status of love in my life might best be summarised by the saccharine pop-cultural caption, ‘you don’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need’. I’m single. I hope one day I’ll be the person whose voice you most want to hear when the phone rings in a distant room. And that being someone’s most hoped for voice is only the beginning of it. 

[9.]      Financially, I have finally managed to pay off my credit card, consolidate my superannuation into an ethical investment fund and hopefully saved enough money for a short holiday after I finish my thesis. With no extra work I am now living off my university stipend - which is making most luxuries unaffordable but doesn’t seem to be stemming my purchase of vases and my irresponsible book-buying habits. At one point I thought I might be able to claim for all books bought through my tax, so I’ve kept all the damning receipts in a drawer. 2009 might well be classed the year of the impulsively purchased photographic monograph. I haven’t yet received the stimulus package grant of $900.00 that is being made available this year to all Australians within specific tax brackets. I’m not sure if this might mean I’m ineligible, having earned less than the lower threshold allows for (my stipend is tax-free). I check my account for the arrival of this soft-footed money often. I own no real estate property, but I do have a rundown little car, a lovely laptop computer and some comfortably dented furniture.

I have no notable drug-use or addictions to report, other than a once-daily coffee fix and a propensity for watering the garden for too long.

[10.]    I am currently reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, which has just been nominated for the Miles Franklin and Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease. One of my favourite presents this year has been a copy of Leviathan or The Whale by Philip Hoare which arrived wrapped in a map. The last work I published was poetry in Stop Drop & Roll and I have a piece about David Berman appearing in the upcoming Cutwater journal. I also have some work appearing alongside the photography of Gene Eaton in the Boom project. The last live reading I did was at Cottonmouth in April. The last movie I saw was Synecdoche New York. The last music I purchased was the new Bill Callahan record Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. The last track played on my computer is ‘Commes des enfants’ by Coeur de Pirate. The last meal I cooked was an ordinary napolitana pasta made in a hungry rush. The last text message in my phone reads ‘Happy Birthday dear! Hope you had a great day x o alli’ and it is from Allison Browning. The last email I got was from a friend in Houston and is part of a cycle of emails reviewing the weekend that I keep up with my international friends through. My last three Google searches are ‘how many astronauts are in space now’, ‘Tanner Lectures, Scarry’ and ‘Terry Faulke, wilderness’. The last man I kissed is younger than me.

[11.]     Since writing this address last year I have visited Holland (Utrecht and Amsterdam) and the United Kingdom. Later this year I will do that trip again, with a side journey to Wales for the ‘Art, Literature and Culture in an Age of Global Risk’ Conference. Within Australia I have been up North to work as a Writer-in-Residence for five weeks in Broome, and over to Melbourne. I would still very much like to live and work in another international city, although I suspect my next move will be over East in 2010.

[12.]     I am a member of International PEN, the Concrete Organisation, a book-club called ‘Words for Everything’ and I sit on the board of an independent press. I am an RTR Fm subscriber and a public library user. This morning I have an invitation in my email inbox to join a fortnightly dessert-eating club. Up until February I was a member of the Cottonmouth Organising Committee. I have no health insurance or union memberships, both of which ought to change once I finish my thesis. 

[13.]     Today I will stay relatively close to home after the morning’s excursion to the gym. (Now that I am writing completing this statement the day after my birthday I can project the rest of the day with some accuracy). In the morning a friend who currently lives in Boston will call me to wish me a happy birthday and ask if I will be her bridesmaid when she gets marries her astronaut fiancé next year. Actually, he’s not an astronaut, he’s a physicist with a research interest in bone weakness, or is he a petrochemical engineer? Possibly he is all or none of these things. At any length, I will be honoured by this request and I will say yes, so long as she doesn’t make me wear apricot tulle. I have never been a bridesmaid before, but it makes me boundlessly happy to be in this bride’s corner.

I will go out mid-afternoon and have coffee with a friend who has just started her career as a lawyer. She loves her job and it shines under her skin, but perhaps we both recognise that she is being absorbed into a world I will only ever have partial knowledge of and feel intimidated by.

