Cafe #8: Cicalata Cafe

Date: Saturday, 17 February 2007, 3.00pm
Location: 323 Lygon Street, Carlton
Coffee: $3.20 - latte (with ice), milky [gluten-free food available]
Reading: Interpretation as Pragmatics

I had an idea I would walk to Parkville through Melbourne Uni - find a cafe in a suburb new to me. But I walked through Melbourne Uni campus for a long time - around cricket fields and colleges - and ended up just about where I started. So here I am again on Lygon Street. But it is good - I asked for latte with ice and it is what I got. ("Do you have ice?" I asked as I stumbled in. I think I sounded parched,looked a bit faint and fuzzy.) A tall lukewarm latte and a water glass full of ice. Exactly it.

This is a cafe I'd describe as fitted out with trendy decor, another long and narrow one. There is a deep brown leather bench along the entire wall of one side,creamy uniform tables, a brown painted floor, bright orange wall boxes behind the counter, ceiling bulbs with enormous round cream shades like wheels and faintly speckled cream granite or somesuch shiny counter. Everything is orderly and symmetrical.

Yesterday I met Anne at Readings so we could head off together for a lunch date at her place in Abbotsford. I said that Melbourne had finally gotten me to put sunscreen on (it has been hot, humid, sunny, clear and there isn't much shade to speak of) and Anne replied that sunscreen may be just as bad if not worse for us than the sun! It was fantastic - everyone else in my life has a mission to get the sunscreen on me, urging me with tales of ozone holes and melanomas. I admit to resisting sunscreen. I can't help but feel much of this sun scare stuff is really just about selling sunscreen. And while I acknowledge that different skin colours react differently to the sun, I feel sufficiently olive-skinned to be out in the sun in the normal course of my day without sunscreen. But the missionaries are making inroads. I still choose not to or forget to wear sunscreen most of the time but I also often feel slightly anxious about develoipng skin cancer. It's like with birth control pills: you realise you forgot a pill and vaguely panic about being pregnant. I get a bad burn and vaguely panic about skin cancer. So my anxiety's just shifted since I'm not on the pill anymore (I'm on the implant).

So, you see, it was very refreshing for someone to not only refrain from the sunscreen lecture but to actively dismiss it.

I did put sunscreen on my back, shoulders, neck and nose today. And I wore a hat.

So maybe I'll move into Anne's house. It so happens that her roommate has decided to move out. The lunch date was also an appointment to check out the house. Abbotsford is still on the northside, though it is closer to the south than Brunswick or Carlton. Anne lives two minutes from the Collingwood train station and near to trams. There is a little grocery shop across the street. The house has two big bedrooms and a small study and a lovely courtyard garden with a circularly laid brick patio. My share of the rent would be a bit more than I was hoping to pay, but given that Anne seems to like the idea of living with me (an idea which no one else who's house I visited has liked) and it is a nice house and I like Anne very much, and the themes of her PhD are similar to mine for my Masters and it is a house of only two people rather than three, four or five, it seems a good idea.
Tomorrow I will do the trip from there to Huntingdale. Well, one route anyway - it is good that there are several combinations of walk/tram/train/bus. So I won't get bored and all weather is catered for.

Anne made me a lovely lunch of salad with browned seeds, roasted eggplant and corn wrapps. For dessert we had yoghurt with crumbled brazil nuts, rice biscuits (cookies) and dark Whitaker's chocolate. Very nice.

It has been a social few days. On Thursday I joined Erin and uni friends for dinner on Lygon Street. I had penne arabbiata - it was okay. We then retired to Erin's courtyard to finish the wine and talk about sex. Last night was many hours at a wood-panelled dusky lounge on Little Bourke Street called Murmer. Erin and I were there with loud Labour supporting sisters. The music in the bar was a bit too loud but the four of us screamed at each other successfully into the evening. I admit to taking a break to find some dinner and get away from the screaming for a bit. I selected a couple of plates from a sushi train.

After finishing numerous drinks at Murmer, we parted ways with the sisters and Erin took me to the Nite Cat, where Duncan was mixing. It is a big-band jazz/swing dance club, but there was acid jazz on and free entry. The Cat is basically a large room enclosing a wooden dance floor. The stage is a large raised block in the middle. There are more chairs low lighbulbs shaded by antique shades of all shapes, sizes and colours. The dancers and drinkers were mostly young and white and not hitting on each other. The band was about done when Erin and I arrived around 1pm but we danced to the recorded music, blusey jazz and a bit of disco and a bit of hip-hop. I was very muggy and tired so had to force myself to keep dancing.

Interpretation as Pragmatics has made that text-as-god leap that I hate so much. I can get with the idea that the author is constructed in the reader's mind and even that total reconstruction of authorial intent is impossible, but it seems an act of faith and irrationality to then see the text as an active structure that creates the author and reader (text as god rather than author as god?). A text is not a person and does not act or create. A person created the text with meaning in mind, picking and choosing the words to get across that meaning. Readers use their personal and cultural resources to understand as much of the meaning as they can. And just because there can be unconscious meaning that the author is unaware of having expressed or conscious meaning that the author has not expressedeffectively does not negate authorial meaning. I wonder that there is so much intellectual debate on the process of reading - it seems so...intuitively rational. But maybe I'm taking this text as creator of meaning thing too seriously. Yet, I feel there's a difference between text as creator and text as communicative tool - and it seems more than mere semantics...

See, reading as religion. People read religious texts to find the meaning given to their lives by god. People invent literary theories to figure out how to find meaning given to their lives by writers.