Monday 3 June

Uncanny garden scene, or haywire:

understand this is June, and rainfronts throw a solid sheet on northwest passage, and dirt pools ruffle beneath the browntoast grape vine, and the stripped Santa Rosa strives to bloom.  Cropping within a fold of the shrubby navel, a lone green orange.

*

Art of screenwriting advice from John Gregory Dunne in The Paris Review: start a scene in the middle of conversation; collect names and details for possible titles, plus snippets to continue unfurling stories; see writing as manual labour of the mind. As to challenges of plotting – he makes no grand plan, more like placing trust in the process as instinctive, but he notes that other writers excel at convolution. Also distinguishes between genres with a comment that novels take charge of the writer (so, scripts don't?). On the distinction between non-fiction and fiction: “I find that sentences are more ornate and elaborate in nonfiction because you don’t have dialogue to get you on your way. Nonfiction has its ruffles and flourishes, clauses and semicolons. I never use a semicolon in fiction”. 

He recommends viewing The Third Man as an example of tight plotting, and good scriptwriting.

*

Two kilograms of limes are chopped ready for the first phase of annual pickle production: the house is fragrant with turmeric and citrus. That was the hardest part with fermentation now underway for four weeks in a tall glass jar covered with a tea towel. With leftover fruit, I make two jars of lime curd. 

Lime pickle ingredients

2 Kg limes, chopped

240g fine salt (I used pink Himalayan)

4 Tbs ground turmeric

120g apple cider vinegar

Make a slurry with the last three items before combining with fruit.

Lime curd ingredients

Grated rind of 4 limes

1 cup of caster sugar

3 large eggs

125g butter

half a cup of lime juice, pulp removed

Process

Melt butter and sugar in the top of a double boiler with grated rind and lime juice. Add in the beaten eggs and whisk until mixture thickens (should coat the back of a spoon). Do not boil or the eggs will curdle. Pour warm into sterilised jars and seal. Store jars in the fridge.  Eat within a week once open.

Wondering about home care and temporal practices as inscribing identity.  How we live around here.  What we do.  An idea of how it makes us feel.  Writing as narrative showcases use of language as a tool. To dwell in words then becomes evidence of the episodic self. Documentation as record.  She is writing me into being, so embossing a self through frames and modulation.

If landscape like self-identity is text with multiple layers of meaning, then there is complexity. Not just a roll-of-the-dice or any two-up throw to choose between anchor or albatross.

*

A lifetime of movement through the housing market forges correlation between a type of housing with life stage progression (family life, and raising children). Stages in your own life cycle can be equated to a housing career, and the twinned, if hopeful assumption of vertical progression; upmoves towards a big win at the property casino. There can be wonder about housing careers and their significance in relation to housing histories. Housing pathways might just relate to the value-add of any renovation work, or its shadow opposite, a downmove, shambling deterioration. In this particular suburb all around them with rebuilds, subdivisions, infill, additions, upgrades and landscaping renewal, there is convergence of lifestyle values and aspiration. The median house price (and, so property value) has risen 13.2% in the last 12 months.

Have they been rewritten in this house? Did he rebuild herself along with the main structure, furniture, gardens space, and rooms? Meanwhile, she dwells in words. Here, then is a type of accounting for home. Reminder of that disappeared, once-read and known poem about how the poet’s mother was kept saddled and ridden by her step-father. Why? wondered her children, witnessing this treatment. You should have seen the others, was the mother’s closing-line response.

Thursday 2 May

This morning she dreams of Albany as if location scouting. There is an ocean out beyond their kitchen window, and she spies a yacht’s sails, hills ranging in the distance. She is saying that the house just wouldn’t do for them, much as in waking life she says to her husband "this house just doesn’t do for us now". Reality intrudes in gusts, fermenting the subconscious. Another glance out the dream-window reveals a tram riding on waves towards them.

*

I very much enjoyed the good-humoured characterisation of Bob Comet, the plausibly autistic protagonist of Patrick de Witt’s novel The Librarianist. Bob as a professional reader-subject observes that writers aiming for a bull’s eye will often miss. Comedy triumphs in exchange with other characters: an inmate of the local residential care home called Brighty responds to Bob's query about her name with who gave you the green light to get personal? What’s not to love about genus suburbiana neighbours anointed Chance and Chicky Bitsch?

Structure is also a delight (if prone to wrenching time shifts caused by framing) with 2006 foregrounding elements which are retrieved from Bob’s memory banks as a kind of stuffing infill/catchup. Events follow in a nonlinear sequence, lilypadding from 1958 and onwards, back to WWII. There was anticipation in terms of high expectations of narrative closure and return to 2006 to resolve remaining mysteries. Clues: Connie’s dress; the red string; running away from home.

*

I am still troubling the specifics of What is an affective artifact?   Piredda advises us to "Think of an earthquake – what is priceless? What makes you feel something?"

• Photographs

• clothing

• jewellery

• music

• Linus’ blankets, especially at “moments when our identities are undergoing a process of construction” (on retirement, for example?)

• William James conflating me with mine appears as the odd one out in this reckoning - a historical anomaly

• affective scaffolds

• linguistic expressions as affective artifacts or rituals - a "family lexicon"

• “all objects to which we tend to attribute some part of ourselves” citing Belk, 1988, p.141

I imagine a boundless scrapbag to contain my magicks: this house and garden, including every plant I have grown from cuttings, alive or dead; collections of books and clothing grifted from searching over many years; hauntology of photos and memories; our daughters at two and eight and ten, then suddenly grown, fully formed as young adults; my red leather shoes and brown satchel (both opshop finds); and a Sunbeam Rapier keychain I souvenired from mum, along with those symbols of speed, freedom and escape which are attached.

Selected references

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. 

Piredda, G. (2020).  What is an affective artifact? A further development in situated affectivity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19, 549–567.

Friday 10 May

Catchup on takeaways from Anna Tsing’s The mushroom at the end of the world:

• Aiming for a livable here and now p.163;

• Find yourself “surrounded by patchiness, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs” p.5;

• “This book is my attempt to pull you into the maze I found” p.14;

• “Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival” p.19;

• “What if precarity, indeterminacy and what we imagine as trivial are the centre of the systematicity we seek” p.20;

• Salvage accumulation p.63;

• “A tool for noticing difference is worth trying out” p.123;

• Capitalism as translation machine p.134;

• Watch landscape p.152 – this I know from experience of classrooms, schools, dynamics of teams, gardens, human flow patterns;

• polyphonic assemblages, p.152; and

• “Assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this is the story” p.159.

*

Walking down Whitfield Street:

Foggy start / still no drenching rain / /

light and shadows yield in cross currents, inconspicuous / while cultural hybrids
basketball, trick or treat performances like candy, Coke or baseball caps beak-backwards

chime with new urbanism / resurgence as property values 📈/ here community prospers // a 30 Km/h play-safe streetscape marks tidal flow towards the shopping centre as destination / subdivide and rebuild to manufacture space ➡️ tissues engineered as fabric / zones of exclusion apply

*

Currently reading Domestic Fortress: Fear and the New Home Front by Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy.  The writers claim that “Domestic routines position us in a paradoxical relation to our fear since the home is both the site around which much apprehension is experienced (of invasion from outside, or of violence within the home), yet it is also a defensible space which can protect us from gnawing concerns about a more unpredictable world outside” (p.2).

Their reference list directs me to reconsider a 1975 paper by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan: 

• • “Place is a centre of meaning constructed by experience” (p.152);

  • "An old armchair and a quite ordinary bed are not aesthetic objects that require our admiration and critical judgment. They are known intimately through more passive modes of experience. They can also be appraised by the eye, however, for they are clearly defined objects and their visibility can be enhanced by rituals of the kind that one performs" (p.154);

  • The primary meaning of home is nurturing shelter… the pivot of daily routine (p.155);

  • Home is given over to hidden processes, and protects us from the “glare of the public eye” (Ibid.) and;

  • Earth “is the human home in the cosmic scheme of things” (p.165).

In her book Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live, Akiko Busch conceives of home as an “impossible proposition” with “infinite possibilities”. She goes on to suggest that “any definition of home today must consider how new attitudes and values come up against the familiar; how our needs are served by what we know, as well as by what we remember” (p.20).

Shifting scales aside, I see that the chaos of meanings confabulated from/with home can only ever be individual; distinctions will sometimes be held in common, but affect cannot be universalised.

Selected references

Atkinson, R. & Blandy, S. (2017). Domestic fortress: Fear and the new home front. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Busch, A. (1999). Geography of home: Writings on where we live.  New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ and Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press. 

Tuan, Y-F. (1975). Place: an experiential perspective. Geographical Review, 65 (2), 151-165. 

Thursday 23 May

If he was alive, this would be my dad’s 80th birthday. I think of Catweazle and Captain Pugwash, us sitting together while he gets to be the big kid putting on silly voices. Together we eat soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers for lunch in the rented cottage on Colehurst Lane. I see from a quick search that this fantasy show ran only from 1970-1971 which means that I was six or seven when viewing. Dad was only 20 years older; younger then than both my adult daughters, his grandchildren.

In the back cover of my diary I keep a list of advice handy: Tips on tech tools and bike locks; native plant possibilities which have since spun off into their own Moleskin companion, but more reality than possibility now since I am also planting, monitoring to keep track of the experiments underway; possible reading material, and suggested writing apps which rarely deliver in the same consistent fashion as Libre Office, or even simple spreadsheets for the detailed database that writing requires; practice of poetics, then, is a notational crumb trail, moments which vanish unless captured like the notes I play on my piano keyboard, but also come to haunt me while sleeping. Fleeting moments which somehow sustain. Sounds much like the elusive appeal of photography, but first you have to notice. Attention is more complex than point and click. What I bear with is this enormous weight of grieving, either an anchor or albatross, much like these interdependent concepts of home and self identity which I continue to explore.

Q Who is this self?

Q What am I doing here with my one precious life?

Q Knowing that our lives here on earth are finite and, under the competitive credo of neoliberalism, dispiriting, how then to live well?

I ask the room. These questions are clearly rhetorical.

Suggestions from recent reading and conversations: 

• lie flat. Disappear. Surrender like water. Retire/rusticate/resolve/refuse/ renew (or seek repose).

• strategic subtraction

• meditate

• dance

From poetry to generalisms

the place and time of this ecology

refines steady as a 33 RPM groove

towards concentric reality, a spinning

whole which looks like home.

Here, I whirl, loosely held as grains

in motion, a centrifuge, then, a planet large

enough to know of Walt Whitman's multitudes.

Rest, I tell myself, wander, potter

about. Heal. And watch 

to see.

Terms of being

Home is worked from these pockets

of repose alongside marked reality, a place

to be experienced texture, fibre

grain, affects Here,

the Self is unseen,

nobody, irrelevant private and self

contained, obscure

as any raw pine interior.

Experience of being expands time.

Attending to moment-ous commonplace,

the elusive moods,

weather, routines, music Notice 

the air of dwelling

in obscurity.

Inspiration prompt:

When identity is derived from projecting an image in the public realm, something is lost, some core of identity diluted, some sense of authority or interiority sacrificed. It is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen and hiding... Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? Going unseen may be becoming a sign of decency and self-assurance.  The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation (Busch, 2019, p.19).

Selected reference

Busch, A. (2019). How to disappear: Notes on invisibility in a time of transparency.  New York: Penguin Press.

Thursday 4 April

Cooler mornings with some chilly winds mark this particular seasonal shift as Djeran. According to local Noongar wisdom of six seasons, “The onset of cool and rainy days meant that traditional mia mias (houses or shelters) were repaired and updated to make sure they were waterproofed and facing in the right direction in readiness for the deep wintery months to come”. The beach now seems less desirable as an early-morning destination. 

In our front yard sun trap, purple Evolvulus is starting to flower while Osteospermum or African daisy seeds are germinating in the rear side bed along with nasturtium. No sign as yet of rain, so hand-watering continues. Wasn't Easter once the rain-gauge marker of change? Not any more.

Like water, dark chocolate is in short supply, and there are noticeable shelf gaps at the supermarket.  Not quite a return to Covid-ration levels. Aside from ongoing climate concerns, this current scarcity is probably a result of the Nullarbor flooding in March, and Eyre Highway’s subsequent closure. Once again, recurrent events can be seen as patterns showing that Perth and Western Australia may be embedded in global flows, but the city and state are also distinctive and isolated places, even in relation to the rest of the nation.

Meanwhile, housing property values continue their upward spiral. Good news for investors; no doubt handy material for dinner party conversations; difficult to stomach for renters or young would-be home owners. Irrelevant to us given our decision to stay put in this context rather than force a downscale. Anti-consumption as our preference, then, despite a growing awareness that this area where we once felt a sense of community or belonging is becoming unaffordable in the midst of gentrification.  Indicators of social and cultural change:

• the range of choices available among the new coffee and cake shops; 

• increasing apartment density and traffic congestion; 

• major shopping centre refurbishment;

• $7 million spent on a revamp of the local pub;

• visibility of SUVs in parking bays, and abandoned over paths, verges; 

• influx of noticeably younger adults, many with either dogs, children, or both; 

• signs of rebuilding or renewal of languishing housing stock despite the fact that "The housing still worked" (Waldie, 2005, p.1); and

• familiar faces disappear as local residents are forced to move on, away, often to an elsewhere which means further out from the CBD since rental costs are increasing. Our neighbours, for instance, moved to Jane Brook.

In their study of the dynamics of place and changing cultural understanding of home in particular, marketing scholars Grant and Handelman conceive of dysplacement as the impact of commercial forces which hamper home owners’ efforts to achieve “a home-identity alignment” (Grant & Handelman, 2023, p.883). Rituals of decor, design and improvements to what realtors, media representations, and the market determine as a financial asset are the focus of their critique. Disorientation results for residents who experience these cultural changes as disruption. 

For us more than 25 years ago, extensive DIY renovations of the house and garden were necessary to achieve emplacement.  I am not sure that the current cycle of renewal in suburban Perth is much different, but it is driven by significant boosting of property values, and locals (eg our neighbours) are not all happy about the disruptions they can perceive as their once peaceful cul-de-sacs bustle with business and congestion.  

Although it might seem churlish to complain about urban improvements as a result of population growth and increasing wealth, this place is no longer the community we decided to join. Citing American historian Barbara Fields in relation to loss of familiarity or connectivity, attachments which no longer exist could be described as resolving into "places that are “unfamiliar, unaffordable, or hostile”" (Grant & Handelman, 2023, p.885).

Selected reference

Grant, A. & Handelman, J.M. (2023). Dysplacement and the professionalization of the home in Journal of Consumer Research,49, 882-903.

Waldie, D.J. (2005).  Holy land: A suburban memoir.  New York and London: Norton.

Friday 12 April

A cycle of window cleaning begins which she had planned to complete before inviting an agent over to appraise the house.  Their home is already reframed as the property or an asset. Apparently this is a seller's market.  Owner to seller = semantic shimmy.  A sidestep.  Finishing touches, she tells herself.  All in readiness for Home Open.  Best laid plan as a project manager, but things do not always align with scripts.

