Saturday, April 21, 2007

Café #16: Bigmouth

Date: Friday, 13 April 2007, 7.45pm
Location: corner Acland and Fitzroy Streets, St Kilda
Wine: $5.00, red - okay (no gluten-free)
Reading: Petersburg

I am sitting in a glass-windowed room with low lighting, leather window-benches, black-clothed tables, with candles and curls of red pinprick Christmas lights hung from the verandah roof on both sides of the corner cafe. There is a (fake) fern and flowers on top of the cake counter and a vase of peach lilies on the raised bar-style table traversing diagonally the centre of the room. There are copper-painted walls with black and gold swirly ferny designs in the corner window.

Previous to now I walked along St Kilda beach, reading Petersburg. I must get it finished tonight so I can start writing my essay tomorrow. I still have about thirty pages to go and am feeling drowsy. I suppose the red wine doesn’t help with that.

Reading Petersburg again has been a pleasure. However, I do now look forward to being done and embarking upon a previously unread book – and getting the paper done. It doesn’t really interest me; I like the book very much, but I don’t feel the need to write an essay on it at the moment. The Derrida/Barthes essay interests me more. Reading about Bely’s Symbolism makes me wonder if what I want to explore for my thesis is actually rationality and metaphysics: is metaphysics rational or religious? Does that depend on how you define metaphysics? Is it characterised by a sense of reality outside of the materially experienced world or is it the sense of transcendental meaning that exists outside of the systems of human meaning-making? I don’t know yet.

I wandered around the St Kilda Readings bookshop (After having potato cakes and chips – strange healthy-battered cakes that tasted brown-ricey. Great chips though.) feeling burdened by all the philosophy and modern classics I’ve still to read. Maybe I waste time reading random contemporary fiction. Hopefully there’s room enough in my life for both.

My week-long holiday is almost over. I have to get up at 7.30am on Monday to go to work. It’s been lovely: I got lots done – cleaning, organising, filling out forms, breaking dishware, cooking, op shopping (for some warm clothes and some cute clothes) and studying. Me and Derrida have spent a lot of time together over the past week, with Barthes interrupting at the end. I wrote an essay contribution for a Vibewire project, got to a comedy festival performance with Tony and Alison, who are visiting Melbourne for the festival and family. We saw Greg Fleet and Mick Moriarty. It was not a very funny stand-up routine and Greg told a joke about a husband who watched his wife give birth likening the experience to watching his favourite pub burning down. That put me right off. It boggles me that in today’s supposedly (post)feminist times such jokes still get told.

Anyway, I should be off home to sew up some holes in my clothes...

Monday, April 9, 2007

Cafe #15: The Local

Date: Good Friday, 6 April 2007, 3.10pm
Location: 22/24 Bay Street, Port Melbourne
Wine: $5.50, white - okay
Reading: Of Grammatology

Okay, so this is a pub and not a cafe, I'm drinking wine not coffee, but I've got a view out to the bay, a glass of cold drink and a pencil. It is a beautiful, sunny day after a week of rain and chill. There are idyllic puffy clouds in the sky and enormous puffy bluebottle jellyfish on the shore, often looking like a blown-up latex doctor's glove.

Today I am discovering Port Melbourne. The Port itself is boardwalks and trendy restaurants, but if you walk around it you reach the beach. The beaches are small but more inviting than St Kilda - less rocky and shallow - which is several beaches farther on.

I will be short because I'm writing with a blunt-leaded pencil. The past several days have been good. I've done some good thinking - phenomenology, Derrida, Barthes... The more I read those last two the more I find myself agreeing with them. Oi, such changes. (More difficult to write a paper in agreement...) Maybe I can figure out if Barthes theory of reading works with Derrida's theory of writing.

Oooh, 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' is emanating from the pub! It is a cute and oldish pub, upkept old, not crumbling old. Browny-grey, maroon and beigey-yellow. Richly patterned carpet, a stained glass panel topping the roof of the bar with antique books lined up on top.

Okay, pencil nearly dead.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Cafe #14: Friends of the Earth

Date: Saturday, 24 March 2007, 3.10pm
Location: Smith and Perry Streets, Fitzroy
Coffee: $3.50, latte - okay
Reading: The Dialectic of Enlightenment

I'm writing with my lovely felt-tip purple pen, the one that's yellow with white pinstripes!

I can't imagine that I deserve to have life feel this good. I now have: a great house, a great housemate, a bookshop job, a few fun and lovely friends, a bunch of engaged and smart people to share seminars with, and lots of spontaneity and sun. What more can a person want except not to have a job at all?

Now that I know when I work and when I go to class I think I may go to some social swing dances again or try to find some other sort of group-type thing in order to facilitate meeting more people. Maybe finding folk music nights or poetry slams or somesuch.

It has been an up-and-down week. I will not go much into the down. I completed my first assignment, a 2000-word class presentation, which I think went fine and of which I am curious to see what mark it earns. I wrote/talked about Foucault's notions of modernism - simulacra and transgression - and Lacan's mirror stage theory: Ideal-I, Gestalt, imago, ego. Then I used the theories to interpret a few of Picasso's renderings of Velazquez's painting entitled Las Meninas. It was a fun exercise to interpret art, but I am afraid I may have ran away with my concepts in the flow of writing. Did it all make sense, or was it mere linguistic flourish? This is a problem, I think, that many modern and postmodern theorists suffer from. Difficult and sometimes pretty to read, but sensible?

My first day of paid employment was yesterday and I trained at the Caulfield campus bookshop. On Monday I begin at the Alfred Hospital branch, which I understand is to be my working home. It was a good first day as far as first days at new jobs go. I am very lucky to have avoided first semester rush. But second semester rush will happen. I was also lucky to have begun work on the day of a big end-of-rush party. This involved a lovely zen-ish cafe venue with a separate function room, an open bar kindly payed for by my employer, lovely finger foods (including a huge bowl of only-okay baba ghannouj), and two fellow employees (men) with guitars and a classic rock repetoire. S opened his time as entertainer with Wish You Were Here, so I felt sure I was in the right workplace. After the men with guitars put away their guitars, the bar put on dance music and several of us, mostly women, danced and danced. It was a lovely time. I left around 9.15pm to take Ann out. We went to a cute local pub, with ratty couches and a leg-kicking lamp on the bar, and listened to a good band with an awesome slide player. All I need now is to sleep better - been a bit insomniac - and all will be perfect.

Friends of the Earth is a hippy joint - all organic and fair trade and bulk. It is a big wood shop, with books and t-shirts, candles and vegies and hippies cooking lunch. The background music is quiet and bell-like, which is a nice change from the usual cafe jazz. There are hardly any people here, but there is a child.