I will come home and help my mother assemble the salad. The smell of Fabulon starch will be in the house with the music of the ABC News, both things which strongly remind me of my childhood. In the evening I will pace the front verge talking animatedly into my phone about the hypothetical of what to do with a half full bag of rice belonging to someone who has died. Is it more respectful to eat the rice or to throw it out? What does this mean with respect to my insistence on decanting rice into containers? Am I providing less or more emotional ballast for anyone who would have to sort out my posthumous pantry? I hang up the phone and remind myself to let only one thing matter at a time. Then I go back inside and eat a piece of the birthday cake that my dad proudly proclaims to be a ‘10/10 in adherence to the recipe’ (he’s secretly snuck in some grated apple though, when my mum wasn’t looking). Later, to bed, I dream I am lying with a glass paperweight balanced on my forehead and that I am trying to imitate being asleep and dreaming but that really I’m awake. A meditative dream of sorts, the cool heaviness of the weight between my eyes. I sleep perfectly still so as not to let it slip. And dream myself to be waiting for morning to come, to be 27 and a day. 

Status of My Life Address 26.

Status of My Life Address 25. 

A room of The Important Things for 2008 is here

The Important Things from 2007
The Important Things from 2006

In this one you can't really see, but the white parts are cut-out using a scalpel.

First Page will be launched on August 2 at The Bakery. I'll post more about the book and its amazing contributors then.

a. Today I am 26 years old; the atomic number of iron, the age at which you can no longer be drafted into the United States armed forces, the number of the letters in the alphabet if you don't count capitals separately. Sometimes when I reflect on this age I feel quite young and green. Other times, when I reflect that it has been a decade since I turned sixteen, I feel quite old. I wish I'd written a S.o.M.L.A when I was sixteen so that I could remember what my dreams and aspirations were then.

b. I am currently living in the basement of my parent's house, having moved from my home near the park about a month ago. The reasons for the move were threefold - the priority reason being financial (so that I can save enough money to go and visit my sister in Holland later in the year), secondarily concerning my studies (the downhill run of my postgrad thesis) and thirdly to re-centre after twelve intense months. Here I live with the geckos and the centipedes underground. Last night I found a beetle the size of my thumb between the sheets. I like all the small life here, the crawling and the clicking things. A legless lizard lives in the shower and a jumping spiders inhabit the drawers. Where ever I work now it seems that the outside world wants to get in to see me. Within the first week of moving here my father broke the big window that looks in on the study upstairs and so I worked for a week amongst the finely shattered glass and the weather. At my old house last winter the air-conditioner just fell out of wall as I was typing, leaving a gapping hole. Sometimes I think I should just take my laptop and sit in the dirt.

It is quiet here. It is not a suburb made for walking. All the verges run down to the road. The phrase 'speed traps', a locution from my primary-school years, comes to mind as I wander around the contorting streets. There are many new houses being built. They start with the basements, deep pits in the ground set with cages of electrical wiring and thin water pipes. The roots of the houses going back into the earth. Later come house-skeletons with coils of insulated cable hanging from the rafters - all the loose vein-work. I miss living with MMM, DL & SB by the park for so many reasons, but I can see the advantages of being sequestered off in this (bricked) basement. I am trying not to be a child here, I am trying to better my relationship with my parents in adulthood. I do not think I am doing a good job in that respect. I often wonder how it would be if we could not live in the same city, if I didn't hear a passing 'how you doing there doll?' once a week. One advantage to having returned home after such a long period living elsewhere is that all the foibles of your family you assumed were solely meant to aggravate you have actually been going on in your absence uninterrupted - so you can accept them as nothing to do with you. My parents are renovating the front of the house at the moment. In the middle of the day I open the garage door and discover workmen sprawled asleep like road crash victims on the concrete.

c. I am currently sitting on the sofa in the front room. It is a ship of a sofa; wide and deep. Outside the clouds are hairy and threatening rain. This morning I ate breakfast at Aubergines in Fremantle and then drove up to the brainsick house in Beard Street, and quickly past it twice. I wanted to take some photos but I'd forgotten my camera. My neck is stiff and seems to creak if I move my head too sharply. Probably this is from laptop over-use. There is old French jazz playing in the distance, which I am enjoying. I am wearing black tights, a dress with orange leaves on it, a thick scarf and the bird earrings that twin a pair L has in Holland. My toenails are painted plum and my hair is newly dyed a chestnut/auburn. I still have all my limbs, all my digits and the ganglion in my left wrist.

d. In the last 24 hours I have been sick. I suspect this is because I ate too much dairy and red meat yesterday, after being persuaded over the last six months to cut back on both those food groups by the vegan SB. But yesterday I went out for dinner and supposed I felt like reverting to a carnivorous state, so I ate kangaroo skewers. I weigh less than last year but not by design. I am not tall and never will be now.

e. I am working three shifts a week at the book store. I am an occasional wordsmith-consultant for a few arts-bodies in Perth. I was appointed to the Board of a small Press here in Western Australia a few months ago and meet with them for half a day every month. I am presently involved with two local writing projects, Cottonmouth and First Page. I have been appointed to the peer-assessment panel for Project Development and Young People and the Arts literature grants managed by the Department of Culture and the Arts since last I wrote about the State of My Life.