Gloves, bucket, squeegee and microfibre cloths. A mix of water and white vinegar in the bucket. She starts with the study and bedroom. Swish the front door panels inside and out, then move to the rear of the house. After the kitchen window and back door panels, she stands on the verandah scrutinising the screen door. In one corner of the frame, a flattened cockroach seems etched, more like a tattoo or engraving. Too hard to overlook in this state of hyperattunement, she cleans the husk. This takes some scrubbing. From there to tiny ledges on mouldings, the bottom timber panel, the door plinth, and then suddenly examining verandah posts...

She know this is compulsive.  Feels deranged.

Water and vinegar. Ansell heavy duty rubber gloves and a pair of dancing cloths (one wet, the other dry for absorption of excess). Hasn’t she been thinking that the general grot adhering to surfaces is an inevitable state of permanent decline, a kind of ageing or disease? Not so. Just dirt.

Windows, once they are transparent, become background elements. The nature of their receding is an act of mitigation. An investment in the habitual. What you now don’t see, don’t notice. Banal as a window.  Ordinary as a screendoor.  Unremarkable verandah posts. In the words of Kathleen Stewart, "The ordinary is a circuit that’s always tuned in to some little something somewhere" (Stewart, 2007, p.23).

Relieved, she wonders if all along the comfort that's been disturbed relies on pervasive invisibility. What she hears once the kettle shrills, ready to brew tea after all that work, is the rising south-easterly, a harmonic for airport manoeuvres reconciling sky maps with tarmac. Fossil fuel, aeroplanes, mass travel, heating. Here’s the whirlpool, a tune for (non)sleep.

Selected reference

Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Thursday 25 April

Anzac Day commemorations around the suburb included pre-dawn candles flickering on driveways, and a family on North Road gathered in a front yard vigil.  There was an official event held around the memorial cenotaph on Wilson Street which was being dismantled by council workers as we rode past on the return trip from our breakfast bench; tucked beside the river near the Guildford traffic bridge, we had taken in the sunrise, passing rowers, and bird life (herons, a lone pelican, magpies, black cockatoos).

*

Reading critical urbanism with Postmetropolis. Much to consider and learn about collective struggles, spatial justice and regional democracy.  Political geographer Edward Soja sees restructuring as “generated crises” (Soja, 2000, p.xvi) and his warnings chime in synchronicity with both Waldie's Holy Land and Hovels to High Rise. In her comprehensive overview of a century of stages of development in housing policy history, economist Anne Power asserts in her coolly neutral tone that state intervention of “streets in the sky became an infectious idea” (Power, 2021, p.9). In a similar mode of concern, I have been calling the apartments we consider in Perth as potential downsizer options coffins in the sky. Meeting us outside one particular home open in the foyer of a Northbridge block, for instance, a realtor we had encountered in a different location nearer Kings Park said "this is not for you". How could he tell?

*

What I wonder now is what comes next... I need to follow up on these historical and global housing issues with closer scrutiny of policies and the current crisis of home ownership in the Australian context:

• DIY thread/ home renovations as work carried out by those who build or improve their own places - typically a community-based practice based on specific values. Grant & Handelman for example touch on the suburban craftsman as a masculine identity like the at-home father;

• the garden suburb and its utopian leitmotif of separation from a conspicuously demonised urban landscape (perplexing given Perth's water scarcity which has always been at odds with the aesthetic allure of green lawns in a context where houses are built on sand dunes).  Consider a 21st century vision, for example Garden city, megacity;

• a care thread (see The Care Manifesto and Lynne Segal's Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care);

• "owner occupation at home" as more than the normalisation of home ownership. Social status positioning of the home as a critical financial asset, and associated environmental issues including sustainability (see Susan J. Smith);

• continuity within the perplexing frame of constant change.  Inscribing place along with notions of self (national?) identity.  Perhaps one common element here is nostalgia: memories of the family home of course will be evoked as distinctly personal accounts.

*

Important to emphasise on Anzac Day, a public holiday in Australia of foundational significance to the dominant narratives of national identity (mateship, adversity in war) "lest it be forgotten or submerged" that the social, the historical and the spatial dimensions are "co-equally linked together" (Soja, 2000, p.8). So this cityspace we inhabit (Boorloo/Perth), notions of urbanism, including home ownership and our localised suburban experience of breakfast beside the Derbarl Yerrigan is firmly embedded, and impossible to relegate to any "unproblematic background" (Ibid.).

Selected references

Grant, A. & Handelman, J.M. (2023). Dysplacement and the professionalization of the home in Journal of Consumer Research,49, 882-903.

Power, A. (2021).  Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850 (2nd Edition). Oxon and New York: Routledge.

Soja, E. (2000). Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Monday 4 March

As in life with stuff and home ownership, materials wear. Entropy looms as a forward possibility, far off, in an uncertain somewhere distant. Easy to dismiss by ignoring signs. Like your body, materials are always at hand, ready to be used up in the living. Suddenly the house which you have taken for granted becomes a maintenance issue. Notice. There is weathering and small jobs are added to an extensive to-do list. Beyond the daily, into the short term, mapped ahead. A horizon, then.  You have a concrete mix much like a cake packet sitting on a shelf down the shed on hand to fill breaks in the limestone retaining wall. Cracks fissure. Over time, they widen. Ornamental pear trees which you planted to fashion a courtyard have grown five metres or more over 25 years to fill airspace, provide shade, and their roots disturb paving. Water runs, forming runnels. Grass dies, then retreats like a hairline into shade.

And so you come to look for another place to call home.

This place is too big, you say.

This place requires too much ongoing work in the garden (recall that you once desired, designed and planted...).

The century old cottage becomes a poor fit, an effort, a burden. And the search for a different home elsewhere begins.

I have been reading philosopher Kevin Aho for existential insights to ageing, change, living well and illness. What he synthesises from Arendt, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky among others is clarity on the vulnerable, groundless experience of (mostly) self-deluding human tendencies. For directions on mindful attentiveness, he draws on Heidegger’s recommendation to

dwell on what lies close and to meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history (Aho citing Heidegger, 2022, p.49).

Home ground. Here. Inclusive: Our patch in time.

Around this place my gardening reveals an old bird bath hidden beneath succulents. What had become overgrown and discoloured from sunburn during the recent heatwaves has given way with pruning and green bin clearance. A new path emerges.

Selected reference

Aho, K. (2022). One beat more: Existentialism and the gift of mortality. Cambridge and Medford, MA: Polity Press.

Tuesday 19 March

I tried to divine the reading which might link to that Kevin Aho text noted above. Threads are broken because so much action-Jackson process has been underway. I have been a dervish on paper and in space. First, my lists spiderwebbed into sub-headings including Dust, Clean, Maintenance, Bunnings, Sell/ Marketplace, Ditch, Garden. The overarching mini-project is Autumn House Refresh, but I know the real goal is about selling to achieve coastal relocation. Let us not delude.

In the interim, I have:

• cleaned the blue sofa, plumped feather stuffing, dried sodden cushions (took three days, luckily we had warm temperatures, and clothes racks could fix like monstrous ruminants on the terrace, airing)

• sugarsoaped floors in utility areas along with the fridge and kitchens surfaces; home is now smelling unheimlich

• ordered a new bathroom mirror to replace the patinaed monstrosity (should be ready for pick-up this afternoon)

• cleaned down my desk, wardrobe, bedroom, and decluttered shelves

• pruned the front verge, now denuded of skeletal plant remains, and ready for renewal, more specifically rain to stimulate seed germination (Easter?)

• washed the jarrah bench which sits on our front verandah, and sluiced the resulting dust bath - next feat is to sand and seal, perhaps polish

• rejected a $12 000 quote for Panasonic reverse cycle air conditioning (that sideways step was to determine if we could actually stay here in this house instead of seeking an alternative/ elsewhere habitus)
  
  

Reconsidering with a quick re-read of journal notes, I think that the thread I had in mind before launching into heavy duty Ansell glove landscapes emerged from these articles: 

1. Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future (dire prognoses are actually worse than we think);

2. In chorus with A Sociology of Existence (essentially we can die at any time) rather than multiple takeaways;

3. And on Autopoiesis which initially appealed because of a recent acceptance by Creatrix editors which effectively countered any weight of multiple poetry rejections... 

4. My final consideration of where the hell I was up to in the reading stakes is the heavyweight tandem step of Atmospheres of Dwelling by Professor of Architecture Design, Federico De Matteis who riffs on Heidegger’s (privileged, masculine, white, European) framing of heimat.

In the physical world where I am fortunate to dwell with a prickly husband who manages constant fallout from kidney disease and calls his day-to-day dealing mostly shittiness – a default affect – I see the gap between cognitive reading threads, and any possible interweaving with a daily life practice of sleep, eat, exercise, adventure or choosing-not-adventure because rest. 

Meantime, as backdrop, I perform ritual scouring of the Realestate app for that Ideal Home in which we Age in Place. Realtor speak for demographic = Downsizers.  Essential elements: Low maintenance grounds; solar panels; proximal to the trainline; decent grocery stores nearby; and amenity of local parks and cycle trails.

Sunday 31 March

On the garden front, we have been pruning: rubra hibiscus hedges to the west were uneven and whiplash tall; my morning work was to clear a blue periwinkle from the ground beneath an apple blossom hibiscus on the back fence.  Entire branches of the shrub had grown woody while they became ensnared in creeper as if Gulliver had been tied down by Lilliputians.  Wielding of the silver secateurs was sword-like until I earned a blister to beat the last one.  Our green recycling bin is now full, ready for tomorrow's pickup.

Finished reading Peter Frankopan's The Earth Transformed which I enjoyed for lengthy, considered synthesis of how we are living well beyond our means, and application of history lessons to anticipate what already appeared a daunting and uncertain future. In sum, this pithy and worrisome observation taken from the 2021 Dasgupta review of economic activity appraises our catastrophic impact on the environment:

Governments almost everywhere exacerbate the problem by paying people more to exploit Nature than to protect it, and to prioritise unsustainable economic activities (Frankopan citing Dasgupta, 2023, p.1268).

Optimism and re-direction from Franco Berardi in The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance: "The voice and poetry are two strategies for reactivation (Berardi, 2012, p.20). I needed this reassurance after a bout of coastal househunting.

On viewing homes open over Easter in the northern suburbs

One rental property is tenanted until May,

another until April 2025, but

here we are in March. What do I get?

Four bedrooms, two bathrooms,

a WIR and pantry, 36 square metres

of garage under the main roof.

Add a theatre for my flatscreen while

subtracting 9 square metres of al fresco with views

of Stratco fencing (samesame from every window).

Next door’s aircon units uproar slantwise like dodgy speaker 

stacks aimed at bedroom walls.

There is no shade. No trees. No garden.

I lie: maybe strappy lilly pillies as screens.

Some faux grass which realtor speak dubs

enough "artificial turf" for the kids and furbabies.

There are no side entry gates yet

marketing pitches a shoppers’ entry

without any apostrophe, and much

is made of luxury specs and fitout which I take

to mean carpets, soft-close cupboards, double

vanities, stone benchtops and lighting.

A double storey boasts crimproof

screens which does not sell the house

to me. There are signs of fear in them thar

sand dunes. Residents are mammoth

mortgagees. There is scrutineering of others'

properties. There is spiraling rent.

Much is made of Property

Investment. I wonder about what is opportunity

and tally costs.

According to sociologist Susie Scott, narrative reflection generates divergent appraisals of past and present lives, and what we are most likely to regret are the lost opportunities.  By maintaining this journal as a method of talking to past and future selves, I see the implications of her argument that nothingness, negativity or nullities (the intangibility of what we are not and that never comes to be, so a "realm of lost opportunities") is built in part by drawing on Sartre's conception of loss as "an implicit absence" (Scott, 2019, p.36). 

In alignment with the disappointment we felt during house inspections, reading and reflection illuminates a critical sense of knowing that I cannot ever be that someone who will dwell in bliss or happiness in the northern suburbs.

Selected references

Frankopan, P. (2023). The Earth transformed: An untold history.  London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Scott, S. (2019). The social life of nothing: Silence, invisibility and emptiness in tales of lost experience.  London and New York: Routledge.

Monday 5 February

It is the season for black cockatoos to feed on cape lilac seeds behind the shed. The birds are majestic as they sail overhead on distinctive rainbow keels, undercarriages iridescent, and their slow descent blots the sun, wingspan widespreading as ink-wash. You are warned of an imminent visit: their squawks are distinct, more cacophony than symphony, and prehistoric, like raptors descending on prey.  If you miss a sighting, evidence is clear: the tree will be left rip/shred tip-pruned by their handiwork with branches and leaf litter collaging the ground.

Indoors, reading continues in spite of heatwaves:

• life course geographies, theories of spaces and times of transition, so relevant to lived experience of retirement and ageing (see Brown et al., Holding the future together; The life course cube by Bernardi et al.; and the work of Kathrin Horschelmann);

• Neoliberalism and everyday life edited by Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton positions neoliberalism “as the latest mutation in a sprawling worldwide regime that forged a new settlement”. The prevailing ideology is understood to be a dynamic “relation between metropole and periphery” (p.75). Finance capital and perverse individualism (where families and community ties are undermined in personal life) are seen as central features;

• A reference to sociologist Michael Pusey identifies the Australian neoliberal coalition as “corporate executives, business lobbies, professional politicians, economic-rationalist bureaucrats and New Right media” (Braedley & Luxton, 2010, p.75);

• The new politics of home: Housing, gender and care in times of crisis by Eleanor Jupp, Sophie Bowlby, Jane Franklin and Sarah Marie Hall addresses the interdependence of public and private life. Crises are defined as those “which play out in the interstices of public policy, economics and politics on the one hand, and in personal life, relationships and senses of self on the other (p.1). Rendering undercurrents visible is the goal. 

Excerpt from Jupp et al.:

In neoliberal discourse home is positioned as the site of intimate economics where ungendered individuals have the capacity to connect home with choice and markets, so as to release potential for independence and freedom. Home is made into a utilitarian, economic category and inequalities are flattened and depoliticised. Home is where welfare services are distanced from political accountability and populated by economic actors; it is where intimacy, care and imagination are of economic value and subjects are more or less useful. Power circulates through home in neoliberal discourse through reordering social and individual subjectivities and celebrating freedom and agency while at the same time defining and limiting them.

All of the above are relevant to the post-welfare system we have in place in Australia during implementation of controversial stage 3 tax cuts in tandem with rising costs of living, and housing precarity; also while we learn from alarming revelations which were heard during the recent Robodebt Royal Commission inquiry, and subsequent release of findings in the final report; and as we reflect on the evolutionary impact of 40 years of Medicare spending cuts while acknowledging Gough Whitlam’s vision of universal health care.

Now my challenge is to fit this schema into a frame of application where identity and life narrative makes sense of how things around here at home come to be. This is a knife-blade. Storytelling, then, is the process. Practice fits when I consider the poems I have recently submitted (having done the writing and review about place and identity). Not so much while contemplating the synthesis which lies ahead.

Selected references

Bernardi, L., Huinink. J. & Settersten Jr., R.A. (2019). The life course cube: A tool for studying lives. In Advances in Life Course Research, 41. Accessed online.

