I feel better today. Mark found me in a miserable heap muttering crazily about "word formats being against me, and the world too" so he is going to help me with his keen proofreading eye on the weekend. I also had a nice day which made me stop and think about the fact that even though I am working about 6-10 hours a day every day on this damn thesis, I still get to be flexible and do things it would be hard to do in another job.

First I went to a Writer's Festival event that Naomi had booked but had to miss because of sickness (get well soon!), it was good. It was an interview with Michael Burleigh and Orlando Figes who are experts on the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia respectively (I also really like Peter Mares who is the temporary The Book Show presenter). The session was about evil, but that concept was more or less summarily dismissed early on as not all that useful. I would have liked a bit more in depth probing of evil itself, and why perhaps we label these regimes as evil, while we don't with others. But it was interesting.

Then I was passing ACMI and as one of my friends has just got a job there I thought I should have a look see as I never go. The main exhibition is correspondences: víctor erice and abbas kiarostami . I didn't look at everything because there was a lot there, but some of the highlights were a parallel film by both filmakers about childhood, one in Spain and one in Iran, just exisiting alongside one another rather than making a didactic point. Very beautiful.

Then I went into the next room and realised the Kirostami's photos are some of my favourites! I hadn't put the filmaker togethr with the photographer for some reason.
Here is one that is in the exhibition:


I will go back again.

Then I did a bit of a cafe attached to library editing crawl. I had a flat white at Journal and edited 'Shows and spectacle', then wandered through Myer to try expensive hand creams, then went to Mr Tulk and had a radicchio and taleggio toasted sandwich and edited Illusions, the stayed for a flat white and struggled with editing 'Fake and Ephemeral Structures'.

I am skipping my scheduled supervision because I just don't have the drafts of my Introduction and Chapter One ready, sigh, I have worked on them very hard but I just can't meet any deadlines I set myself. I worked for well over 10 hours editing yesterday until my brain imploded and I was questioning everything. It is all very well to set these deadlines but it just feels like everything will in reality take so much longer.

On one hand the editing seems more straightforward because I have distance from the writing, but then after a few pages of re-writing every line I just get depressed about how crappy some of it is. I also feel sort of trapped behind some wall and I just can't push through to get these things done, I can see how they need to be and what I need to do but I just can't get there. Even straightforward things like finishing footnotes and I have the books and texts and I can't even get up to get the books and finish them.

I think all this feels compounded by teaching a ubject I feel is rubbishy and have zero enthusiasm for, which I also think represents the future of unis, including more of this badly paid teaching, but unfortunately being badly paid is better than being completely poor. Honestly, what is the point of having a PhD if all it guarantees is really badly paid teaching of subjects I don't even like?

Mark found my scarf, hurrah, when I woke up this morning I noticed he had carefully hung it over the bed head.so I would see it.

Today has been useless, I had a huge list of things to do but did none. I am so cooold too and Mark keeps switching the heater off it is only 12 degrees inside.

I am so drunkity drunk, and I haven't even really drunk that much, just ate nothing all day, silly sillly. Had drinks tonight for my friends, it was meant to be a celebration of their civil union but the British High Commission didn't give back Huw's passport ( he is heading to UK for study) so they couldn't go to NZ for the ceremony. Damn you england

So in the end it was just a happy boozy night. I have left Mark at it, I was literally falling asleep in the supper club. I also may have lost my most favourite scarf, which is also one of my most favourite possessions ever, I bought it in Florence! Eeek, I am hoping it turns up. sad times.

I did meet a hugely obnoxious person though, urgh, she talked down to me like I was 12, then I said something about 'when I started uni in 1998' and all these people said 'oh my, you make us feel so old', and they are all about 30. Ummmmm ok then.

Another week of teaching down. It is amazing how different groups of students can be. If I was only teaching my first group I would be seriously doubting my ability as a teacher, they sit there oh so silent. I have resorted to giving them group work, even group discussion, which goes against my tutoring ideal, but it is better than silence.

I am a bit frustrated with my thesis. I had a plan all done last Wednesday but I haven't got anything done, a combination of busy-ness and disorganisation. Yesterday was meant to be my day for writing my Introduction, I went in to un i to have a form signed, and then started worrying that I actually had no idea what an introduction should be like, I have an introductory chapter, but what goes in the introduction. I think ideally my recipe is "pithy quote that sums up problem" - followed by my intelligent yet well balanced insight into the existence of the problem and lack of research, followed by the more ho hum list of what is in each chapter but done in such a way as to seem like a seemless and persuasive progression toward a higher plane of understanding. Hmm. I looked at some other thesis online from the states and felt better about the appalling lack of grammar.

Then I went to the market and bought olives and bread and gave up on my plan of a burek as the crush was too intense.

I then felt tired and went home but I should have persevered in my plan to go to Journal and order green tea and write my introduction as I just ended up mucking around and tweaking things at home. I am so sure the convenience of word processing is far outweighed by the distractions provided by the internet, spider solitaire and so on. Maybe there was a window of oppurtunity between the coming of convenient computer word processing and the computer becoming a portal to procrastination. On the other hand I am pretty sure we had computers at home for games before we had them for work.