The largest job consuming my time is my thesis, the words of which nibble at me like a cloud of mosquitos even when I'm not sitting at my desk. (Really, you want to hear more about my thesis? Well okay then).

My thesis consists of two components; a creative dissertation and a theoretical exegesis. The creative part is planned to comprise eight episodes, each offering a different reading of seascapes and anxious landscapes set in varied environments. Each of these sections broadly correspond with the movement of a wave; from the retreat of the preceding waters, to the growth of the bore wave, first-sighting, inundation, cross flow, loss of velocity, withdrawal and the exposure of a re-formed topography. The sections are all prefaced with a short evocation of the wave using poetic conventions, playing with the page-space as a double boundary that can parallel the wash-zones between water and land. A series of narrative links ultimately draws together the disparate vignettes, so that the final work mimics a delta in structure (all the stories run out to the sea - nifty, no?). Not all of the sections take place in coastal zones: the novel also explores how the impact of a disaster such as the Asian Tsunami can extend beyond the fringes of a country and ripple towards the interior. A wide variety of genre conventions are used within the different sections; from dystopia, to ghost story, to a diarised account.

The subject focus of the theory has honed in on seascapes and other wet landscapes (flooded spaces, coastal plains, littorals and landscapes marked by the rise of subterranean water); environments that have unstable cultural valences, but are rarely confronted head-on. Seascapes are slippery surfaces for the grafting of multiple and often competing meanings, particularly within the Euro-centric/Australian imagination. They are often universalised (initially understood as 'not-land' in a cartographic sense) and romanticised. While much academic work has been done on ideas of the 'vacant interior' in Australia, there is a substantial gap in work done on contemporary notions of the vacant exterior, the shifting environment beyond the edge of continents. The exegesis takes up this thread, situating its analysis within a modern milieu beset by the memory of violent environments including Hurricane Katrina, the Great Sumatra-Andaman undersea earthquake and the Asian Tsunami Disaster of 2004, as well as an anticipated future in which the first of the Pacific Islands will sink and the seas will rise.

The exegesis looks at 'environmental otherness' in the context of contemporary understandings of nature as a source of capricious violence and moral/social guilt. The central argument is that the strange and sublime agency of natural disaster manifests as a latent presence in our experience of seascapes that are not conspicuously catastrophic, as well as those that are. From environmental otherness the theory moves into a discussion of the 'ecological uncanny' with respect to seascapes; whereby familiar settings are seeded with an internal unfamiliarity creating multiple disjunctions in their interpretation. This is an idea with currency in modern psychology (recently distilled as the term 'solastalgia') as well cultural theory and art theory. A discussion of the emergence of the ecological uncanny looks at ideas about the nuclear uncanny, the nature of violence (particularly terrorism) and fear, and the Postmodern sublime. The exegesis argues that we calibrate new scales and methodologies by which to understand these fluid environments as a result of the ecological uncanny. We position ourselves outside of the afflicting/afflicted space - usually by building sites above it, both physically and psychologically (the subject of Chapter 1 of the exegesis). We shift our understanding of the space in time - casting the shadows of former environments over the present, or creating a déjà vu of future landscapes resident in the immediate environment (the subject of Chapter 2 of the exegesis). The result of these theoretical relocations is that we register a sense of the 'ecological uncanny' in both external (spatial) and internal (psychological) fields. Behind each of these re-positionings is a notion of the sacred and the profane in nature (a discussion that runs through the entire work).

The exegesis uses the work of two photographers, Susanne Majuri (Bodies of Water) and Richard Misrach (On the Beach), as well as the fiction monograph The Road by Cormac McCarthy as primary texts to illustrate the theory discussed. Other subordinate texts are also used to demonstrate specific ideas along the way, including cartographic sources, other modern literature, photography, and examples from science, politics and popular culture. The exegesis brings together ideas from canonised theorists (Jean Baudrillard on catastrophe, Paul Virilio on violence, Werner Hamacher on disaster and semiotics, and Jacques Derrida on the nuclear age), as well as writing by contemporary theorists (Jonathon Bordo on wilderness and witness, WJT Mitchell on landscape theory, Max Kozloff on photography) and the ideas of writers working outside of academic discourses (Nicolas Rothwell on uncanny landscape, Michael Chabon on apocalypse, James Hamilton-Paterson on the ocean).