Braedley, S. & Luxton, M. (2010). Neoliberalism and everyday life.  Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca; McGill-Queen's University Press.

Brown, G., Kraftl, P., Pickerill, J. & Upton, C. (2012). Holding the future together: Towards a theorisation of the spaces and times of transition. In Environment and Planning, 44, 1607-1623.

Jupp, E., Bowlby, S., Franklin, J. & Hall, S.M. (2019). The new politics of home: Housing, gender and care in times of crisis. Bristol and Chicago; Policy Press.

Monday 12 February

Reminder of what there is to like about summer

(46 degrees)

bare feet on floorboards snorkelling at Mettam’s Pool sunrise over the Darling Scarp sounding like an insane howl or applause everything cold, especially watermelon and showers northern hemisphere films on the big screen TV where outdoor shots come dressed in eyeball-dessicating snow quilts clothes brittle as dried noodles on the washing line, and breathing irradiation in the wicker basket, a Geiger counter... cicadas hitting their shrill piping like a heartbeat kept trim that aching silence of cicada cessation if you should wander by joggers, cyclists, dog walkers set in motion by acute golden rays each afternoon, cul-de-sac haunting as if the day came robed and released only in closure seabreezes pouring through the tunnels formed by open mouth windows and doors 

Monday 19 February

In the garden, death throes of another lavender. Second one this season since the first succumbed in the parterre where its silvery charm offset the purple Schwarzkopf. Even a mature tower of Echium has ossified beside the front brick path. Probably to be expected since it may be drought tolerant, but that particular plant is around five years old, and survived the typical life span. Considered a weed risk in Victoria and California, I note. Poisonous to humans, cats, dogs and horses. Loves the sun, but probably not heatwave times stuck for days over 40 degrees.

Finished reading Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh. Much to digest, and that develops insights to contemporary writing, art, and the cultural shift since Adorno & Horkheimer. Useful tips against autotheory, and explanation of the outsourcing of risk to writers.

Summary overview or recommendations:

• dialectical thinking as critique and counterpositions to confront “exigencies of omnicrisis” (p.305)
  

• mediations include “scale, impersonality, hold” (p.283); also “Residual, emergent, extra” (p.284); and with “thick representation, mental exertion and symbolic functions” (p.286)
  

• plural pronouns for inclusivity/ collectivity, and to avoid aggrandising in first person singular
  

• slow rather than “always on” which refers to that state of intense presence required of the neoliberal subject. Social scientist Melissa Gregg is cited as deeming this condition “presence bleed” (p.62)
  

• “we require time and space to think” (p.225)
  

• genre instead of engrossment
  

• hopeful theory trajectories are defined as “conspicuously project-based theorising, constructive philosophy and categorical theorising” (p.304)
  

• energies of synthesis as opposed to “antitheory’s expressivity and extremity”, so the aim is to shift registers, scale knowledge and hold “circulation at bay” to prioritise “the slow or vertiginous making of new constructions” (p.304).
  
  

Also useful re-encounter with, and reminder of, ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s paper “Shadow politics and the politics of dwelling”.

Selected references

Kornbluh, A. (2023). Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. London, New York: Verso.

Plumwood, Val. (2008). “Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling.” Australian Humanities Review 44. Accessed online https://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2008/03/01/shadow-places-and-the-politics-of-dwelling/

Monday 8 January

This started with a short list.  The new year audit of terms for where Home = House + X:

Abode/ Address/ Apartment

Base/ Bedsit/ Bivouack/ Bolt hole/ Bothy/ Bungalow

Cabin/ Caravan/ Care home/ Camp/ Casa/ Cave/ Cell/ Chalet/ Commune/ Cot/ Cottage/ Crash pad/ Crib

Den/ Desi-resi/ Digs/ Domicile/ Dorm/ Doss/ Duplex/ Dwelling

Flat/ Flophouse/ Funhouse

Granny flat

Habitat/ Habitus/ Hacienda/ Haunt/ Haven/ Hearth/ Hole/ Homestead/ House/ Houseboat/ Hovel/ Humpy/ Hut/ HQ

Igloo/ Investment

Joint

Lodging/ Loft

Madhouse/ Maison/ Masionette/ Mansion/ McMansion

Oasis

Pad/ Palace/ Patch/ Pavilion/ Penthouse/ Pied-a-terre/ Pit/ Place/ Prison/ Property

Quarters

Ranch/ Rental/ Residence/ RV/ Room(s)/ Roost

Sanctuary/ Seat/ Semi-detached/ Shack/ Shanty/ Share house/ Shed/ Shelter/ Slum/ Spread/ Squat/ Studio/ Strata/ Suite

Teepee/ Tent/ Tower block/ Townhouse

Terrace row

Unit

Villa

Yurt

Ambiguities exist where temporary arrangements or key elements of living are described, especially when considering terms typically used to describe sleep, play and storage: For example, bed, bed roll, couch surfing, cubby, hammock, locker, sofa bed, swag, Wendy house.  

I have chosen to include cot and crib since they are slang for shelter while also familiar as beds for babies and toddlers.  Similarly, for linguistic reasons related to language use, I have included prison as a euphemism for home, while omitting asylum, detention centre and holding pen, despite including cell which applies to a monastic or devotional space as well as a site of imprisonment.

In housing studies, domestic homes are identified as dynamic "hubs of care practices and relations" which are not only critical and central to care work (typically gendered as feminine), but "the foundation of social organisation" (Power & Mee, 2020, p.484).

This perspective becomes significant in recurring mainstream media accounts of homelessness or property precarity which focus on people who work/ are breadwinners but, due to circumstances like inflation, family breakdown, and affordability, are forced to sleep/ dwell in cars.

I initially wondered about the distinction of homelessness framed as rough sleeping or vagrancy - wandering without shelter - and the implicit social or State dismissal of vulnerabilities rather than perceiving needs which require immediate support, as would be the case during a disaster. Whatever happened to the infrastructure of the welfare system?  Eroded, or dismantled, it seems. That emergency measures can be more humane was evident during Covid lockdowns when disrupted travellers were housed or isolated in hotel rooms.

Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe explains how “frameworks of care function to help us maintain vital links with the part of us that cares. They empower our caring side, ensure it is in charge and that being more caring is the lived reality" (Weintrobe, 2021, p.153).

Selected references

Power, E.R. & Mee, K. (2020).  Housing: an infrastructure of care.  Housing Studies, 35(3), 484-505.

Weintrobe, S. (2021). Psychological roots of the climate crisis: Neoliberal exceptionalism and the culture of uncare.  New York, London and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic.

Wednesday 17 January

Hidden dangers: first, a termite inspection; next, images emailed as evidence after Tunnel Vision performed their annual jetting down (potentially) blocked clay sewerage and drain pipes; now, fungus frilling in a eucalypt on the driveway requires a call to the arborist; and a timely renewal of housing and contents insurance. Assailed, it seems. Or just noticing. Maintenance.

Outdoors to indoors: Raking hibiscus and gum leaves, bark deposits like scissored curls, and gum nut scree to mulch garden beds vs learning to play Song to the Siren on my keyboard. Nearly finished eating the cherry panforte made to share over the unravelling end of year festival of hyper-consumption that is Christmas and new year.
Performed a material audit, and dropped surplus stuff to daughters, opshops. Useful overview/ documentation and conversations as we walked around reviewing the house contents, yet I am on the cusp of adopting a position. I seek shift. British design historian Judy Attfield explains how "fundamental impulses" underlie the desire for "innovation and social change"; her consideration of cultural values of materialism in everyday life supports a "decentring critique of power dynamics" to reveal "the mismatch between theory and practice which brings...fundamental questions into the real world of lived experience, the only place where change can actually be effected" (Attfield, 2020, p. xii).

I persist, then, in looking to see.  Out walking: The older man I passed at 5.00am was hunched and short of breath. I overtook him from the river to the homeward-bound stretch where our paths crossed yet again on Hyland Street, and I suggested that he was beating me. His rejoinder: I’m still going.

Additional inspiration from Steve Buscemi’s character Les Galantine in Delirious (2006):

• The first thing is to write a manifesto, or what revolutionary Ivan Chtcheglov writing in 1953 calls a formulary.

• The first thing is to make a plan.

• The first thing is to take a line of flight.

• The first thing is to map multiplicities; to outline arrivals and departures.

Multiplicities feels like going round in a spin cycle. Strange coincidence this morning as I encountered a paper about Georges Perec which describes his approach as an "attempt to register actuality", so an ongoing quest and questions rather than any clear answer (Highmore, 2017, p.1). Sounds like a handy term for my kit.

Selected references

Attfield, J. (2020).  Wild things: The material culture of everyday life (2nd Ed.).  London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi and Sydney:  Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Highmore, B. (2017). Georges Perec and the Significance of the Insignificant in Wilken, R. & Clemens, J. (Eds.). The Afterlives of Georges Perec. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.  Accessed online January 2024 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Georges-Perec-and-the-significance-of-the-Highmore/35c4677cb2652d3eaf1af1a2b64d7de3d750a693

Wednesday 31 January

Hot hot hot. Bunuru seasonal easterlies in the crossover to February. Getting up first to to be outside with the hose and water from 4.30am, then walk, get through your yoga routine.  All before breakfast at 6.00am.

This morning the arborist came round to chat through flooded river gum fungus issues – branches are dropping all over the suburb, and you do not want the weight of a branch coming down on the house or car below. Same Tree Wise Man who remodelled the driveway landscape in 2017, only now he owns the business. Same same different. Same trees, but now regrown, and much bigger. Looming canopy layer.  A possum haven.  Same red pepper tree understorey sings at choke points with a rasp or clank reminiscent of yacht sails. Same man, now divorced and chatting to you about his business transitions, family insights. Somehow these elements - his wisdom, your concerns - are interwoven with this garden, your home front, dynamics of everyday life.

Still reflecting on another life course gem from philosopher Rosi Braidotti discovered in a seminar presentation Affirmative Ethics and Generative Life where she describes an SMS sent from a British friend after Brexit: “I feel disorientated and diminished”; then comments “what a great definition of negativity” (p.471). To counter? Critique or affirmation, refusal or resistance.

Selected reference

Brdotti, R. (2019).  Affirmative ethics and generative life in Buchanan, I. (Ed.). Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 13(4), 463-481.

Sunday 3 December

I have been practising The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York on my keyboard since learning of Shane McGowan’s death. The rollicking parts are too fast for me, and I cannot keep up, but something of Shane’s piratical delivery runs through both hands and every finger as I lurch through slurred notes, and Kirsty MacColl’s sass cuts through any sweetness or nostalgia: You scumbag, you maggot/ you cheap lousy faggot.

Vale.

Our plumbago hedge is in flower along with the oleander and hibiscus shrubs. The honeysuckle is overgrown by a red pepper tree, and a tactical prune was overdue. Hopefully, it will return from the sadness, as so often it does.

Finished reading In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. Great capture of inter-connectivity and entanglements: the alien beauty that we channel, and all the wonder in this world; the novel’s structure links time, geography, and species in chains of being, while tracking progression of human opportunities in tandem with the inevitable decline that is climate crisis. Entirely credible representation of that peculiarly extractivist mindset which leads to NASA, Cape Canaveral, space flight, and the newest frontier of empire compelling us into exploration of our solar system where alien life forms may call like sirens. MacInnes suggests that we are the sole architects of this destruction.

Thursday 7 December

Twelve sleep skeins while considering if dreams serve as portals to alternative realities:

1. 1. My bike was stolen, and I had suspicions, searched. There was a sense of loss along with coming to terms.

   2. A woman in an office wore a jaunty hat. I overheard her invitation to colleagues who might want to touch her shoes. No reason why, nothing exceptional, not even heels, just self-obsessive.  I recognised a sense of wanting to be real, have agency, to contribute or participate, but knew it was pointless, knowing this was just a dream.

   3. I was sitting outside a cafe waiting as if something had been arranged. There was a man with an accordion who left the cafe and went to cross the road. He did not look at me, but I secretly willed him to do so.

   4. A crime had been committed, and the mother and son (suspects?) were clear in their dislike of the other.  Seemed a bit like Cluedo or Whodunnit.  Something was amiss. The mother left, her coat billowing. The scene looked performed. Made for the small screen, or a stage.

   5. There was a house next door to a chicken farm. The block was long and skinny. Birds roosted in trees, free ranging. I asked Wes to direct me to the nearest bathroom, and the wallpaper was 70s kitsch with matching towels. He was in the kitchen, and I saw through the open door of his bedroom. I wondered what had happened; where is our easy intimacy?

   6. I was in a classroom, moving around and deliberately being pleasant by making small talk. I caught myself performing the teacher. I was being with-it by responding to a bystander who intruded and was lying low outdoors, trying to wag.

   7. I was exercising, doing push-ups on a road surface in a small country town, yet did not react to the surprising observation that a block of flats loomed nearby. I walked beside the road in the dark with some kids who played in a shadow line, then I pulled and threw weeds. I washed a lettuce.

   8. There’s a restructure at the water authority and suddenly I’m working there. I knew the brittle culture and felt management wanting to leave a mark (runs on the board). Meetings in far-flung rooms where people stream, but no one really knows where they’re going. Old 1980s box style computer monitors. I went to a meeting, or tried to. It was a long way off, so I didn’t make it. There was another worker who looked a little like dad laying out bait for jokes/ mockery. In-the-know facial expressions like an episode of On the Buses, arch. He never once looked at me, and I was not introduced. I was watching him very carefully. He dressed in that contrived office daywear designed to avoid offending. Beige to blend.  I used to rely on navy and white.  At the other extreme, William Gibson describes a character as "a kind of sartorial stutterer" (Gibson, 1986, p.119).  In the dreamscape, I remember clunky old phones back at the office – a good match for the computers. My manner was mildly amused while trying to problem solve and stay helpful (returning a marker, opening the locked side of a glass door). I was going with the flow.

   9. A mansion surrounded by carbon copies. A dancing duck and a woman playing the piano. Me trying to record on my iPhone.

   10. The sound of a baby crying comes from a cardboard box left on disused ground. A young man with a red motorbike checks his mobile before riding away.

   11. There is a pressure job to complete organising a meeting to make template forms. Something that should have been done, but isn’t.  Affect is heightened guilt of a missed deadline. On waking, I am glad that the pointless distraction is not mine. Feelings of relief.

   12. I caught a bus to Market Drayton. We were on our way somewhere else, maybe London. Wes had a sore eye and I carried his drops. Entering the bus HQ an official type said she’d have that, and I said since it’s his prescription, no you won’t. Then, a beat later: How does that work – nice earrings, I’ll be having them? I was enjoying being in Drayton, but also frustrated with the bus stopping there so long. Paradox. Metaphor for life?

In terms of transformative potential, dreams present opportunities to revisit and perhaps resolve what swims beneath the surface; my unconscious concerns focus on maintaining integrity while avoiding entrapment.  My dream-persona attends to transgressions or injustice.  Work still figures in my subconscious as a place of control. Those weird, uncanny, disconcerting elements in dreams signal an urge to look closer, ask why. Like most escapist entertainment, creative intrusions in dreamscapes are noisy.  Funny that we accept the subject role as a continuation of our other, waking state, as if in these stories we can be splintered, and made whole again.

