bush turkey

I was walking along a busy inner west street today. I looked up, and saw a bush turkey sitting on a fence. Strange place for a large bird.

paper trail

I have been going through old papers and diaries, things I've written over the years. It's embarrassing to read, even just to myself. I really wasn't a very good poet.

to-do

The list of things to do snakes through my mind, twisting like a boa around each thought, crushing whims and work alike. No more the creative, I am only coffee and the infinite grind.

history

 I recently rediscovered:

• This blog
• My other blog
• My LiveJournal
• The list of my friends' blogs, almost all abandoned
  
• A friend's webcomics
• My highschool-era personal website

No links. The curious may flex their google-fu.

I'm certain that there has to be a single word in the language of a more emotionally eloquent culture that describes the amusing yet somewhat crushing feeling of stumbling over a tangible and public record of your history and discovering that you, from the feathers in your cap to your embarrassing flaws, are the same person you've always been.

the bird in the fireplace

Today a noisy miner was rescued from our fireplace. It squawked as it flew away from our window, objecting vocally to the indignity of being bodily grabbed, transported, and defenestrated by the pest control guy. After at least two days trapped in the dark, the only light being from my torch as I tried to identify it, I imagine it would soon have forgotten its complaints and gotten to the business of food, water, and being a nuisance. These birds are protected because they're native animals but they're as pervasive as lantana or cane toads. Still, it's a living creature that was saved from a lonely end, and the salvation of which saved our apartment from putridity. All's well that ends well, I guess?

blake 12 ii - the painter

The Painter

I’m on a ferry from Manly
and as the sun’s last rays sink
the city shines.
The fine lines of the Bridge,
the Tower and the towers dissolve,
blue, orange, white stars flare and
gems are strewn luxurious across the bay.
My faith says
God paints glories
in the glories worked by hands.
He made us, we made
the night bejewelled.

Afternoon, I approach the city
crossing from Pyrmont over the old bridge,
a young sunset
sets all glass ablaze
as I walk below the peach golden blue sky.
Though buildings anticipate vermillion,
the water delights in each delicate
shade of sun’s evensong —
gentle colours dance, play
in a millionfold-subtle masterpiece.
My heart says
God’s own hand paints glories
in humble pastels.

- Iain Hart

blake 12 i - the curiosity of my soul

You may remember (unlikely) that I submitted some poems to a poetry prize in 2010 and posted them up here when they weren't successful. Well, this post and the next are last year's attempts! Enjoy.


The Curiosity of my Soul

I died,
and my soul lingered a while.
It looked over my body,
remembering adventures,
tears, smiles,
praise and censure;
felt tension at the parting,
but only as discarding
a too-worn favourite coat.
It turned slowly,
regarding the world it would leave.
Detached already, caring still,
but curious more;
powerless eyes immune to lies
taking in the first sight of truth.

It saw my murderer,
with smoking gun in blood-stained hand,
brandishing his strongest weapon
in the dullness of his eye:
Indifference to the blood he’d shed,
taught him by his father’s fists
and midnight trysts with Jack.
His mother’s wounds ran real and deep
and sore, then numb; and through him too,
as dumbly he stood by. A boy
without a chance to cry or try. The man,
now turning, walking from his kill,
had shot not my body in the night,
but his father’s shadow on his soul.
Turning, walking,
shadowed still, and ever on.

My curious soul,
unburdened of its physical concerns,
followed the man,
watching his gait and his nonchalance.
It conversed with my killer’s conscience,
“Why me? and why tonight?”
And as the man stepped
from the alley into the bustling street,
the reply came:
“Why not?
All will die, and all deserve to.
Didn’t they teach you that in Sunday school?
I just helped you there.
And tonight... well... someone, somewhere, had to die.
I just didn’t want it to be me.”

Pausing, turning,
my soul saw those walking past.
Bowed heads all,
hiding from each other the shame
shining like flames
in their eyes,
the innermost storm.
That man there lied, that girl will,
those children kill, the old man steals
and all of them hide the hope —
the tiny, glimmering diamond of a hope —
they will never be seen.
My soul,
now grieving for the world,
was yet powerless,
so I left.