My studies started as an MA but have now been upgraded to a PhD, which sees me finishing mid-year next year. The working titles are 'The Water Library' for the creative piece and 'The Rise of the Edge: Catastrophic seascapes and Other Wet Landscapes in the New Ecological Uncanny". The last title is all pomp. In fact both of them will probably change. I am busy then. The job I most enjoy is the thesis (even though this is the most stressful part of my life presently), followed closely second by the work at the bookstore.

f. There are new understandings about the space behind my eyelids and the motivations for my actions since last I wrote this annual report. Some of these understandings are so small they do not bear mentioning here. Others are so large they are inappropriate to mention here. Of those that I will mention here, on the negative side of the equation: I have come to realise that I have an over-developed sense of emotional empathy for other people, and that whilst this might improve my abilities as a writer it does not help me to achieve any useful clarity or indeed to help others. I have come to realise that I amplify the weaknesses of people who love me on equal, or greater measure to augmenting their strengths, and that in people with certain personalities this can prove to be more destructive than any the positives my love can inspire. I have learnt I have a great capacity for self-sabotage. On the upside side of the equation: I have learnt that I have more emotional fortitude than I thought I had. I have learnt that it is also productive to stay still, to stay only in the instant moment, to listen and not to talk. I have learnt that to be more self-possessed does not entail being excessively introspect, that it is found in the minutia of doing both small and big things.

g. I am not religious, but I believe in core morals that could be construed as a personal spiritual ethic. In saying that, there have been times that I have prayed, in some form or another over the last year. There have been times where that has seemed the only appropriate response, particularly in the presence of sudden death or severe illness. Maybe it's more like creative visualisation than prayer, although that sounds too much like The Secret. I have seen things my subconscious has recognised as omens and I have sought signs of shifting luck, although I've always had a cautious optimism about these indicia. I've acted counter to those signs and regretted it. My dreams have been vivid and filled with internal symbolic valences. I have faith in other people, I have faith in myself. I meditate because it's the only way I have to get quiet. I believe in the curative power of good conversation, exercise, clean food and a sleep in a bed where the sheets smell like rain.

h. I am currently single. I have had two short romantic entanglements over the last year, but none have lasted or progressed to a depth beyond initial (albeit intense) fervour. Both these romances were with good men with some turbulence in their lives, who were leaving the country. It's a modus operandi I'd like to change, although both made me very happy in our truncated time together. I suspect that I spent a long time walking around with my heart strung like a valentines' balloon out of my chest since last I wrote this report; a thin skinned heart too high for either me or anyone else to reach. This is undoubtedly a reaction to the end of a long-term relationship nearly a year ago, and its' later revelations. I have been untrusting and to some degree insular beneath an act of charm. But these days I am feeling much more whole again, because after all this I am no longer heavy with the past. I think that only in the last month or two that I have pulled my heart down from the air and put it back where it belongs. It is of course, frightening to be in this place. But Hey Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken again. Should I meet the right person in the right headspace, and for that I am happy to wait and wait. Meanwhile, I develop rolling crushes on men with lovely forearms and/or careless haircuts.

i. I am saving to go and see my sister over in Holland later in the year, so find myself relatively debt free and with a few grand tucked away for a ticket. The money I was paying in rent at the Park House now goes into a locked account where I can't touch it. I plan to go for a month, and also go to see my relatives and friends in the United Kingdom whilst in that part of the world. I still owe the Australian Government some astronomical sum in HECS fees, largely for my law degree. I have finally paid off the student loan I owed for the purchase of my car. While I seem to have a bit of money presently, I suspect that on return from the European sojourn I will once more find myself broke.