Selected references

Gibson, W. (1986).  Burning chrome.  New York: Harper & Row.

Leong, D. & Zinych, O. (2023).  Dreams as portals to parallel realities and reflections of self.  Qeois doi:10.32388/242XCF. 

Monday 18 December

Finished reading Where the other half lives: Lower income housing in a neoliberal world edited by Sarah Glynn, and Narcocapitalism by Laurent de Sutter. Still going on the read/ thinking-through with Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman knowledge. 

Glynn’s collection was published in 2009 and draws on case studies from Dundee, Leeds, Sweden, New Zealand, France, America, Canada, as well as public housing in Australia to showcase policy borrowing and common strategies from the neoliberal playbook; there are distinctive geographical features inherent in local-preferences in combination with political differences. The historical span is the last century, typically framed as 1920s-era depression through post-WWII Keynesian ideology to the early 21st century, and not remarkably different to the post-pandemic world we now inhabit. Further down the road, perhaps? Iterating, at any rate. Despite hegemony and the unceasing sparkle of property, I hope that we are not tempted to follow the extreme measures adopted in the US to enshrine home ownership.

Narcocapitalism on the other hand focuses on the use of chemicals, specifically anaesthesia. De Sutter critiques the medical complex as an arm of capitalism which serves to repress excitation of the mob via (manic depressive) individuals, and includes consideration of Prozac, antidepressants, cocaine, chloral hydrate, and biopolitics of the Pill. In an “age of anexcitation”, calm must reign according to de Sutter’s epilogue.

Taking both texts in tandem as a cautionary alert to modernism's concatenating ills, especially while triangulating with analysis of well-living, I draw inspiration from persisting with the type of hope expressed in narrative reflection - see for instance Miraval and Quintana's paper on adaptive humanism:

We believe that while humanity is experiencing a time of transition and transformation, it is “stuck” within limiting narratives. Those narratives prevent individuals and societies from exploring new options and from acting upon those alternatives; that is, from co-creating a future.

Compelling reasons for me to continue this work on agency, sustaining the self, and wanting/ needing/ buying less. Given navigation of complex micropolities - referring to the "activities designed to work on the affective register of selves and groups" (Deleuze & Guattari quoted in Bennett & Shapiro, 2002, p.20) - this is the best month of any year for non-participation, rejection of materialism and, to use Meziant's phrase, oblique refusal. 

I have come to see over these months of looking that this Borders Easing study, my life-affirming scrutiny of being-with retirement, is concerned with deconditioning.  How to do differently or otherwise during transition?  Considering these moments taken up in reflection, listening to stories, journal updates, and photowalks showcase the "transformative possibilities of turning away, withdrawing, and non-action as both politically engaged and a refusal to fit into specific norms" (Spathopoulou & Meier, 2023, p.148).

Selected references

Bennett, J. & Shapiro, M.J. (Eds.). (2002). The politics of moralizing.  New York and London: Routledge.

de Sutter, L. (2018).  Narcocapitalism: Life in the age of anaesthesia.  Cambridge and Medford, MA: Polity Press.

Glynn, S. (Ed.). (2009).  Where the other half lives: Lower income housing in a neoliberal world. London and New York: Pluto Press.

Hamed Hosseini, S.A. (2023).  The well-living paradigm: reimagining quality of life in our turbulent world.  Discover Global Society, 1(19).

Meziant, K. (2023). On reading non-participation as refusal.  FENNIA, 201(2), 243-252.

Miraval, F. & Quintana, H. (2023). Adaptive humanism: Moving from limiting to quantum narratives to connect with the emerging future.  Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 3(2), 197-216.

Spathopoulou, A. & Meier, I. (2023).  Practising refusal as relating otherwise: engagements with knowledge production, 'activist' praxis, and borders. FENNIA, 201(2), 140-153.

Tuesday 7 November

A week spent on jury duty in an open court meant a dedicated period of time opened to consider crime. The Juror Release Form presents an alternative version of the role as making “a valuable contribution to the administration of justice in Western Australia”. This trial was initially set to run for three to four days.

For the most part, my experience of jury service involved active listening, and scrutiny of evidence in association with an indictment listing 11 charges which included sexual penetration and indecent dealing with a child under 13. This was not an easy hearing to attend to.

At the outset, staff managing intake and balloting of jurors at the District Court framed the procedure through their focus on citizenship and community. In other words, behaving responsibly.

Once the judge opened proceedings in court room 3.2, alongside the rational process of applying matters of law through logical thinking, it became evident that there were also affective matters to process.

Events flowed in sequence: I chose an affirmation over the oath. I was empanelled along with 12 others. Over six days in attendance, I drew on the dominant narrative of community as:

… almost always invoked as an unequivocal good, an indicator of a high quality of life, a life of human understanding, caring, selflessness, belonging. One does one’s volunteer work in and for “the community”. Communities are frequently said to emerge in times of crisis or tragedy, when people imagine themselves bound together by common grief or joined through some extraordinary effort (Joseph, 2002, p.vii).

Positive connotations overall, and one in which the bond of members is often distilled as identity. Social movements and interest groups – for example, those who might deploy ideals like family values – are conceived, according to Joseph, as dwelling in a “heartland”.

But what happens if people involved in circumstances to be heard by the court are peripheral to the heartland? What if their homes and families are in some sense different or out of the ordinary? Crimes were committed in the father's house; to look and listen to details exposed behaviour as aberrant.

According to anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, “Affect is the commonplace, labor-intensive process of sensing modes of living as they come into being” and its rhythm is embedded in the present moment “as a compositional event – one already weighted with the buzz of atmospheric fill” (Stewart, p.340).

Significant atmospheric elements of a court include: a coat of arms positioned high on the wall behind the judge who thus appears enthroned; official personnel wear legal gowns; there are formal rituals of rising for, and bowing to the judge, who is addressed as “your honour”; the defendant appears seated beside a uniformed guard in the dock which is directly opposite the jury box; a witness stand is empty for critical action to appear immanent or unfolding; a bible is available for swearing an oath. Such was my weighted immersion in the world of jurisprudence which appeared to me as a space or event that you may never need to contemplate unless summoned to attend, although you could choose to watch proceedings from the public gallery. Stewart describes as “a promissory note” that a distinct little world or condition like this court room on Hay Street “is suddenly there and possible” (Ibid.).

For sociological perspective on behaviour, Erving Goffman defines criminal enterprise as possibilities within the human condition where conscience is lacking and “situational opportunities” are seized upon (Goffman, 2017, p.241). As a result of such disruption, and the mayhem which follows, there can be destruction of objects, the person or subject who initiates such action, “and other people” (Goffman, 2017, p.271).

In this instance, others included children, family members, those directly impacted by proximity afforded by domestic spheres, and relational ties. John Rennie Short asserts that "domestic abuse and child abuse are nasty in themselves, but public outrage is often heightened by the fact that they take place in the home... We are losing our sense of the fairness of the polity but hanging on to the notion of domestic harmony.  The image of a serene home life haunts our collective and individual imaginations" (Short, 1999, p. 30).

While the entire jury stood yesterday to deliver unanimous verdicts to all charges (seven of 11 found guilty, and four not guilty), what follows like a contrail drawn in a blue sky is this current state of monitoring the eCourts Portal to discover Judge Ritter’s sentencing...

Selected references

Goffman, E. (2017). Interaction ritual: Essays in face-to-face behavior (3rd Ed.). London and New York: Routledge.

Joseph, M. (2002). Against the romance of community. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Short, J.R. (1999). Foreword in Cieraad, I. (Ed.). At home: An anthropology of domestic space.  Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.

Stewart, K. (2010). Afterword: Worlding refrains in Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G.J. (Eds). The affect theory reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Tuesday 21 November

Heatwave and bush fire warnings for the week that lies ahead.

I have mulched the kidney area out in our front yard where, if convention dictated, a lawn would be. Gutters are cleared.  We are as ready as it gets.  Agapanthus is in flower – 11 spikes this year erupting as a purple firework shower.  I am raking spent jacaranda blossom each morning, camouflaged as they turn brown and crunchy in contrast to the palm-sized, yellowing and ragged hibiscus rubra leaves which impale themselves on the rake tines as if ready for barbecuing. 

Viewed Limbo, Ivan Sen’s monochromatic landscape of timeless, inescapable presence. Coober Pedy never looked as magnificent. Characters moved as if seized in amber flows, stuck. Brilliant capture of historic time locked hard in a specific setting, and the wicked problems of racial divides, equity, and justice for victims, in particular First Nations people.

I have been enjoying a brief switch to reading fiction with 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.  This novel inspires but also disappoints (delightfully evocative fragmented lists as interstitial chapters, narrative scope, travel in light years, and politics are epic; love story at the centre of the narrative is implausibly contrived and conventional).  Then I went sideways:

• Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling in which philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood warns that recovering a sense of place or belonging can be rendered problematic "by the dissociation and dematerialisation that permeate the global economy and culture";

• continued exploring the Anthropocene (human endeavours manifesting as physical changes in the world).  An important connection is the clear link with affect theory. Also, feminism and economics offer perspective (we cannot measure or rate what is overlooked, so by definition not valued - nature/ ecology, unpaid work/ NFP or volunteering, care, ethics).  Grieving is apparent for the loss of any future. Rupture emerges as hope for change (see Lesley Head);

• still considering the Phil McManus geographical paper Living with anthropogenic climate change, 2023, which presents a detailed matrix of positions, and  emphasises that impending doom narratives are historically useful for avoiding cataclysm;

• Gibson-Graham recommend "a kind of exploratory, place-based method" as "a way of belonging differently in the world" in their 2011 paper A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene;

• for local insights into urbanism, Crommelin et al. consider the redevelopment of East Perth, and the policy failure which meant sustainable practice was not embedded. The process they describe is where nature is framed as empty and toxic, necessitating rehabilitation; space is then seized for elite residential development.  Another distinct side effect of urban renewal, social housing is marginalised, yet noteworthy for being included in the implementation of other Perth-based projects, such as Subiaco (see Troy for additional insights to East Perth).
  
  

To end where I started, with hope and inspiration, philosopher and political theorist Jane Bennett suggests that “a discomfiting affect is often what initiates a story, a claim, a thesis” and, by cultivating wonder and enchantment, we manage to resist the cultural alienation provoked by stories of dwelling on a dead or dying planet (Bennett, 2001, p.4).  The necessary work she suggests as a counterbalance for the lure of modernist cynicism serves "to discipline affect into a sensibility" and, by so doing, favour life (Bennett, 2001, p.158).

Selected references

Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: Attachment, crossings and ethics.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Crommelin, L., Bunker, R., Troy, L., Randolph, B., Easthope, H. & Pinnegar, S. (2017).  As compact city planning rolls on, a look back: lessons from Sydney and Perth.  Australian Planner, 54(2), p. 115-125.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2011). A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 18(1), 1-21.

Head, L. (2016).  Hope and grief in the Anthropocene:  Re-conceptualising human-nature relations.  London and New York: Routledge.

Troy, L. (2016). Making nature and money in the East Perth redevelopment. In Cook, N., Davison, A. & Crabtree, L. (Eds.). Housing and home unbound: Intersections in economics, environment and politics in Australia. London and New York: Routledge.

Saturday 25 November

Watched a Zoom presentation by Professor Doug Boyd, a historian and archivist who directs the Louie B. Nunn oral history centre at the University of Kentucky. His topic was AI and oral history: the good, the bad and the ugly which I came across on Eventbrite.  Doug said that he belatedly realised the three elements of his presentation should have been reversed, since the good would have offered hope in closing.  And, yes, for the record, increasing possibilities of verbatim transcription is a positive feature of AI along with searchable metadata; other aspects though are less appealing, perhaps even antithetical to the nature of oral history. Now to take Doug's advice with this memo.

The ugly, the bad and the good:

1.  the ugly

• • • Ongoing political inaction (which Kim Scott Robinson defines as the Age of Dithering). What we witness in mainstream media is the steamroller of convention working in tandem to resist change. The sideshow permits only distraction.

    • Our spring swelter is a reminder of what it means to live with climate change. More than early summer onset, especially in November, we have a week of temperatures over 35 degrees plus bushfire and high wind warnings. This generated anxiety when our youngest daughter chose to evacuate her house in Banksia Grove since a fire front was approaching their street, and DFES recommended emergency measures. There is a gulf between what people share by way of images on their mobile phones, that immediacy, and the ABC emergency updates an hour or so afterwards, the next day, later. Phone flame images are terror-inducing because they are urgent while news is a tale told after dangers have resolved.

    • Affect tension swells as Wes approaches his three-monthly clinic conference with a nephrologist. I am reflecting, so neatening, and the last nephrologist succumbed to cancer; this illness and its management have a 27-year history at Royal Perth Hospital. Clinics and consultations deliver a regular reminder that without their ministrations, he is vulnerable, and risks are likely in any experience of keeping body-mind-as-well-as-possible within the frame of illness, whatever that term comes to mean.  For consultants, the tipping of invisible scales is apparent only in blood test results and clinical notes, not so much from the patient’s lived experiences. On the surface of that double-edged sword, Wes is also mindful that he is reliant on intervention each time a stent is replaced in his kidney. So, along with his heart, two organs are stented or "not happy". There is no reprieve from this awareness of contingency. And to engage with the medical establishment is to be acted upon, pressured to adopt the recommended regime. The ideal patient is one who complies.
      
      

2. the bad

• • • Seems that I have covered these above.

    • In sum, threats to democracy, our modernist fears of annihilation, dissolution as living with entropy and, ultimately, accepting mortality. The swirling turbulence of affect. Inescapable.

3. the good

• sitting here in my study, drinking from a glass of water with its floating lemon wedge cut from a tree which grows in our garden; looking up to reflect, and glancing out the window, knowing that delight exists despite all the above.

• Having the time and opportunity to jot words with a Bic Atlantis pen, imprinting black ink on the lined pages of a 250 page A4 spiral bound notebook. Scribbling.

• Spinach and onion pakoras which I cooked for dinner, and accompanied with mint raita, using a cup of mint picked from pots I moved into shade during this week of scorch. Luxury of abundance.  To create, to harmonise, to notice, and learn, these are all strategies worthy of cultivation.

• Last, and most important even during this eighth wave of Covid, our daughters are happy in their thirty-something lives, and they are both nearby, grounded here in Perth.

Wednesday 4 October

Still reading narrative theory, and the postmodern perspective. 

What features? An abundance of hyper-reality, case studies with interviews to feature the narrative turn, and awareness of plurality reinforced, especially over time, including reference to the trajectory of ageing as well as decline of advanced consumer capitalism, and how we appear assembled “on file”, thus defined by experiences within institutional lives. Citizens and subjects.  Settings are predictable: Family structures, schools, workplaces, as patients in medical care, and nursing homes (Andrews et al, 2000; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Lieblich & Josselson, 1997). 

Overall, the findings of qualitative research, especially as a synthesis of oral histories, collectively produced autobiographies or interviews, is of immense concern if applied to the way we live now expressed as the Robodebt scheme, Royal Commission findings, subsequent Senate inquiries into other political scandals, and rising awareness of the violence of care exercised in relation to people held in detention, and aged care facilities (see Berlant).

