This will hurt me...

I like to call this: James Dean, with tongue .

Bleak times. Jetty as seen from Errol Flynn Reserve, Sandy Bay. October 2011. James Wright is one of my favourite poets. Here is one of his poems. Youth , James Wright Strange bird, His song remains secret. He worked too hard to read books. He never heard how Sherwood Anderson Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself From his hatred of factories. My father toiled fifty years At Hazel-Atlas Glass, Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps Of dumb honyaks. Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease? Maybe. But my brother and I do know He came home as quiet as the evening. He will be getting dark, soon, And loom through new snow. I know his ghost will drift home To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone, Whittling a root. He will say nothing. The waters flow past, older, younger Than he is, or I am.

Henry and Ezra re-enact the Battle of Rorke's Drift down on a dirt pile in Geilston Bay. We employed an assortment of bumblebees, grasshoppers and beetles in the role of the Zulu attackers. A wallaby played Prince Dabulamanzi kaMpande. As ever, it was Victoria Crosses all round when the dust cleared!

Under the Tasman Bridge, and not a troll in sight! Under the Tasman Bridge, western shore. October 2011. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively is in many respects a conventional sad, romantic tale you may find familiar. However, in terms of construction, craft and style; this is a decidedly original book. Lively has constructed a shifting, jagged narrative that is a thing of beauty. Shifting tenses almost every other page, the book also frequently alternates narrative voices and chronology. Although this might sound confusing, it works wonderfully well. Thus, there are many occasions within the book where we get multiple presentations of the same event from different viewpoints. Those passages in the present tense are narrated in the third person, though the central character – the elderly and dying Claudia – is always present. From here though the novel shifts backwards and forwards through time, reconstructing Claudia’s life from both her memory and standpoint, but also those of the signifi...

Don't go in the water Ezzie... Don't go in the water Ez... Don't go in the water Ezra... Don't get any more wet Ez... Don't get any more wet Ezra... Don't get any more wet Ezzie... We don't have a spare set of undies Ez... We don't have a spare set of undies Ezzie... We don't have a spare set of undies Ezra...

Windmill at the Spring Festival. Royal Botanical Gardens, Hobart. October 2011. Theme Thursday again, and this week I am in a "railing against" mood. You see, I currently hold the controversial opinion that there are too many gizmos and GADGETs these days. It used to be that the most advanced gadget you'd see at a meeting was the humble retractable pencil. Then overhead projectors got a foothold. As they died out, along came the laptop and with it the dreaded PowerPoint. Alongside this bloated behemoth you will now find your audience (that's how I view meetings, d'you wanna make something of it?) came the mobile phone, the I-Pod, the I-Pad, the touch pad maxi pad taxi pad plus-double-plus-plus. There are the coffee machines on the way in. Fax machines on the way out. The boom gate in the parking bay and the pay-as-you-go before you can go machine. There are the octopus phones and the video-conference gear that never works and the stapler that never works and the ...

Lego Duplo vehicles as panopticon. A great leap forward in totalitarian omnipresence Henry. Congratulations!