I do not take drugs. I do not smoke and never have, although I don't mind other people smoking around me. I do drink, but increasingly I drink less. I never drink at home. After about three glasses of wine and I'm telling stories about sea creatures (the recreational interest of my thesis) so that's probably best. In summer I drink g & t, now that it's cold I mostly drink red wine. I have one coffee a day, sometimes not. If I have more than two coffees in a day I feel like I can see through time.

j. I am currently reading The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Dìaz, Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi, Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon and some less interesting theory books for study. My favourite two books since last writing the S.o.M.L.A have been Actual Air by David Berman and Seven Tenths, the Sea and Its Thresholds by James Hamilton-Paterson. The last movie I saw (I am somewhat ashamed to admit) was Vantage Point with DL when we were both too tired to go out on a Saturday night. The last DVD I watched was The Squid and the Whale. The last gig I went to was In the Pines, where I really enjoyed The Tigers but had to leave before SP played (which was a shame because apparently that was a lot of fun). I liked standing in the sawdust and wearing a scarf and drinking hot citrusy wine that night. The last thing I bought was a cup of coffee this morning. The last meal I cooked was spicy veggie burgers with cucumber and homus in pitta bread.

k. I have not visited any different countries since I last wrote the S.o.M.L.A, although I did go to Newcastle for the first time last October. I quite liked it there and I hope to go again for the This Is Not Art Festival later in the year. I think I may end up spending some extended time in the Eastern States after I finish my thesis, but it is too far away to consider seriously just yet. Other countries I would like to visit in the future include; Turkey, India, China and the States.

l. I am a member of a book-club, a political party, International PEN, The Concrete Organisation, an informal set of people who walk aimlessly at night and sometimes write down notes about what they see. I do yoga every week at a studio in Leederville. I am left-handed. I have a broad constellation of moles. I like the smell of old steel nails, interesting facts about skyscrapers, the Latin names for the stellar seas and growing edible plants.

m. For my birthday I will go out tonight to have a meal with friends. I have had numerous texts and messages today that have made me smile. My mother bought me a pair of boots for my birthday and my sister has sent a parcel which is yet to arrive. I have cards from my grandparents and a voucher for a massage (which I am so looking forward to) from three of my international friends. I will drive home in the evening tonight amidst the most impressive of electrical storms.

n. It's been a hard year. I've tried my best to be a good person, but there are certainly instances where I have not been. Instances where I've compromised when I shouldn't have, where I've held onto anger when I should have let go, where I've failed to forgive myself. But there have also been achievements, realisations and - goddamn it - laughter. I have danced all night. I have run five laps without stopping. I have been rendered speechless by art and by nature. I have changed my favourite animal three times. I have felt the sun on my shoulders while I swum in the ocean. I have felt passionately about an idea and argued for it cogently. I have worn through three pairs of shoes. I have started a project and ended a fight. I have had so much pride in and love for my sister in particular, despite being so far away. I have changed my opinion and accepted a perspective. I have stood on the top of the hill at sunrise. I have written well. I have been surrounded by the most amazing people, who ceaselessly inspire and drive me, who believe in me. People I have been able to give back to. These gifts are immeasurably precious to me.

Outside it is the strangest light before the coming rain storm. I am 26 today.

Status of My Life Address 2007, Age 25.

The bomb-maker has her hot heart,
shining like a new tomato,
in the cage of his fingertips,
and he is binding it into a trap of wires.
Cruelly casual about the crust of sawdust
it slips, and it skids and
he, [gasp] catches it in his shirt.
Her delicate aorta a mortar
to be handled glass-ishly.

It is small, plum-sized her heart.
Watching her lover red-handed
she considers that it would pump an ocean
if left to its own devices.
The unshelled crab of her heart
would nosedive from the work-bench,
crawl over the linoleum
and seek a Pacific of love.

Her heart swells, when she sees him
leaving the bathroom in the morning
carrying the spine of a bell pepper
that he has eaten in the shower.
But in the twists of the fastenings
it just seems so stunted, such an undernourished organ.

There he says as he slots it back between her ribs
I have reinforced your heart against all known shockwaves,
you are built against many types of modern violence.
At quiet night, inside her body's muscle clicking blood nicking
chorus, she notices that the alloyed heart softly ticks,
like a old record left turning after the song is finished.

The bomb-maker has her teeth,
unusual mineral sharps
out in a line on the mattress
and he is setting in tiny detonators.
He looses a molar, forgets their order
sucks absently on an canine
as if it were a boiled sweet.
Her kiss will list to one side of his face,
the incisors have their claws down.

But she thinks, my teeth will sing,
bleaching the sheets in the sun.
She thinks, they will ring like tuning forks
when I tap them together.
my mouth will be full of song and sparks
my palette will split bright syllables
and my children will be born
with egg-teeth. Like snakes.

Her mouth sizzles with the unstable
electricity of just-woken bones
in the morning.
And when they are lip pressed in that dim hour
she is avoiding the dark dreams that have
fallen into the back of his throat overnight.