- Iain Hart

musical mind-games

During my study of music at uni, I picked up an appreciation for musical experimentation. I heard, and participated in, musical expressions which played with more than just notes and rhythms and instrumentation — music which rearranged the concept of music itself as a part of its performance. This was music which was more often described with words than with traditional notation. Or perhaps not even described at all, just existing as the result of a process.

One of my favourite examples was a piece called "I Am Sitting in a Room" by Alvin Lucier. You can find a description and a recording here. Basically, Lucier recorded himself reading out a script in a room, then recorded a playback of the recording in the same room, and repeated the second step many times. By the final repetitions, you can barely hear his voice anymore; you can only hear the resonant frequencies of the room corresponding with the rhythm of their production in his voice. It's not exactly pleasant listening, but I find it fascinating.

Another which I was quite impressed by was "Dripsody" by Hugh Le Caine. It uses the sound of a drop of water falling into a bucket, re-recorded on tape at different speeds, to create something astonishingly complex.

From the sublime to the ridiculous... I found this today: "Call Me Maybe Acapella 147 Times Exponentially Layered" by Dan Deacon, obviously based on "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen.

If you can get past the unfortunately original-sounding beginning, and the fact that the ludicrous lyrics are repeated ad nauseum, you can find another iteration of what intrigued me about the two more serious pieces above. When you mix sounds in unconventional ways, you can hear things you did not expect. The formerly-prominent elements sink into abstraction, while the background sounds take on new and unrecognised forms, somehow bigger and more elaborate than you thought they could be. I know it's based on one of the worst and most insidiously catchy songs ever, but I do admire the kind of musical mind-game that this, and the more venerable works above, are playing at.

surrounded by knowledge

Mmmm distraction

I ought to be studying right now... I'm considering this blog post to be writing practice essential to my academic success. I am sitting in Fisher Library (University of Sydney) in one of the top levels, with row upon row and shelf upon shelf of books to my right, and a late-afternoon-slash-early-evening skyline to my left. This is my favourite place to study; it's quiet and removed from the bustle of uni life and all those noisy first-years (not that that's a problem right now, as it's holiday time), while at the same time it provides enough curiosities to stop me getting too bored while I study.

In general, I am quite a fan of

Libraries

for a number of reasons. On a superficial level, I enjoy the ambiance. It is a relief to know that the society in which one lives values knowledge enough not to burn it, though I think the presence of so much recorded knowledge in one place accounts for only part of the appeal. Fact is, the books themselves are aesthetically appealing. The feel and the smell of a book is a tangible bonus to the abstract acquisition of knowledge. Sometimes it's even more satisfying than the knowledge acquired, if the book is rather terrible or just a bit weird.

Another reason I like libraries is that they contain such a ridiculously broad range of books. They cater for every experience from "This is exactly what I was looking for and was expecting to find here," to "I didn't even know that was a thing!" Take this for example:

If I recall correctly, it's about the

..........................................................................................................................................................

Clearly I couldn't remember what it was about. I started writing this post in early July, faltered, and ultimately failed to complete it. But anyway, here it is! I still really like libraries.

P.S. I think it may have been something about Jesuit monks and a hospital. First one to find the book and tell me gets a high five.

how cool is the universe

Here's something that I think is awesome:

Space.

Space is amazing. It's one of those things on which I can spend hours trawling through Wikipedia pages, or hours flicking through Astronomy Picture of the Day pictures, or other such things. It just fascinates me no end. At the time of writing, APOD has a picture of the sky over the sea near Buenos Aires which shows Venus, Jupiter, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, an asteroid named Vesta and a dwarf planet named Ceres. I read, through clicking through to another page, that Ceres was the first object found in the asteroid belt when they were looking for a planet between Mars and Jupiter. See, I never knew that but it's fascinating. A bit more distracted reading and I find this diagram of trans-Neptunian objects and their orbital inclinations, which also shows a whole lot of other tiny objects floating around the outer solar system. This stuff is nuts. Also, it reminds me of the existence of an asteroid known as 87 Sylvia ('sif that's not named after someone I love dearly) which was the first asteroid known to have two moons. It's a freaking asteroid with a diameter smaller than Tasmania and it has moons!