Quote finds on narrative theory:

• "We have no direct access to experience as such.  We can only study experience through its representations, through the ways stories are told" (Andrews et al, 2000, p.xi); "Narratives of the self, as temporal constructions, are anchored in local in institutional cultures and their interpretive practices.  These practices shape how self-narratives are fashioned", and "Storytellers have agency and self-reflexivity.  Their stories are temporal constructions which create the realities they describe.  Stories and lives connect and define one another' (Andrews et al, 2000, p.x).

• "The self is not simply a reproduction of the inner circle of family or intimates.  It is "at home' in all settings by virtue of its capacity for superficial familiarity with, and sensitivity to, others.  At the same time, the radar screen is constantly receiving outside signals, scanning new and diverse sources of social input in a seemingly endless process of monitoring the social environment and appropriately modifying the self in response" (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p.42).

• "Narrative research seems to be the most natural method of studying phenomena of great rarity, where sampling is not an option and researchers aspire to go beyond description into deeper levels of individual judgement and meaning" (Lieblich & Josselson, 1997, p.xiv).

Two recent processes by way of illustrating the narrative impetus: First, our youngest daughter turned 30 with much celebration on her part over more than just the big day itself. Lovely to see her wave goodbye to another landmark decade of transitions, particularly with the view that things can only get better. Second, and meanwhile, with the Voice Referendum approaching, and the low-road media display best avoided to maintain self-care, we have been holding a film festival...

Here, we seem to be considering why the future possible could be ever more hopeful or, at least, an improvement on an undeniably violent history. 

• We started with The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith written and directed by Fred Schepisi in 1978. I remember mum and dad taking me to see it at the cinema, and noticing them being bothered by my viewing the sex scene (not the killing spree or embedded structural racism, though.  I had forgotten how the score is so pompous. Now seems jarring). Beautiful landscapes. Brutal times. Worth repeat-viewing for Jack Thompson as the oily priest, so we followed up with a 1975 Oz New Wave detour to Sunday Too Far Away where Jack Thompson is charismatic while leading the rebellious shearers in their strike for decent pay.

• Continuing the theme thread, The Tracker, filmed in 2002 showcases Gary Sweet revelling in his delivery of an odious antagonist whose lines are reminiscent of those who follow John Howard under the conservative banner, and their current statements of why nothing can change for Aboriginal people in Australia (which was borne out under those long years of Liberal National Party leadership). David Gulpilil brought humour, irony, and retribution to the titular role, making everything seem an effortless performance, as he always does on screen. 

• The most recent film, Black and White also made in 2002 and based on real events, starred Charles Dance as the lawyer for the prosecution while Robert Carlyle defends an Aboriginal man charged with murdering a child in Adelaide in 1958. There are revelations of police corruption and political interference, so the times are shown as a struggle for progressives. The biggest surprise, though, was seeing Ben Mendelsohn play a young Rupert Murdoch as a crusader opposing the death penalty and demanding justice. Since Louis Nowra wrote the script, there are fleeting reminders of Cosi, especially with Mendelsohn included in the cast, and Colin Friels as a priest.

I am thinking that the stories we tell ourselves become our self-limiting beliefs, and this is true of individual mindsets as much as the national consciousness. According to the theorists I am reading, the horizon, or what possibilities might lie ahead by way of what Brian Massumi calls things-in-the-making, reflects a dialectical process of thinking through opposites which leads to foreclosure.  This radarscope of thinking leads me to the post-qualitative literature, where rhizomes extend like interconnective webbing of possibilities.  What if?

In his exploration of decolonisation and necropolitics, Achille Mbembe describes an in-between state of governmentality where the “choice is between life and death” (Mbembe, 2003, p.34). He includes surveillance as an exercise of power akin to control.  In this context, the permanent condition of colonised subjects is experienced as living in pain. Nanoracism in its “capacity to infiltrate”, is seen as everyday social relations where racism enters “the air one breathes” (Mbembe, 2019, p.130).

Time to open the windows, refresh the settings, and steer a different, more enlightened course.  

In reference to Mbembe, Judith Butler suggests "The planetary opposition to extractivism and systemic racism ought to... deliver us back to the world, or let the world arrive as if for the first time, in a way that allows for a “deep breathing”—a desire we all now know, if we have not already forgotten how to wish for it" (Butler, 2022, p.7).

Selected references

Andrews, M., Sclater, S.D., Squire, C. & Treacher, A. (Eds.). (2000).  Lines of Narrative: Psychosocial perspectives.  London and New York: Routledge.

Berlant, L. (2011).  Cruel optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Butler, J.  (2022). What world is this? A pandemic phenomenology.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Holstein, J.A. & Gubrium, J.F. (2000).  The self we live by: Narrative identity in a postmodern world.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lieblich, A. & Josselson, R. (Eds.). (1997).  The narrative study of lives, Volume 5. Thousand Oaks, CA, London, and New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Massumi, B. (2015).  Politics of affect.  Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Mbembe, A. & Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40. Duke University Press. Accessed 2 October 2023 https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/theoryfromthemargins/mbembe_22necropolitics22.pdf

Mbembe, A. & Corcoran, S. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Sunday 15 October

In flower in our garden: peppermint gums, statice (the evocatively named sea lavender), strelitzia, oleander, one jacaranda tree, multiple hibiscus shrubs, and pelargoniums. What I notice in everyone else's front yards, and on verges as small street trees which look straggly for the other 11 months of each lap we take around the sun, are both the pink and white varieties of bauhinia. A siren's call. No scent, but the jasmine on fences and screens is powerful compensation.

I have planted dill, marjoram, Vietnamese mint ready for banh mi, purple basil, and another pot of lovage in front of the shed. This area is not only north-facing, but protected by a pergola and overhead grapevine. We have lost one plum tree: the Satsuma still fails to make a show, so has officially expired. This is the only real downside of the encroachment of shade across garden beds and grass; trees and shrubs we planted 10 to 20 years ago are now mature, and make their impact known. Evolution, then.

Reading Sara Ahmed. Relevant to the Voice Referendum, Mbembe, and affect theory. She understands feelings as impressions. The pressing that becomes an object by changing us.

Also reading:

• memory work as a means of dealing with power and hegemony – Frigga Haug is a key figure; 

• an interview with Brian Massumi in which he outlines that there is much creative expression to be found in unemployment, and suggests we should “retain the manyness” inherent in the concept of affect as well as its forms; 

• Crawford et al consider fear inside the home just as likely as out; and 

• Barad has been resonating for me as I re-read and discuss with others, especially in relation to memory since she argues that it is not located within individual brains, “rather memory is the enfoldings of space-time-matter written into the universe, or better, the enfolded articulations of the universe in its mattering… The past is never finished… and it never leaves us behind (Barad, 2007, p.ix).

Viewed L’arte della felicita this week. Italian animation – The Art of Happiness. Brother Alfredo who is dying writes to Sergio, and this letter sits unopened throughout on the dash of his taxi. A portent.  Meantime, Sergio is undergoing an existential crisis. Frozen in fear, he is trapped, suspended in these rising flows of entropy. The context is our contemporary, chaotic world depicted symbolically by a dream sequence in which Mt Vesuvius erupts (reminds me of The Mood of the World by Heinz Bude).  At the end, when Sergio finally opens the letter, he discovers that Alfredo writes about the present as an extension to eternity. Lessons are therefore Buddhist, metaphysical, hopeful. Both characters are saved by love. So, a redemption tale.

Feeling sad and disappointed that we could not generate a redemptive narrative of our own here in Australia during the national discussion leading up to the Voice Referendum. Instead, another affective volcano erupted. It is hard to accept the rejection of such a generous invitation to change and heal past wrongdoings, especially when the proposal to recognise First Peoples in the constitution was defeated before polling booths in Western Australia closed today.  Outcomes, at any rate, were decided. 

Ahmed suggests that “The affective economies at work, where words are substituted for each other as ‘names’ and ‘acts’ of emotion, certainly do something – they re-cover the national subject, and allow recovery for ‘civil society’, by allowing the endless deferral of responsibility for injustice in the present” (Ahmed, 2015, p.269).

Selected references

Ahmed, S. (2015). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd Ed.). London and New York: Routledge.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Crawford, J., Kippax, S., Onyx, J., Gault, U. & Benton, P. (1992). Emotion and gender: Constructing meaning from memory. London, Newbury Park, CA, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Massumi, B. (2015).  Politics of affect.  Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Sunday 29 October
A long quote which has been filtering through my thinking spaces, bothering me, especially while out walking:

We live in the banality of the ordinary. We act and use things in the way we do simply because we can. Life, for most of us, most of the time, is not a struggle. We are not involved in a constant battle with others for resources, or for supremacy over the earth. Our lives are not a fight for the survival of the fittest, or a war of all against all. Most of us, most of the time, find we can just get on and do much of what we want. We can do this without being inconvenienced and without inconveniencing others, and we would be surprised if life were really any other way. Life is not always, or even often, difficult. Things just are, and we can accept that this is simply the way the world is (King, 2017 p.19).

In contrast, and while considering the notion of selves on file:

A brief annual letter of evaluation, which we browse and file away for future reference, seems innocuous enough. Its contents may confirm what we already know, although surprises are always possible and could, in the short run, have devastating effects on our self-esteem, if not our jobs and careers. But just as importantly, such seemingly innocuous texts are more or less independently filed away in institutional archives, with perhaps nothing being made of them at all at the time. Yet they can lurk about a going concern, just waiting to be activated to assert their self-constituting powers. In the future, they may be resurrected to support new assessments of our person or performance. Retrospectively, they can be read as linked together or as “adding up” to a formal documentation of some identity, which is then taken to be “the” record of who or what we were, have become, or will be for all practical purposes (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p.222).

My thinking-through was mostly related to my husband’s medical dossier, so extensive as to be impenetrable to all consultants who have access (let us leave aside for now the medical industrial complex at scale if big pharma is to be taken into account), but also my own CV, performance management records compiled over 33 years, accumulated data checkpoints, and algorithms of being-in-the-world as citizen/subject.  Am I meant to accept, as King recommends, that all of the personal context above in tandem with rapid advances in AI, surveillance systems, the continuing rise of populism, everything in the tech-utopian vision of our future becoming is part of how things just are?

It is clear that the everyday humdrum appears as banality.  But how ordinary can global flows, climate uncertainty, and advanced consumer capitalism appear when we conceive of an acceptable, functioning operating system?  One key concern unravels the positioning: King's philosophical context is set within a pre-pandemic frame. A nostalgic position, then, conceived in times before Covid.  Since the cracking-up period we have all lived as SARS-CoV-2 lockdowns, vaccinations, miscalculations in communication, and political plays, the paradigm shift can only have served to shake once-trusting participants to newborn-Alices viewing events through diffracted looking glasses.  Here we enter an all-areas-backstage-pass to the real house of mirrors.  

In her foreword to Post-Qualitative Research and Innovative Methodologies, Julianne Moss asserts: "The Anthropocene has made it very clear that our planet is not thriving"; and, in setting out why the book presents "a generative set of practices that turn and return us to the tensions that occupy our existential sense of hope, wondering and belonging about the world", she raises the I-beam of an enduring struggle (Moss, 2020, p.19).  Perhaps it is only now that we are coming to see the neoliberal performance spaces differently.  Not so banal, after all. Perspectives may have shifted to critical engagement now that we understand what poses such a threat to the continuation of all life on the home planet.  And, yes, what is visible still looks like hope.

Selected reference

Holstein, J.A. & Gubrium, J.F. (2000).  The self we live by: Narrative identity in a postmodern world.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

King, P. (2017). Thinking on housing: words, memories, use. Abdingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.

Moss, J. (2020). Foreword in Thomas, M. & Bellingham, R. (Eds.).  Post-Qualitative Research and Innovative Methodologies.  New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Saturday 2 September

Uncanny.

A friend forwards a Guardian article by Chris Womersley commenting on the suburbs (between the city and the bush) in response to my photos of the newly reinvented Scarborough Beach setting. Resort style beside the Indian Ocean is easily disrupted with Procreate colouring. Up there, in that hyperreal beach scene, I can imagine beholding the critical impact of climate change. It is only a confabulation, but the image seems to conjure sense from this week's passage.

On the day of our visit to Scarborough we share the setting with seagulls and surfers. More people are swimming laps in the pool than enjoying the beach. Alongside the steps and undercover area at the amphitheatre, council workers clean with blowers and gadgets. We walk a distance away from their industry to minimise the impact of unwanted noise.

Walkways and promenades enhance amenity beyond bogans hooning at the beach, and this intrusion of my late-1970s memory of Scarborough is indelible. I know that cars once ruled the car parks, in the same way the Sunday sesh was an institution at the Scarborough Hotel, and the iconic Peters by the Sea served chiko rolls with chips. As a preteen, I found the dominant suburban beach culture crass, macho, and stultifying. No wonder I took to visiting Karrinyup library in summer where I could read my way from DH Lawrence to Sylvia Plath and beyond.  Saved by literature like many other awkward adolescents. Also, with distance, there is appreciation of how such an aversion shaped my preferences and developing character.

According to Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay On the psychology of the uncanny, use of the term uncanny (or, even better in German ‘unheimlich’ or unhomely) means something new and unknown that is often seen as negative at first. 

Mostly the concept is applied to literature and art. What becomes represented is a state of fear or unease. It is one thing to conceive of Jentsch’s grotesqueries, carnival, monsters, even death, but when we reframe these disturbing elements within our current experiences delineated by war on terror, SARS-CoV-2, the pervasive push of AI, diverse crises including opioid addiction, anxiety and obesity, the Anthropocene, all key elements of modernism as entropy, an ending ahead: that humans and non-humans seek safety is no surprise.

Living with awareness of this unsettling state as it prevails is deeply troubling. No wonder we crave a blanket or harbour that is home. What if that reassurance comes under threat? What then? Here at this juncture we confront bushfires, rising waters, species loss. Yes, houses and homes are burning, flooding or permanently washed away. Rents, insurance, and mortgage costs spiral. As the basis of our being-in-the-world, potential loss of self and identity can only mean torment. Since we live with the planet in distress and, by facing uncertainties, in taking stock rather than looking away, as ethical sentient beings we suffer solastalgia or climate grief.

Reading for solace while minding the gap:

• Post-qualitative research methodology – refrains create spaces, entanglements; a reminder to appreciate photographs (Charteris & Jones, 2020, p.343). Instruction to read, read, read (Ibid., p.340). Non-normative as the norm.

• memory work mentions sounds including birdsong, speech and music, food, cultural artefacts. See also Radstone on Nostalgia: Home-comings and departures.

• Gaston Bachelard’s coinage of the oneiric house as an archetypal dwelling (see Trigg, 2012, p.100, 136).  Bachelard also says that memory is “lodged in the houses of the past”  (Ibid., p.138).

• Dylan Trigg claims that every question is seeking (p.102 thatness and whatness). I wonder, what about whereness, howness and whyness? Never mind when which seems likely to become seized by goal setting weaponry, and inevitably future-focused.  Memory as storehouse. Like rooms in the memory palace, home is understood to be a repository.