Here he says screwing the teeth back into her gums
Each of these is new polished, sequin obscene smile
your laughter will be radioactive, leaving no one un magnetised.
Drinking green tea one morning she burns the
fleshy node between her two front teeth
and discovers diamond-shrapnel hidden there.

The Bombmaker puts helium
in her food, fills her with the noble elements
makes her back crooked with welding
and combs dynamite dust through her hair
in the evenings.
With each small repair she is aware
that he is making her minutely more perfect.
Her fingernails are grenade pins.
Her footsoles are landmines.

All the batteries in the town drain down.
They count bus-stops, they
swim between the sea-mines.
Small nuclear clouds clutter the air
like the pastel ghosts of jellyfish.

And here's what the bombmakers' lover knows:
that clinical strikes and spasm wars,
and sensory deprevation are just other words for us,
And that in love we are all a cluster bomb.

They light a fuse. They blow the lights out.

Looking at the site I suddenly remembered that under the floorboards of an old house in Wembley Lucy and I had stowed a time-capsule with imagined letters written by the ghosts of the dead children of the future (it was probably found on the first termite inspection - our open alphabet, the childish A’s and E’s, giving us away). “To whoever finds this. You have uncorked a ghost" I think it said. Mind you, ghosts in a bottle are a dime a dozen on ebay these days. We liked to leave our traces as children, to bury trinkets in the alley or hide our objet d'arts (invariably made from toothpicks, grass knots and old toast) in the crooks of fig trees.

The love notes on the Object Not Found site still hold their voltage, evidence of abandoned intimacies and broken trysts. Next time I write a love letter I don’t mean to send I’m not going to hit delete or screw it into a fist and put it in the household bin. I’m going to leave it, folded neatly in some inconspicuous public space. Maybe between the slats of a bus stop bench, or buried in a coffee sack at Kakulas. Imagine all those words that we have in our repositories – too charged for us to keep, too confidential to let go. Rip off the by-line I say! Free-range objects set to inspire their finders.

In the aftermath of tropical cyclones Floyd and Glenda in the Pilbara last year The Chaser ran a sketch about corporate naming rights to weather systems. In the sketch Julian Morrow approaches NAB, AWB, the ALP and others offering to sell them the branding rights to the next major cyclone (‘Glenda’ being, after all, a name that conjures up canteen-lady-in-orthopaedic-shoes-and-a-lilac-rinse, not potentially razing natural catastrophe – although I doubt that anyone out on the rigs had that image in their heads during the storms). If you felt a certain sadness that the Chaser boys didn’t coming knocking at your office door, if somewhere deep in the atoms of your heart you thought how nice it would be if one day your name came up on the cyclonic register, you can wipe away that frown! You can now Adopt-A-Vortex!

That’s right, for the equivalent of $AUD317.73-$477.40, you can buy the rights to name a European weather cell. The price range accords with whether you want to adopt a high or a low pressure system. Interestingly, the lows are cheaper despite the fact that they produce the most impressive weather. The guidelines for names are relatively generous and the whole transaction is concluded by means of facsimile (if the name is ‘free’ and has not yet been claimed) or by ebay bidding if more than one individual wants to claim a specific name. Once you’ve purchased your vortex you can follow its origin, course and demise on the German Institute of Meteorology website. After the destruction is complete and your vortex has devolved from fire-raining tempest into a simpering eddy on the corner of the map, you are provided with a birth certificate and a post-mortem document that diarises its short and terrible life. Nothing says I love you like the coroner’s report on a vortex named after your loved one or your favourite pet! “I made that sunset for you", you can whisper one lazy night on the beach, knowing that your personal vortex is building a soft metropolis in the sky to be torn into a storm the next morning. Think of the potential to find romance in climatic apocalypse! Swooning against your lover under skies rent asunder by your namesakes. The kiss of your low and high pressures manifest in bright bolts of actual symbolic allegory! Or, alternatively, take pleasure in seeing your vortex chew on the ruins of your enemies - lightning nests, earthquake weather, firewinds are all newly at your disposal!