At this point I could talk about the tweet I saw this week from some bloke, retweeted by a more famous bloke, which said words to the effect that the religious person's admiration of the universe is limited by the notion of God, but that the atheist person's admiration of the universe is infinite... I could talk about that, but I'd prefer to spend my time being amazed by Orion all over again.

clipped wings

My car
has been at the mechanic for the last week, and before that it's been out of action for the better part of a month, and before that it had been unreliable for quite some time. I really miss it! Now I know that you don't generally need a car when living in a city, and I have been able to manage fairly well without it. But I miss being able to drive. I miss it to the point of being whiney about it in general conversation, and even to the point of writing a whiney blog post after I'd determined not to be too whiney anymore. Dang it, I just want to go driving somewhere.

a solution to such a day

I had a rather flat kind of day today. I accomplished very little, after a number of days of accomplishing very little, such that the feeling of having wasted the day was compounded. Not even my procrastination was useful. Which is why I'm very much looking forward to

Sleep

on account of how it tends to provide a fresh start in a new day. I need it; life (thesis, wedding planning, organisation, finding employment, laundry, etc.) doesn't live itself in one's absence.

home again

There is nothing quite like coming home.

The new Barneys building

is finished, and we're settling in and inviting friends around and it all feels very home-like already. Which is excellent. We've been away from our site for six years, so that wasn't necessarily going to happen so quickly. Being away so long has been an excellent way to learn and re-learn that a church isn't a building but a gathering of Christians in any old place. But it's really good to be back, and we're all really thankful.

and you may ask yourself

I was travelling on a bus today and I overheard a couple talking with the driver. The driver was pulling out from behind another bus, a very tight manoeuvre in this instance which he managed well. The couple congratulated him quite sincerely, told him they were impressed he could drive a bus in wet weather, and asked him if it was difficult. They thanked him for driving so well and said they always try to say thank you to their bus drivers. So my happy thought for today is

Nice people.

I wrote this while watching Rage. People are strange, but if they're also nice, all is well.

capturing moments with contraptions

In my defense, I only missed a day because I didn't sleep the night before and I was exhausted and then I had the more important things of the day to worry about. But now, behold, I write.

This is a box. It contains a deconstructed Zenit E single lens reflex camera built in the Soviet Union in 1976. I am repairing it. Well, I mean this in an ad perpetuum kind of way. This photo was taken in May 2011 and I have made approximately 1 repair since, and I don't really know how to put it back together so that it works again, and all the repair manuals are in Russian. Anyway. My happy thought for the day is

Cameras

because I quite like them. And not just the newish, take-good-photos kind. I like the old, take-cool-photos kind as well. And I liked them before liking them made you a hipster.

See, what I like about cameras is how they are quite plainly machines, but their purpose is artistic. What's clear from that photo is that an old camera is a very mechanical device. Too mechanical for me to put it back together easily, but also more mechanical than one thinks about when seeing the pictures it takes:

(To be completely honest, this photo was taken using a Zenit 12XP from 1986, a successor to the E and slightly more advanced electronically - i.e. it has electronics - but very similar mechanically. It was also fitted with the lens from an E).

Basically, cameras are awesome for both sides of the brain. They're like music that you can touch. When I don't want to capture little bits of the world on even smaller bits of celluloid, I can be trying to fix something, and that also makes me happy.

Take this Falcon vest pocket camera for instance. Syl found this on Etsy, and when we bought it, it wouldn't even open. After we gradually prized it open, we detached the shutter mechanism at the front from the bellows. Syl did a great job of cleaning the bellows and making sure they didn't stick together much, while I got the shutter firing again. A deceptively complex mechanism. Pushing the shutter lever about 6mm moves a plate with a hole in it. The hole is then lined up with the opening at the front, but light is blocked by a second plate. The two plates are connected by an angled spring. When the first plate is moved, the spring is contorted to exactly the right point at which it decompresses itself by rotating. As it does so, it also rotates the second plate. The second plate has a sausage-shaped hole in it which passes past the opening at the front of the camera. The length of the sausage-shaped hole and the spring constant of the spring determine the length of time it takes for the hole to pass the opening at the front of the camera, and hence the exposure time. Basically, all of that goes into making a photo like those you saw here. Fixing up this camera has been a great little project for Syl and I, especially since we got to take photos with a camera made sometime before 1941. Yay!