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...