Unfortunately it seems that the current foster parents of vortexes do not share my vision for the potential of naming their progeny. The most recent name for a low pressure system? Lupus'. The firmament as autoimmune disease. I suppose that it could be stretched to dovetail with the whole Gaia hypothesis in the context of global warming and extreme weather conditions, but seriously, lupus? Or maybe there’s something quasi-voodoo going on there, whereby someone actually suffering lupus has given that name to a cyclone in an attempt to purge the illness from their body in the same way that cancer suffers will name their tumours ‘Egbert’ or ‘Marla’. I am, however, looking forward to cyclone Ralph and the Otto blizzards of 2008…

The naming of weather cells seems to me to be just another step along the continuum of anthropomorphising the natural world and correlatively, trying to bring it under our overt control as an agent of culture. Privatising that process further impels the belief that this is possible. Just as only cartography can render local usage into international standard, the institutions of meteorology play a much larger role in universalising discourses about the weather than merely predicting its local manifestations. Is radical meteorology the next logical progression from radical cartography? Certainly surreal things are already happening in the world of government-sponsored weather modification. In Russia they seed the clouds with chemical reagents to prevent it raining in the capital on national holidays. As far back as the Goodwill Games in 1994 Saint Petersburg’s Geophysics Observatory was involved in ‘cloudbusting’, to keep the sun shining over competitors. And if you really want to read something vertigo-inspiring, sit down with a G & T and peruse “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, a report actioned by the US Airforce in 1996. It covers the hard science as to how drought might be instigated in drug-producing regions, how fog might be rolled in to obscure sensitive military activities and how storm systems can confer technological advantages on a force with better surveillance equipment. Most awe-inspiring, it looks at the uses of near-space in modifying the weather. And this was 1996.

Maybe our desire to name the vortexes above us is also coming to be an assumption of culpability for the manifestations of ‘violent environments’. As we extend our acts of nomenclature and our desire to manipulate the atmosphere by conscious acts (instead of our injurious, undirected omission), are we also willing to acknowledge that there is now no part of the natural that now isn’t touched by our presence on the Earth? The sift of atmospheric gases, the darkest sea-floors unseen by human eyes; even these are now irreparably altered by our abundances and excesses. A flotilla of rubbish twice the size of Texas casts its shadows over sea creatures the human eye will never see in the depths of the North Pacific. The troposphere is riddled with chlorine and bromine atoms in places far removed from the smokestacks of industry. The vortexes we name are already amplified, displaced and seasonally-warped - even if only incrementally - by us. This act of naming cannot be an act of appropriating the world ‘out there’, as it is when we name starfields or planets. This naming is an act of assumption, of acquisition. And I’m not saying there should be nostalgia for some pure aesthetic of wilderness or the touchless sky, only that we should understand what motivates us to name, and how we come to be bound to the named.

But I suspect that the father of ‘Lupus’ doesn’t really dwell on these things.

Marginalia: Why aren’t there better names for clouds? Cirrus, altostratus, stratocumulus: they sound like names for vegetation - thick and clotted names best fit for breeds of weed or hardwoods. Someone needs to write a new glossary for clouds. Names that evoke their gossamer qualities and electric propensities. Words we can only say as our voices thin – when we’re up in the upper stratas, inhaling the ozone. Or perhaps this is my bathetic side coming through. I suppose the clouds should have coagulated names to match their content. If you could bite into a cloud, I imagine that they would now taste like biting al-foil.

See how they mew and ask to be thumbed-through?

Although the royal-blue covers with their gold embossing are impressive, the parts I like most about this book are inside the covers and within the first xxiv pages. These are the chapter headings and their thesis-statements. Here is an excerpt:

The Gulf Stream is Roof-Shaped! Facts and Pearls! An Office for Icebergs! How could you not want to don a stripey vest and swim out through the breakers after reading that?! Capt. Maury was a prolific writer and researcher when at sea. The Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology is a good precursor to juxtapose against James Hamilton Paterson's excellent contemporary work Seven Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds (if you should feel yourself oddly compelled by this post to dive into good literature about oceans). Among his other pursuits, Maury also set up the "Ladies’ Protective and Relief Society: an organisation dedicated to the support of destitute children and indigent women" with his wife Adelaide. In 1895 the Berkeley Advocate reported his demise as follows - At the stilly hour of midnight the cold hand of death visited Berkeley and took Captain Maury with only a few moments notice. The doctor was called but he could give him no relief in any way. Even his death has literary flair then. I wonder if they buried him at sea, with a stitch through the nose.

The next book recently acquired is Rachel L. Carson's The Sea Around Us. Rachel Carson's most famous work is Silent Spring which, unless you have been living underneath the ground in a survivalist cult, you will know as one of the first books to kick off the modern environmentalist movement. The premise of that book was that chemical biomagnification and habitat degredation were one day going to result in the 'silent spring', when there were suddenly no birds left to sing. Silent Spring is widely accredited with having initiated the ban on DDT. The Sea Around Us is quite different to Silent Spring, but it has the same distinctive Carson voice.

