This will hurt me...

To the memory of Fanny... Rescued headstones, St Davids Park, Hobart. January 2012. Theme Thursday and we are talking about CHANGE. I could talk about the CHANGE from 2011 into 2012, but aside from the number ‘2’, what has CHANGEd? No, CHANGE is more subtle than that. CHANGE is inexorable, inevitable and inescapable. Like that boulder in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (only in real life you’d be scraping Indy up with a trowel and sending him home in a jar). Take the case of the loving memory of Fanny [see picture above]. You can be guaranteed that when they planted poor Fanny in the ground, there was a suitably somber atmosphere with nary a snigger, snicker or titter at the back. Fast-forward 136 years and you write TO THE MEMORY OF FANNY on a wall and you would raise more than a few eyebrows. All because the meanings of words CHANGE. Words themselves CHANGE. Fanny used to mean one thing, and now it means something quite different. When it comes to CHANGE it seems that we need ...

'Lest We Forget' on July 22, 1939. Ummm, did anything else happen around that time? St Johns Park, New Town. February 2010. Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov is one of the master’s late works. It is ostensibly the tale of an odd American, and the memory of his four trips to a small village in Switzerland over the course of his life. The narrative provides an opportunity for reflection on this fellow’s turbulent life. Moreover, it affords the author the occasion to demonstrate a little literary flourish and walk the reader through themes of time, love, authorship, and the metaphysics of memory. As such, it can be a little hard going. There’s a vivid description of the struggle our protagonist has in climbing up part of a mountain (to reach a ski lift). It very much resembles the task of grasping Nabokov’s thematic exertions. It’s a well constructed piece, but a little too clever by half. Although characterisation is one of the author’s great strengths, the experimental ing...

The phallus is everywhere. Mount Wellington as viewed from St Johns Park. December 2010. The curse of phallogocentrism strikes yet again. It is incredibly hard to be a radical feminist in Hobart, as everywhere you care to look you will find colossal concrete erections lording proudly over you. It must be the high natural levels of testosterone in the air… Sunday Top Five? My Top Five Wishes For This Christmas! A benign sense of self-satisfaction. Tranquillity. No arguments. A firmer understanding of the rudiments of theoretical physics. A new bag. ...and not a phallus in sight!

Lieutenant Thomas Burnett arrived at Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land on 6 January 1837 aboard the barque Fairlie , accompanying Captain Sir John Franklin who was taking up his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor of the colony. Unfortunately for Burnett, his stay in Tasmania was but a brief one. He drowned on 21 May 1837 when his whaler ran into a spot of weather Bruny Island in D’Entrecasteaux Channel. The photo above is the monument to Burnett, utilising the stone plinth imported from England which was to have been the main stand for an observatory for the man. Bummer. He was thirty-one. History , by Robert Lowell History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had-- it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his baby crying all night like a new machine. As in our Bibles, white-faced, ...

Here is Ezra. He's a bit sad after I told him some very distressing news. In the hoopla of Michael Jackson's demise, it would be a great tragedy if the passing of Mrs Slocombe went by without mention. All of our thoughts and prayers are, of course, with Mrs Slocombe's pussy in this difficult time.