• Where are we at home? Essay by Agnes Heller. Takeaways…

• How about the feminist post-structural theory and methods explored in Working the ruins? Nomadic inquiry, ethical analysis, places as fragmentary and mutable, "home is not a haven; identity can never be a refuge" (St.Pierre & Pillow, 2020, p.260).

• Narrative inquiry – innovative approaches enabling "useful, necessary, and profound methods for understanding and communicating life" (Hyvarinen, 2017, p.xvi, italics in original).
  
  
  
  
  
  

Since deadlines now loom for poetry competitions, and micro memoirs, I have found myself rehearsing lines while out walking. During my daily yoga sessions, the luxury of entire sentences form and flow into paragraphs before I can gather a sense of their becoming and, once finished with stretches and counted breaths, I see only that the thread is broken. I can no longer recall what connections I thought were formed, as if born whole. Sounds much like a dream state or delusion. But I maintain that what I was coming to know, where I was headed is an understanding of self. It is very frustrating to sit here at my laptop, turning pages with nothing but a blank to show for my (un)certainties. Instead, I share practice.

I have finished shoveling sheep manure (two wheelbarrow loads at a time, otherwise I feel the lower-back tension). Before yesterday’s predicted downpour, I also managed to complete the lupin mulch top-ups beneath our viburnum hedge. There were gaps I had been noticing which I filled. There were also mental notes or reminders before I could make the time to finish this job, and my diary has a written depth charge bombing of prompts. Now done. Feels satisfying even though I know the woodlice are already at their work, and compost breaks down quickly – everything is on a repeat cycle of noticing and acting in response to visual cues.

While I know perfection is unattainable, there is a great deal of satisfaction in the finished effect of gardening: bedded down hedges; pruned blue periwinkle contained to its ideal spots (warning: Vinca Major spreads rapidly in shady conditions, so poses a threat to creeks and waterways. Originates in the Mediterranean. Same family as the oleander); a thwarted annual caterpillar invasion means that flower spikes have already formed on the Pride of Madeira in front of our lounge room windows, and I anticipate the blue turrets that will/might/hopefully/most likely and eventually erupt. 

The knowledge arises in me as I type from handwritten notes that what I draw on for inspiration is contingent, and has been all along. Whether the littoral metamorphosis at Scarborough where I stayed one summer on Pearl Parade in the mid 1980s, literature which sustains, or me being-here-now in a world of possibility until at some inevitable point those possibilities shut down.  As Heidegger points out in Being and Time, death means "the possibility of impossibility".  But, for the meantime, life insists on filling that void.

Selected references

Charteris, J. & Jones, M.  (2020).  Replete sensations of the refrain: Sound, action and materiality in agentic posthuman assemblages.  In Thomas, M.K.E. & Bellingham, R. (Eds.). Post-qualitative research and innovative methodologies.  London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 330-355.

Heller, A. (1995). Where are we at home? Thesis Eleven, 41(1), 1-18.

Hyvarinen, M. (2017). Foreword.  In Schiff, B., McKim, A.E. & Patron, S. Life and narrative: The risks and responsibilities of storying experience.  UK and US: Oxford University Press.

Jentsch, E. (2008).  On the psychology of the uncanny (1906).  Journal of the theoretical humanities, 2(1), 7-16.

Radstone, S.  (2010).  Nostalgia: Home-comings and departures.  Memory studies, 3(3), 187-181.

St. Pierre, E.A. & Pillow, W.S. (Eds.). (2000).  Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education.  New York and London: Routledge.

Trigg, D. (2012).  The memory of place: A phenomenology of the uncanny.  Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

Saturday 16 September

Watched Julianne Moore, Timothy Hutton and Bette Midler last week in the two-hour 20 minute film The Glorias.  More than a biopic.  An epic as complex as the feminist struggle it depicts. I kept wondering how that historical phase of the women’s movement could fail when equity and justice were so clearly on their side. Lack of political appetite to change the status quo and inherent benefits of patriarchy, at a guess. Many recurrent motifs in the film were familiar from footage shared online during recent Covid lockdowns, and the reporting of Black Lives Matter protests, as well as MeToo marches, and climate rallies in support of social and ecological justice.

Domestic on the other hand has come to be associated with what is dull, mundane, banal, narrow, prosaic, confined, restrictive and delimiting. Typically the domain or sphere of the female, so gendered as feminine. As a noun, the person who tackles domestic chores inside the house is traditionally female.  The domestic space is conceived as at odds with a world out there - nature or open space in capitalism is by definition free of confines (so, free to mine, strip or despoil); in the conventional western frontier narrative, this wide open outdoorsy space is adventuresome, risky, opportune, and vital.  Against this backdrop, home in the form of a domestic enclosure suggests a private dominion or retreat, framed as distinct from the public sphere of the market, status and worldly interactions. Significantly, rather than any essence, de Beauvoir critiques the circumstance of oppression and alterity experienced by women as the Other within the particularities of any situation.

This insight led to reading Grzinic for understanding of gelatinization, a concept corresponding with the postmodern state, similar to that condition of alienation so familiar to theories of existentialism, surrealist depictions, and Kafkaesque narratives which in turn were perceived as responses to the experience of modernism. “Gelatinization means reality is covered with obviousness” and draws on "a triadic model: the living, the dead and the inert" (Grznic quoting Lopez Petit, 2012, p.4). 

I am now left thinking that, as a woman, my internalised scripting of the domestic in tandem with home is a reaction to living with multiple depictions of female roles. Yes, mass media representations are often sexist, but the tension is maintained in relation to my own critical perspective as someone aware of gender bias.  As a mother and homemaker, these identity-defining roles have presented me with opportunities to challenge and resist.

Selected references

de Beauvoir, S. (1949).  Introduction: Woman as other.  The second sex.  Retrieved 16 September 2023 https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm

Grzinic, M. (2012).  Biopolitics and necropolitics in relation to the Lacanian four discourses. Simposium Art and Research: Shared methodologies. Politics and Translation.  Barcelona.  Retrieved 8 September 2023 https://www.ub.edu/doctorat_eapa/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Marina.Grzinic_Biopolitics-Necropolitics_Simposio_2012.pdf

Monday 25 September

I have been collecting titles/ kickstarters from notes made while reading:

• Sense of an ending

•   Feeling grounded

• The uncanny

• A mundane manifesto

• Gluten free crumble

• This garden plot

• Working the ruins

• Storying
  
  

A Ray Bradbury suggestion discovered on Instagram: make lists of the 10 things you love (books), and the 10 things you hate (burning or banning books) so you can then explore tensions and create a book like Fahrenheit 451.

Interesting term: Coevalness which means “belonging to the same spatio-temporal condition or “stage”... crucial concept for understanding connections and parallels between trajectories of dominance, coercion, violence and erasure that traverse centuries.” (Kusic, Lotttholz & Manolova, 2019, p.23). Joint struggle as a future possible seems to emerge from within tensions. Best to see solidarities over and above distinctions or difference, especially where gender, racial or class lines are drawn. Highly relevant as we here in Australia head towards the Voice Referendum in October.

While reading context about storying, I take note of a developing attunement to complex historical entanglements:

• • Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative by Mark Freeman, 1993;

  • Lines of narrative: Psychosocial perspectives (Routledge, 2000). A collection including collaborative Czech sociologists, and a study of the Manhattan Project alongside a narrative account of a 63-year-old artist with grand schemes;

  • Power, intimacy and the life story: Personological inquiries into identity by Dan P. McAdams, 1985; and

  • Beyond narrative coherence. Hyvarinen et al emphasise what they call the “benign role” of the middle class orientation of coherence-creating narrative while quoting from Life stories: The creation of coherence by Charlotte Linde: “In order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable and constantly revised life story” (Hyvarinen et al, 2010, p.6).
    
    

In sum, storytelling internalises what we come to see as truths or essentials about our selves. The difficulty seems to be sustaining anything coherent amid gaps or interrupted flows.

Selected references

Kusic, K., Lottholz, P. & Manolova, P. (2019). Introduction. From dialogue to practice: Pathways towards decoloniality in Southeastern Europe. Decolonial Theory and Practice in Southeast Europe, Special Issue, 3(19). Accessed 9 September 2023 https://www.academia.edu/77676571/Uneasy_solidarities_Migrant_encounters_between_postsocialism_and_postcolonialism

Hyvarinen, M., Hyden, L-C., Saarenheimo, M. & Tamboukou, M. (Eds.). (2010). Beyond narrative coherence. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Friday 4 August

Poetry month. Interesting suggestions and prompts shared using #30in30. Seasonal shift into Djilba – wattles, our national emblem, are flowering, fizzy as lemon sherbet.

Things I am wondering about:

• images I discover on morning walks of caravans perching on verges, or parked on driveways, the comings and goings – that notional mobility/stability, along with ease of escape (demographic is most likely to be grey nomads, but our backyard near-neighbours are in their thirties with two tykes under five, and their motorhome is set ready to roam - a migratory pattern and/or privilege, then? Both makes sense);

• aspiration - represented by the house as an investment or, more visible in scalar form as a critical function of the neoliberal subject, an entrepreneurial Self within capitalism, the property market - as a lifelong Sisyphean trap;

• suburban sprawl:  a loaded term used to frame critical arguments about imaginary spaces of development and renewal. Related to urban blight. Relevant to gentrification. Best to consider potential meaning dimensions and agendas.  Who gains?  Theorists here are not concerned with emplacement (see anthropologist David Howes), attachment theory (see cultural theorist Helen Armstrong), or place identity (see Harold Proshansky and subsequent theorists);

• a calling card left in our letterbox after DPIRD made a recent biosecurity visit for the polyphagous shot-hole borer. Quarantine Area Notice. Sounds serious. Trapping and surveillance stage it seems in our part of Perth. Now looking askance at our shelter of trees, searching for ballpoint-pen-sized entry points…; and

• discovered a “best town” article in The Australian which feeds into utopian myths. For the record, Dunsborough is nominated in WA. According to who? Using what criteria? The original article is paywalled, but extensively reported, so the reach extends.  Takeaway = Real estate as Mechanism for Investment in the (prosperous) future imaginary.

Quote find from Derek Mahon “somebody somewhere thinks of this as home” from his poem “A Garage in Co. Cork”. Love it!  Taken from New Collected Poems, 2011, but accessed online here. Of course the Irish context means a warm rekindling of all things associated with Seamus Heaney, but also Dorothea Lang’s portraits of lean and furrowed dustbowl figures. The harshness of such lives being lived during a depression, and the husks that are left behind in testament.

In drawing on history and its ghosts, I am reminded of Marshall Berman’s proclamation that the project of modernity “is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows” (Berman, 1988, p.345-346). Such glory in those words, and even more inspiring when the preface is taken into account which explains the book's dedication to Berman's five year old son who died in 1980. Imagine divining the inner strength to "keep on keeping on" after such cataclysmic rupture in your world (ibid. p.14).

In other reading (and to close with updraft):

• Gillian Mears shares a stage of her wayfinding in Alive in 'Ant and Bee';

• PATREC have posted the chapters from Planning Boomtown and Beyond (2018) which includes a timely reference to suburbia (see chapter 7 by Paul Maginn); and

• A recent publication exploring narrative identity appeared in my Semantic Scholar feed: "Who do you say that I am?" ... Slippery stuff to engage with, truth in narrative identity, but Ines Pereira Rodrigues considers the nature of our own potential for self-deception within an ethical frame.

Selected reference

Berman, M. (1988). All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: Penguin.

Friday 11 August 

It is not quite spring, but our practice of house and garden renewal continues. On my phone there's a message alert for the annual delivery of sheep manure now expected tomorrow. Wes has sprayed the lawn for Bindii. Caterpillar numbers decline daily. I am keeping an eye on the rose for signs of fungus. The first of the almond blossoms appeared recently during a downpour. What my Nanna used to call a scud settled in for the entire day. In homage to the season I cooked a tray bake - roasted parsnips, pumpkin, turnip, cauliflower, and cherry tomatoes - topped with a batter which, when incinerated in a very hot oven, rises around the topography of vegetables, and encrusts.

Experience of home is often of the kitchen, especially the kitchen. What instruments to position and inform? I could draw you a map. Together we can look at images in the photo albums. Drink afternoon tea. Then we could share stories. Any home is a repository of memories.  Rooms, stuff and people, relationships.  I remember the woman who knocked on our front door hoping to connect with her dead father by standing on the verandah of what used to be his childhood home, this house, telling us stories about the river flooding, and reminiscing about the footy oval, rekindling what were clearly his memories of getting to footy training by taking a shortcut, through the bush. There was to be a commemorative service, and she hoped to way-find through the place, all his local embodied places, including the old family home on the path as a landmark site. A kind of reverse haunting or ritual to grieve along with other family members.

So, a map. What would it show? Vines. An outhouse. Landmarks. Heritage says the council. Or amenity (which fixed in real estate speak becomes an up-and-coming suburb). The river two blocks away.  Beyond the creek.  Still nearby. That this place was once located in familiar surroundings of similar quarter acre suburban blocks is documented; now the land parcels are battleaxed, and languishing housing stock from the 1950s and 60s has been knocked down, rebuilt or renewed. Values have shifted along with interest rates, pricing, and popular taste.  Here we are holding out in the battleaxe stakes in this street, it seems, along with Hilda and Kevin over the road.

“The longing for home” writes Malpas, as quoted in Rogers, is actually “a longing for a time of stability and security, a time that cannot be found in the present” (Rogers, 2013, p.7).  Lloyd and Vasta extend this challenge to home as fixed or unchanging by drawing on “recent changes to the labour market and work [which] recast the domestic sphere as the site of both consumption and production, a return to the pre-industrial formation of home as a place of work” (Lloyd & Vasta, 2017, p. 3). Here is story/ing illustration of one such change:  

You are lightened by the discovery that returning your work mobile to the office means you are unable to complete the two-step verification required to access work emails from home.  Failing that particular tech-reach, and therefore unavailable, you witness the reinstatement of boundaries.  You learn that ceasing paid employment as a retiree is a separation won in increments. 

Like water, you move on by moving through.

A waning dance leads right up to and includes refusal of participation.  Notes persist even after the fact of your physical departure. Echoes you hear: A hiss; shushing, perhaps, or a sluice.  

Of course, music and movement continue.  First you sense a lull.  Soft sounds start up with different melodies.  Then you dance differently. You learn to embody new songs.  You see this is reclamation.

*

I recall a meal that we shared around our dining table celebrating dad’s 60th. Nearly 20 years past.  Wes would then have been in the kitchen.  Now here I am closing that spatiotemporal gap, soon to be 59. Doing most of the cooking.  Headed for 60.  I hope so.  I tell myself that this scenario is better than the alternative of not being here. While dad is no longer a presence in the physical world, his spectral visitations are regular. On waking the other morning I realised I had been asking him to phone Camilla for me to see if she was still coming over. In his life he never owned a mobile, yet there he was, unreal-dream-dad flipping the Nokia, looking tanned and relaxed in an open-neck, baggy shirt, ready for another meal around a different table (on a terrace in Italy, at a guess).  Still with us.