The parts I like most of all about the book are this map on the inside of the back and front covers, and this very special little beastie who appears to mark the chapter headings:

What is he exactly? An aquatic Chinese New Year's Dragon? A very large axolotl?

Carson's book include these intriguing chapter titles: "The Shape of Ancient Seas", "The Sunless Sea", "Hidden Lands", Wealth from the Salt" and "The Birth of an Island". In more recent years she's become a somewhat controversial figure, largely as the result of a cost-benefit analysis of the use of DDT to prevent malaria-carrying mosquitoes, as against the harm it does to the environment. Have to say that I personally come down on the side of not using DDT. The websites that disagree with that positon are a little scary.

Finally now, because I must stop sharing book smut now and return to my anaemic thesis, the last book. This I picked up the last time that I was wandering through Melbourne's paperback catacombs. A yellow-faced lovely called What the Human Race is Up To.

28 Outlines! the cover proclaims, 160,000 words! In one bound volume What the Human Race is Up to takes the contemporary temperature of history, biology, cosmology, physics, mathematics and more. I particularly liked these two headings - 'The Private Worlds of Animals' and 'Who and Why?'.

In a slightly postmodern glitch, the book also has a section entitled 'living in cities' in the part devoted to the arts. I do love a book that lays claim to being a comprehensive synopsis of the entire world of known things. The Maury does that too, but with a more refined focus. In the foreword of W.T.H.R.I.U.T, N. Mitchinson argues that since Einstein 'put cracks in physics' the world's body of knowledge has been destabilised, and that this book is an attempt to redefine the edges of that body. Brilliant. I used to shelve a glossy-coated copy of HG Wells equally interesting 2 volume A Short History of the World, which purported to be a book of the same character and is now quite a collectors' item. It has a good home with someone who loves it more now though.

Back to these onion-skin pages and the other tasks at hand. You want more book porn? You hussy.

"The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is linguists' intellectual lemonade. While at work this evening I've been bathing in the sub-audible cerebral fizz, ignoring customers and trying in vain to mouth the words. Also something about buffalos, but more on that in a moment.

The text is written by Zhao Yuanren and consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years have resulted in a large degree of homophony in Classical Chinese, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible when spoken out in Putonghua or when written romanised.

The following is the text in Hanyu Pinyin and Chinese characters. Pinyin orthography recommends writing numbers in Arabic numerals, so the number shí would be written as 10.

« Shī Shì shí shī shi»
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shi shì, shi shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shi shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shi shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shi shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
Here I would put the Chinese script, but I suspect Movable Type doesn't support it because it keeps inserting these little diamonds with question marks in them, so instead here is the Pinyin Transcription of the Vernacular Chinese
«Shī Shì chī shīzi jì»
Yǒu yí wèi zhù zài shíshì l de shīrén jiào Shī Shì, ài chī shīzi, juéxīn yào chī shí zhī shīzi.
T chángcháng qù shìchǎng kàn shīzi.
Shí diǎnzhng, gnghǎo yǒu shí zhī shīzi dào le shìchǎng.
Nà shíhòu, gnghǎo Shī Shì yě dào le shìchǎng.
Ta kànjiàn nà shí zhī shīzi, biàn fàng jiàn, bǎ nà shí zhī shīzi sha si le.
Ta shí qi nà shí zhī shīzi de shīti, dài dào shíshì.
Shíshì shī le shui, Shī Shì jiào shìcóng bǎ shíshì ca gan.
Shíshì ca gan le, ta cái shìshi chī nà shí zhī shīzi.
Chī de shíhòu, cái faxiàn nà shí zhī shīzi, yuánlái shì shí zhī shítou de shīzi shīti.
Shìshi jiěshì zhè jiàn shì ba.

Meaning in English:
In a stone den was a poet Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that those ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

Yes. It's quite beautiful and curious even in English. I think that in Chinese it works on the same basis as the "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" conundrum in English, wherein that sentence is grammatically correct if you take into account that the word 'buffalo' can be (a) the place in New York (b) the animal (c) the verb - as in to bully or intimidate.

[Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [that] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo). [Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo. Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Cathy, did you know that they say that although the Golden Gate bridge towers are absolutely plumb vertical, their tops are a centimetre further apart than their bases? The curvature of the Earth. You're off to an amazing place. I will come visit soon and we can go to McSweeneys. Until then, wishing you buffalos and lion-eating poets.

Yum, said the Poet