Off topic have other people ever noticed the delightful combination of homo-eroticism and homemaking in the Manchester Unity building in a scene I call 'Nude men buy houses'?

Tea and cake

Is what I am eating, vanilla tea with cherry and cream cheese strudel. Yum.

Had the fusion panel today, it went fine, I may have spent quite a lot of it pretending to take notes and in fact writing my new thesis intro.

This weekend holdeth:

Breakfast get together, slightly frightening but I am sure I can get up, then there is my fear of crossing the river, argh!

Drinks for a new doctor, hurrah, I must let it be inspriing and celebratory and not feel down because of my slowness.

Winter feast at mum and dad's, I will make chocolate brownies and huddle in front of the fire.

Art Fair

I wandered off to the art fair at the exhibition buildings on Sunday. It was good. I had a hangover. Maybe that helped to filter the enormous amount of information.

I haven't really been to an art fair before. The space was chock full of art, a lot to take in, people seemed to be having real trouble with their spatial awareness, possibly spatial awareness actually switches off in cases of visual over-stimulation.

I found it both fun and overwhelming to look at so much art, especially in the short time I had.
Good and bad and just stuff about the art fair.

- Boring or shit artwork looks much worse, when you can look over your shoulder and see something that is better and more engaging I just don't feel the need to try and engage with anything that is pretentious or dull.

-Looking at how much art costs is fun, the art fair is about selling after all. I had fun reflecting on the way a monetary value might be arrived at for different works of art. It is also just fun thinking "$24 000, for THAT SHIT", teehee.

-Looking at how galleries present themselves is fun. Apparently the fashions on the field were not so exciting on Sunday, even Anna Schwartz had dressed down to jeans, black of course.

Some art I took photos of for various reasons, my lens had a splodge so excuse that. Oh and I didn't exactly record what everything was, but hey labels aren't all that.

Jon Campbell work from the Artbank

Garden with Silver Gnomes or more precisely Reflectie Lullaby by Gregor Kregar in Michael Reid gallery.
Gnomes are the new black I also saw them in Uplands and elsewhere. I liked this pretend garden, I might make one in my living room when Mark goes away.

View of the fair with David Griggs' work.


THe other commissioned work, Peter Hennessy's My Humvee. I liked this, but somehow it was hard to look at in the space, it wasn't very striking. In fact when I first walked in, the sculpture was right in front of the doors, I didn't even notice it. The carnivalesque tent by Griggs fitted beautifully into the atmosphere of the show, but then once you get close and start looking at the images it isn't a carnival at all. Or maybe it is. Hmm. The age review said about Hennessy's work that "The precarious black monument balancing on its bullbar sends out waves that ricochet throughout the Art Fair." I don't like this description, but I think the work itself is good and fun.

A sculpture for the Top Gear team. Don't know which gallery or artist but it was called Red Octopus.

Everyone took photos of everything. I did too. Are people looking at the art or just collecting it on their camera phones? Maybe that could be a good way to collect. Will they ever look ath the photos. It is as though the camera has become a necessary part of identifying something which interests you, some people were even starting to get distressed when the image wasn't any good, as though they were losing the experience of seeing it. I need to think more about this.

And here I am taking photos of photos... Not a very satisfactory record. I liked these images with the super saturated colour, it made it seem as though even a boring office or factory could be fun with some splahy colour, like the land of Oz.




Trees and a forest by Zadok Ben David, the trees at the top were actually made of little figures, but what I liked most was the way they moed in the small breeze of people walking past. I was pondering whether making drawings, apintings or sculpture of plants is related to a what is referred to as 'place making' in garden history literature, it is an idea that encompasses more than just your conventional garden, but which also suggests that inherent in the creation of gardens is the idea that a new place is being made, a place that exists almost purely to be a place. This is a simplistic praisie but ome I will keep thinking about.

Jeong Yong-Kook Organic Garden (detail).

Exhibition Buildings in the sunset.

Spamtastic

I am checking my spam, usually gmail is so reliable but lately important emails have ended up in there. Someone who wanted to book for an event wnet straight in there, but then I say that is deserved as she just wrote "I want to book a place on your walk", no Dear Katrina, etc.

Some of the real spam is just too hilarious, in gmail you get the subject and the first sentence.

Some of my favourites are the fake news.

from Oswaldo subject slim and goo from this tap
from walder subject huge tool please lassie (never knew that dog was into crowbars and the like but there you go.)
from pat subject privacy mans mail!
from holberg subject Cannibalism in USA first sentence "Elvis is found alive"
from Marcus subject Pope shot!
from Orin subject CHEAP FUEL IN TEXAS! first line "Statue of Liberty set on fire" (hmmm)
from HOwett subject Elton John dies in rocket ship first line "See secret nude photos"
from arnaldo subject Image does not put up with dilettanteness. Watches of famous... (is this a haiku of some kind, a haikuist trapped in the net maybe?)