Reminder: to return to Dylan Trigg and his insights in The memory of place. I see I am really scouring for what else, as well as reasons why. There have to be more ands to come - more than just rooms in this memory palace.  There has to be a psychological basis for intertwining memory with identity.

Selected references

Lloyd J. & Vasta, E. (Eds.). (2017).  Reimagining home in the 21st century.  Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Rogers, D. (2013).  The poetics of cartography and habitation:  Home as a repository of memories.  Housing, Theory and Society 30(3), 262-280.

Friday 14 August

This home project was always revolving around the search for a sense of self and meaning to reconnect with purpose. Home reflects my values, but I spent more time constructing a career self. And that working woman was distracted elsewhere, anyplace but here (and even here, work intruded). Meanwhile, my immunocompromised partner was languishing, spent. He says the best years are gone and all that remains is residue. This is not an easy thing to see and to know.  It is also the realisation that most troubles me.

Sensing space then is what remains. The world of affect. Existing only through senses. I take notice:

• Multiple cottage captures while out walking to see with my camera;

• A drive to UWA to pick up my new hardback copy of Boomtown 2050 by Richard Weller meant we got to enjoy lunch on a park bench overlooking Matilda Bay;

• Taking time to improve on a favourite sourdough bread and butter pudding recipe (5 whisked eggs, equal parts milk and cream, vanilla essence and cinnamon for the custard);

• Pink new growth emerging like cockatoo feathers on the lillypillies beside the drive; and

• Sheep manure added to our front garden beds really does make a stink.

In my stream prompts (thank you Semantic Scholar), I came across how devotion and worship are akin to nostalgia, which makes me think of aspiration and prayer as crossing that divide between secular life and the redemptive hope of salvation available in religion, or through spiritual practice. If nostalgia and memory work are ways out from the centre, an unconscious urge (see Radstone & Schwarz), then this must be our constant neurological condition under capitalism. Stress of what next? Seeking. Home then could symbolise mere apprehension of steady ground. Footing.

Private? Hmm, not so sure given the warnings presented in The commercialization of intimate life: Notes from home and work. Drawing on the notion of a care gap, which Weintrobe develops in Psychological roots of the climate crisis, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s collection of essays trace the 30 years she spent studying an eroded public sphere which originated in the mid-nineteenth century as a divide between market life and homemaking. The problematic nature of thinking in binaries becomes transparent:

• Commerce vs a cloistered domain;

• Public vs private realms;

• Outside (everywhere that is not-home) vs behind a typically fenced enclosure of walls, windows, and doors (prison? Home);

• Place as distinct from non-place, liminality, or a more generalised notion of undifferentiated space.

Russell Hochschild claims that “caring has become increasingly associated with “getting stuck” outside the main show… The result makes for a harshness of life that seems so normal to us we don’t see it” (Russell Hochschild, 2001, p.8).

Concurrent with the reading and wondering about importance of the affective turn (for instance, as care flows in relationships and communities, connection points in economics, and the concatenating scalar change we currently witness in news headlines), an eddy of my own runs alongside in the day-to-day background via Google documents while helping edit my daughter’s cover letter drafts. She is on the move, planning her triumphant return after five years spent living in a northern hemisphere which seems to fail her in the light, warmth and satisfying job stakes. So she writes. And updates her CV. Submits applications. In three weeks, on the day her father has eye surgery to remove cataracts and replace a faulty lens, she will be back here.  Home in Perth.

What is not lost on me is the irony that at her age I was not only working and renovating a house, but busy with two young children while juggling physically, emotionally and financially pressing demands.  At the same time I recall being torn by the cultural expectations attached to being a mother.  Care work like home-making is never peripheral unless the system tells us it is not a central tenet.  Mourning this loss could be seen as problematic, especially for me when the grief feels like nostalgia, a memory.  It is true I no longer swim in the eye of that particular whirlpool. 

While my life in this house, on our street, here now appears placid and settled, I am reminded by Weintrobe that the real political struggle to be or to actualise extends beyond any individual's temporal frame: she warns that we "face the prospect of ecocide unless neoliberal Exceptions are ousted from power" (Weintrobe, 2021, p.77).

Selected references

Radstone, S. & Schwarz, B. (Eds.). (2010).  Memory: History, theories, debates. New York: Fordham University Press.

Russell Hochschild, A. (2003). The commercialization of intimate life: Notes from home and work.  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.

Weintrobe, S. (2021). Psychological roots of the climate crisis: Neoliberal exceptionalism and the culture of uncare.  New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Saturday 26 August

The forecast is sunny and 24 degrees; I have finished shoveling eight bags of sheep manure around our garden beds; no sign of rain in the six days ahead. 

Meanwhile, in England, our eldest daughter takes selfies to share an audit of her wardrobe, checking to see what makes the cut for being with the onslaught that is a southern hemisphere summer. Mostly that’s a no. Sleeves are too long. In offering this feedback, I am mindful of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s good-enough mother-figure, a term he coined in 1953, so warranting an update to good-enough parent. Not quite gold standard, definitely imperfect, but good-enough as a goal in parenting lets everyone off that painful guilt hook.

If I riffed like a pirate on the artist Barbara Hepworth’s statement that There is no landscape without the human figure, then I might assume that “There is no home without the human figures, their complex relations played out amid material artefacts, and their interdependent psychological scales of adjustment from relatively well-balanced to sadly off-kilter”. Such is the template we might imagine for the good-enough parent hoping to raise relatively well-adjusted offspring. A little thin as a manual, perhaps more like a recipe tip, signpost or blueprint, but a handy springboard position to adopt.

These days I am reassured that both adult daughters take time to phone and check-in, chat or seek my opinion – usually to confirm their world view (is it just me? No. I see it the same way. You are not alone). Their presence is what reassures me. They embody the familiar. The fact that we speak a language of familiar words and phrases means that we appreciate shorthand, and get each other’s jokes. While listening to the most recent interviewee subject share his tale of homesickness, this key component of loss was what resonated for me most: Noah missed the familiar. He is remaking home, but expressed an ache for his family. I bet they have been missing his company, too. Reminds me that I have my own good-enough mother (and aunt, uncle, brother, cousins, nephews, nieces). The English grandparents I once mistook for immortals are now catalogued as story(ing) in the memory palace.

I learnt from Noah's story that transitions can be clear-cut. That pattern of embodiment which is lived in one place as home may cease to be, but some other pattern inevitably emerges in the new context. So, our everyday lives - those lifeworlds which Husserl calls the things themselves appearing - persist within diverse contexts (Ashworth, 2003, p.145). In this sense, the home we carry is within us all.  Embodiment, or a cloud of memory-feeling.

Reading seams I have been mining:

• Peter Ashworth’s An approach to phenomenological psychology: the contingencies of the lifeworld;

• Existential phenomenology and qualitative research, a chapter by philosopher Anthony Vincent Fernandez;

• Heewon Chang’s Autoethnography as method to check bearings;

• which then prompted a re-read of Autoethnography: An overview; and

• finally tracked down an elusive Elizabeth St. Pierre chapter in the fourth edition of a bumper Sage resource on post-qualitative methods which, until now, I only had access to as a fifth edition. Here I encounter the distilled wisdom (after Lacan, and as cited in Ulmer) to first read, then “avoid understanding too quickly” (St. Pierre, 2011, p.614). In drawing on Deleuze & Guattari, St. Pierre applies their term hacceity as a verb to conceive of that which “is not stable but is always becoming. It is not is but and” (Ibid. p.618). A reminder that certitude itself becomes out of reach – a rhizome.

A strange place to find comfort in another messy middle, but resonant and fitting.  

Last, this brief 2009 Guardian review of Marc Auge’s Non-places reflects on super-modernity, or what the writer, PD Smith called “Ballardian non-places in which people are always, and never, at home”. Given the reading company I have been keeping, the aptness of such a description is welcome, especially with shift in this season of lengthening days. Renewal. Another tendril of hope.

Selected references

Ashworth, P. (2003).  An approach to phenomenological psychology: the contingencies of the lifeworld.  Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 34(2), 145-156.

Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method.  London and New York: Routledge.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2011). Post-qualitative research: The critique and the coming after.  In Denzin, N.K. & Denzin & Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds.). The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th Ed.). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, pp. 611–625.

Winnicott, D.W. (1990).  Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst.  New York, London: W.W. Norton & Norton Company.

Tuesday 4 July

Raked. Pruned the lemon-scented pelargoniums, and now reek like mosquito repellent. Familiar smell of summer, but weird for this wet and windy season.  In the same way, the moon apocalypse photos I have been taking each morning while out walking have me discombobulated by cloudbloom. The cumulonimbus sail like drunken pirate blimps. Houses, streets transform. I see that what may be familiar to the eye can be unknown and re-learned.

We saw The Selfish Giant on Beamafilm. Brilliant cinematography, and sensitive handling of difficult subject matter. Also re-watched Glengarry Glenross on Kanopy, mainly to pay respects to the talents of Alan Arkin, may he rest in power, but also to crack up at a blow-waved Al Pacino in psychopath salesman mode while responding to Kevin Spacey’s management style (Wes keeps saying he gets Arkin mixed up with Alan Alda on MASH. They do not look alike. Perhaps the Matrix glitching is an Alan thing). The brilliance of David Mamet’s script. Captivating.  Finished reading The Weekend by Charlotte Wood. Started William Gibson’s The Peripheral this morning, and feeling hooked like a fish on stories.

I have forwarded The invitation by Barry Lopez to Wes because he is sending me iMessage updates from his reading of Bergson’s philosophy. We are like the couple in the Joanna Hogg film, Exhibition, working on our separate projects, in different rooms of the same house, while thinking parallel thoughts. Maybe that is how married couples get to be gently mocked for coming to look like each other. The synchronicity means you tend to lean in, tuning.

Wednesday 12 July

Wes is a day patient at St John of God’s having cataracts corrected, and a new lens installed in his right eye. Cyborg man in the (re)making. Waiting for the pick-up phone call. Thinking and reading.

Through my study window, cloudy grey skies and lack of breeze mean washing takes two days to dry. July doldrums, perhaps. If I can stay with this immanence, I read signs as positive. Otherwise, I am wondering how to proceed. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi argues, chaos prevails. His solution in What is (Not) to be Done amounts to a return to use-value which he calls frugality. He offers a premise, an observation that what we currently witness is withdrawal of energy. Demobilisation as a type of desertion.

Continuing the longer read of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. She considers The Good Life as an unachievable fantasy (upward mobility, certainty, job security, intimacy, all of the liberal-democratic promises in abeyance under neocapitalism) serving up “archaic expectations”. Suggests becoming “a poet of the episode, the elision, the ellipsis…” (p.34). Wondering how that might look.

Two additional quotes:

• "Home and the 'hood are spaces of localized, personalized practices of encountering, wandering and scrounging (p.37); and

• what invigorates the living is "...the fantasy of the meritocracy, a fantasy of being deserving, and its relation to practices of intimacy, at home, at work, and in consumer worlds" (p.167).

So, seeing world-building promises as exploitative lies becomes a way to be in the contemporary, chaotic present. Thin hope on offer, especially when recognising that Berlant's analysis pre-dates Covid and climate calamity.  The grieving we live. 

I am coming to appreciate her reframe around the ordinary or everyday, though.  Keeping track of feelings, or affect. Better this clear orientation than to be blind or self-deluding.

Selected reference

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Wednesday 19 July

Rain might seem constant, but the surges outside my study window break in fits, like a tidal breach. What is constant remains as a behemoth groaning which I know is meant to be a temporary machine-fix kept on the flat bed of a truck; the truck engine runs while parked alongside the water pump station one block away behind our back shed, and invisible thanks to dense bamboo thickets. The fix has been this way now for more than a week. In that time I have finished re-reading Richard Ford’s Lay of the Land so that I have fresh perspective for engaging with the fourth release in the series titled Let Me Be Frank With You which I started yesterday as soon as the last page of book number three was scrolled. I recorded in my notes that realtor protagonist Frank Bascombe asks What is home then, you might wonder? (p.68). Why, yes. Yes, I do. Meanwhile, once Hurricane Sandy has done its worst, and his previous beachfront property is demolished, Frank now aged 68 in the next instalment, actually a novella fashioned from interconnected scenes during the lead-up to Christmas, reflects “what little difference a house makes once its gone”.

Other quotes I highlighted while reading The Lay Of the Land (ebook version downloaded electronically in Bluefire from the City of Perth library):

• All that serenely settled, arborial, inward-gazing good life, never confiding about what it knows (property values) p.41

• Everything’s exactly as they pictured it when it was all a dream p.42

• In-depth communication with smaller and smaller like-minded groups is the disease of the suburbs p.162

• Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway p.300
  
  

I remain skeptical of Frank as a construct, wondering if Richard Ford intends to mock him.  The positioning would then appear cynical. Frank may be an unreliable narrator who leads impetuously on a wayward path like a deranged Everyman.  He makes pratfalls.  But he is also frail and recognisably human.  I have been beguiled by Ford ever since reading The Sportswriter on all things Americana, but especially real estate. Frank Bascombe's wisdom is pithy, delivered kerb-side, and often laugh-out-loud hilarious.

In other reading, I skim The Affect Theory Reader for treasure along with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, an unfinished enterprise written between 1927 and 1940 concerning Parisian city life using a collage technique to write. I thought the approach might be useful as I continue with my own prompted journal entries using material as thinking tools. Material like this ongoing commune with Frank Bascombe who I've come to find endearing, almost a father-figure, or that uncle who turns up at Christmas and may not plan on doing so, but still manages to wreck everyone's day not only with an ill-judged choice of costume, or turn of phrase, but oddly inconsistent views of the world as it really is, which is of course code for according to him.

Selected references

Benjamin, W. (1999).  The arcades project.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press.

Ford, R. (2006). The lay of the land. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Gregg, M. & G.J. Seigworth (Eds.). (2010).  The affect theory reader.  Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Tuesday 25 July

Raking means that kaffir limes pinball like bumpy torpedoes: incoming fire across pavers. Fallen leaves from the cape lilac stay clustered on their spiny central stems, yellow as sulphur.  Scratching, scratching away against bricks and concrete with rake tines that wear with use. Grey skies skim overhead.  Scheduled power outages until 5.30pm require planning, although the 7.30am start arrives fashionably late.

Here in the kitchen

Dishes, lots of dishes. Cutlery, pans and components of electrical appliances, too. Today she blends roast tomato sauce in readiness for dinner, just in case the power outage extends. Adjusts seasoning and adds Korean chilli flakes for bite.

In the kitchen, she sweeps jarrah floorboards each morning. Water boils. She stirs the fermenting lime pickle, checks the fridge and cupboards before each grocery shop, monitors time’s passage from the clock on the wall, rolls out wholemeal pastry for a galette at least once a week, and then there’s the coming and going – constant movement through space. The kitchen is a portal either leading to the bathroom and laundry, or exiting out onto the back verandah, and the most accessible washing line during winter. Undercover, south facing. Out there is the viewing platform.  A reconnoitre and transition zone.  From here, check out lawn growth and budding cycles on plums, almond, citrus or fig trees; monitor weed patches and bandicoot dirt-fossicks.  This is the place for switching into Blundstones.  Garden ready.  Metal rake leaning while on duty beneath a western awning, tucked round the side.  The deck is a weather-watching platform since cold fronts materialise from the south and tunnel through wired as dirty silver road trains.

In a southerly bluster, tea towels crack on the deck like flags. Here is a bright blue wrought iron table with matching chairs. Two outdoor ovens: one a pizzeria with stones and trays; the other better equipped for roasting or baking bread. Both have gas bottles attached.  Set high on wheels, they can trundle over tongue and groove jarrah decking.  The heat isolates out here, in warmer weather, as conditions shift, keeping the house interior within an optimal range.  During winter, the bread bakes indoors around 4.00am so that the oven warms the house, and the house, yeasty, always smells like home. 

Saturday 3 June

Just like that we plunge into winter.  There is sunshine for now outside my study window, and a week of rain forecast. Makuru in the Noongar seasonal calendar offers further insight to the increased likelihood of gales and storms.  Paradoxically, it is known as fertility season.  Makes sense when you think of animals pairing in readiness for subsequent shift.

The ornamental pear trees which we planted 20 years ago to shade the back terrace have nearly finished shedding; mop-top robinias have overtaken them in the mulch stakes; and the grape vines covering a pergola in front of our shed are similarly denuded. Diverse leaf-shapes in yellow, lime, orange and red lie fallen like abandoned wingless creatures.  Some flutter on pavers and brick paths, while others, smaller, clump and adhere to the ground.  I rake three zones each morning, then top up new beds planted down behind the shed.  It is very wet, and worms are close to the soil surface.

Last week, between showers, I planted thyme seedlings at the base of the most vigorous grape stem which I have watched mature. It is gnarled, thicker than my arm. I encounter re-emergence as a key component of the overall rhythm. Most noticeably, succulents including aloes and cotyledon which I nurtured from cuttings now forge their spiky turrets, craning, buds ready to flower.

While I am outside gardening, churn-thoughts continue on place attachment theory and its importance for individual well-being. For instance, “one common finding is that, like interpersonal attachment bonds, intact place attachment bonds are frequently associated with greater well-being” (Scannell & Gifford, 2016, p.360). Comfort-security, connection to nature, and belonging are all enhanced (Scannell & Gifford, 2017). For ease of reference, 10 additional benefits are: memories, relaxation, positive emotions, activity support, personal growth, freedom, entertainment, practical benefits, privacy, and aesthetics.  Clearly, secure attachment promotes place attachment. Any parent, caregiver or teacher would see this as Psych 101. 

In turn, according to Lewicka's literature review of people-place attachment spanning the last 40 years, this awareness can promote support for climate mitigation. An antidote to neoliberalism and the prevailing destructive impulse? A counter-narrative to the dominant master tale at any rate, and one that takes time and close attention to grow attuned to.

Selected references

Lewicka, M. (2011). Place attachment: How far we have come in the last 40 years? Journal of Environmental Psychology 31, 207-230.

Scannell, L. & Gifford, R. (2016). Place attachment enhances psychological need satisfaction. Environment and Behaviour, 49(4), 359-389.

Scannell, L. & Gifford, R. (2017). The experienced psychological benefits of place attachment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 51, 256-269.

Friday 9 June

The most revealing insight to revising the u-shaped theory of happiness is how the original u-bend article was flawed (see The Economist article framed as why people get happier as they age). Lack of longitudinal data is mentioned by Galambos et al as a specific critique. Also, the authors point out that memories of older subjects about happier times (often tainted by nostalgia) are unreliable, and most likely inconsistent. The data sets are seen as problematic when generalised. For another angle, a sociology paper analysing what the author calls life satisfaction shares this takeaway:

...ageing might bring mitigation of unrealistic expectations, a focus on the present, stoicism and so on.  But that direct effect does not seem to bring about an actual increase in life satisfaction; it appears merely to counteract what would otherwise be a decline in life satisfaction rooted in the genuine challenges of growing old (Bartram, 2021, p.434).

In sum, local, lived experiences are considered more relevant to outcomes than any grand unifying theory of lifestyle mapping, or a normative trajectory. There is no master narrative to roll out here.  A pity. So much reassurance in one neat theory!

I am also wary of drawing over-stretched conclusions based on my own limited experience of what the researchers deem a mid-life nadir (40-60 years of age). Certainly, I am happier at this point in time compared to, say, two years ago or 10 years ago.  There is both ease and comfort now.  But I also reminisce fondly about the times when our daughters were young children, I was in my thirties, and we enjoyed adventures as guided by their enthusiasm and company. I miss them. This seems more real and honest to me than saying I am living within an unreliable senior moment.  Now they are adults living elsewhere, and often sound disaffected by the performative nature of daily work.  Toil is their inescapable reality, as it once was mine. 

No more.  Instead, as a retiree, I garden, read and write.  Self-directed work of a different order.

Last night, after enjoying the meal I prepared - and which meant the entire house warmed from the oven's use (pumpkin gratin with sage in brown butter, and dessert of stuffed apples) - we re-viewed two hours of The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. Touchstone elements: 

• Marcuse on social control and manipulation (from 1978 interview footage);

• Persuasion as the powerful application of psychoanalysis;

• Archive footage depicting ideology in the United States as comparable to Nazi Germany; 

• The horror of social engineering (unintended consequences) on two continents: First, Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, and his ambition meant that people were misled and even more likely to suffer harm from unleashing PR and marketing forces; second, in London, Anna Freud’s mistaken assumption of righteousness; and

• What was made visible over time was her dogma, and the failure of her patients' treatment was depicted in stark contrast to Martin Luther King’s speech on being maladjusted (he calls for creative maladjustment).

If  we are embedded in an "alienatingly 'faceless' world of modernity" and globalisation has evicted us from the world we thought of as familiar, then the Deleuzian approach is to pursue meaning by other means (Buchanan, 2005, p.18). The goal becomes finding new determinants for that self in search of happiness.  

Selected references

Bartram, D. Age and life satisfaction: Getting control variables under control. Sociology, 55(2), 421-437.

Buchanan, T. (2005). "Space in the age of non-place" in Buchanan, I. & Lambert, G. (Eds.). Deleuze and space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p.16-36.

Curtis, A. (2002). The century of the self. [Film].  UK: BBC.

Galambos, N.L., Krahn, H.J., Johnson, M.D. & Lachman, M.E. (2020). The U-shape of happiness across the life course: Expanding the discussion. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(4), 898-912.

Saturday 17 June

Small things of note in the garden:

1. the blue flowering creeper looming above the washing line flourishes over the fence.  I rake spent leaves which are splinter-shaped, slivery, dark green spindles.  This plant is vigorous, but a quick check shows that there are some problems associated with its spread in Western Australia. We first encountered this Sollya in Albany, and then again while on holiday at Nikki's house in Margaret River.  Of note, the blossom is vibrant and striking but, more importantly, in a dry continent, no water is needed to keep it upright in summer.  It really does live up to the promise on the nursery label of being tough.  Hard up against the boundary fence, restrained in a limestone planting bed, and trained over wire mesh for initial support, the mature planting has grown sculpted in an interlocking tracery of twisted lattice-stem; there is powerful form beneath a shock of foliage.  

2. out the front, set behind the boundary retaining wall, a white climbing sempervirens rose has swelled to fill the space, and seems intent on threatening the plumbago hedge for supremacy.  Emergent shoots spear overhead in arcs, seeking light.  I once caught a glimpse of this beauty from my car window while driving to work on West Swan Road.  Even then, on sight, I knew the danger of its rampant excess. Buying a specimen meant that we succumbed. Even thought we do not live on a large rural property. Now the mature rose poses a thorny dilemma for any gardener, especially constrained as it is by the presence of our letterbox. In spring, though, when flowers set in a showy snowdrift, white petals are a dazzling counterpoint beneath gum trees. For me, this is the quintessential Australian garden style.  Odd mixes.  And hardy.  We have evolved the aesthetic as so many other choices failed to thrive.  Exposed on this north-facing site, offset with renovation handiwork, and the slightly out-of-whack tilt of secondhand brick pillars, there can only be joy at the sight of how these roses froth and foam.

3. known to me collectively as Pearl plants since renting a house in Mt Hawthorn, and caring for the owner's garden when she - the eponymous Pearl - relocated to a care home, I have grown to love ornamental succulents.  It has been a long-term shift rather than an easy passage.  At an estimate, thirty if not forty years.  At first I found succulents ugly.  And the spikes can be difficult and off-putting.  It is no joke to say I did not get the point.  With their ease of propagation comes a slow-burn to happiness as you learn how to enjoy the impact of mass planting.  This takes patience.  Some succulents, like the Aeonium schwarzkopf can grow leggy and need regular pruning.  I began with cuttings.  Now they are knee-high in rows alongside the back shed.  Their dark colouring also begs for the complement of silver-foliage companions (eremophila or emu bush, lavender, cotyledon, echeveria white cloud, silver echium).  At this time of year in our garden, the aloe varieties are also stunning with peak orange spires. En masse, and over time, I see a cottage garden.  Individually, though, the eye picks out oddities and dissonance:  What on earth is that? Sometimes the succulents can seem an acquired taste.

What may be worthwhile here is to consider entanglements between emotion methodologies (such as affect theory) and space.  Historian Margrit Pernau for instance argues that "Bodies are necessarily situated in space, and they bear the imprint of the spaces they are moving through and have moved through. Mediated by the body and its senses, different spaces become linked to different emotions" (Pernau, 2014, p.541).  

In terms of memories and formative relationships, I see the means of transcending stuff – care is everything. People who enable this flow include the absent Pearl, Nikki, and gardeners I encounter as an absent presence; generosity is enacted in the way they make time for cuttings, then leave open invitations out on their verges or front walls. There is a culture of community and sharing in play.  I am witnessing the same dynamic while walking suburban streets to discover that thoughtful fruit growers have deposited buckets, boxes, crates or pots filled with lemons, grapefruit, oranges and limes.

As for our garden, taken as a patina of overlapping stories and experiences, this practice looks and feels to me like home.

Selected reference

Pernau, M. (2014). Space and emotion: Building to feel.  History Compass, 12(7), 541-549.

Monday 26 June

After the solstice arrives a sense of pivoting. I had become bogged down reading about suburbia, and those new urbanist salvation theories of overcoming sprawl and cost spirals by embracing density.

First, a preamble.  If as Richard Lang claims, the home is our second body and we are engaged in a dialectic as embodied beings, then to inhabit is to be in and of the world, humans enclosed in skin along with non-humans with whom we share the planet. He continues, referencing French philosopher Merleau-Ponty, to state that subjective life is “an act of transformation where space becomes place” (Lang, 1985, p.201). Living, then, this dwelling is a dynamic act of incorporating. Our movement in the arc of life, these dance steps, map a path from the strange to the familiar. Through living and inhabitation (Heidegger’s being-in-the-world), we make it so. Our own sense of home is formed relationally, through experiences, whatever that materially feels like or sounds like to us.

Reminds me of Miroslav Holub’s repeated entreaty to “go and open the door” (see his poem The Door).

Here goes with the reading rundown:

• A better place to live: Reshaping the American suburbs by Philip Langdon. His 1988 article A Good Place to Live published in The Atlantic is worth reading, but I am not so sure about the longer text. There’s a nostalgic yearning, a back to small-town, community values hectoring in Langdon’s tone that leaves me feeling resistant. Wait, I tell myself, having grown up in an English village, surely you can relate to the comforting scale? That sense of being outdoors in nature, and the freedom you enjoyed? Well, yes, but I think that could be due to living in an analogue age, pre-internet. No phone, parents both working, and no social media scrutiny. I also recall the limitations of that singularly  funneling context, and how much I wanted to escape the confines. No-one, not unless they are fearful of change, wants to go backwards. 

• Likewise, Robert Putnam’s revised anniversary edition of Bowling Alone was flawed for me. It could be because the research is confined to American socio-cultural analysis. Aside from the familiarity of suburban sprawl, and reliance on freeway driving, the Australian lifestyle seems less invested in civic life, or prone to the types of communitarian joining in which Putnam seems to be pitching (by the end of the book I was hearing Monorail, monorail), unless you mean a BBQ or trip to the beach. Myths of colonial stockmen, Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin, canecutters, gold diggers, and sheepshearing aside, our national identity is not so much defined by great frontier traditions of individualism as it is by the unavoidable stigma of penal settlement in tandem with the ongoing expansionist, extractivist project of Empire, and historical commitment to what is now catalogued as frontier massacres.

• By the end of their evangelical tracts, both Langdon and Putnam make a compelling case for a continuation of growth and progress under the guise of new urbanism. So, what might the good life appear as? Certainly not an outdated aspirational dream of material excess in the current awareness of climate crisis, yet the woefulness of the “plague” reported in The Sydney Morning Herald focuses with similar fervour on property, pricing and the enormity of economic concerns as a generational gap. Nothing really to account for our common global predicament.

I admit to a quick detour to refresh myself with historian Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias: Visions of Suburbia, just to make sure I had my bearings (utopia as merely a “partial paradise”, which was "founded on the primacy of the family" - so critical, right? Of course. Check and yes again, despite popular misunderstanding of the term, suburbs existed prior to the end of WWII since the term describes the world "beyond the city"). For cultural nuance, Fiona Allon is also insightful in relation to contestability of the Australian suburban dream.

So much of what gets written about suburbia is ironic or dismissive or both, and yet many of us live with our little empire view, typically outlined from within the bounds of a suburban plot.

In the end, I found hope in Ray Edgar’s account of Howard Arkley and the artist’s unironic celebration of suburbia. The house as home. Just that microcosm.  An unpopulated exterior view for the most part, until Arkley had had enough of houses themselves and moved indoors to continue exploring suburban living spaces through pattern and design features that many Australians can probably recognise, if not relate to.

Selected references

Edgar, R. (2015). Suburbia: Does the great Australian dream have life in it yet? The Sydney Morning Herald. Accessed online https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/suburbia-does-the-great-australian-dream-have-life-in-it-yet-20151206-glgu2r.html

Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois utopias: Visions of Suburbia. In Bourgeois utopias: The rise and fall of suburbia. New York: Basic Books, p.3-17.

Lang, R. (1985). The dwelling door: Towards a phenomenology of transition. In Seamon, D. & Mugerauer, R. (Eds.). Dwelling, place and environment: Toward a phenomenology of person and world. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, p.201-213.

Langdon, P. (1994). A better place to live: Reshaping the American suburb. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Putnam, R. (2020) Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community (2nd Ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster.

Tuesday 2 May

Seasonal shift of red, orange, yellow leaves falling from the ornamental pear trees in our backyard, and a bonus of navel oranges from mum's early-fruiting tree.  The latter bounty means sticky orange cake for dessert with cream (made with four eggs and almond meal; the glaze is like sour marmalade).

My revised attempt at an objectified vignette of home:

On the weatherboard cottage

The Australian worker's cottage is grounded, simple in layout.  A child's sketch.  Vernacular architecture, identifiable, uniform.  There is a passageway like a spine. Four rooms mirror dance 2x2 in gridlock beneath a hip roof. Modulated. Patterned. Readily reproducible. On top of roof beams, a rippling exoskeleton of corrugated iron with distinctive weatherboard encasement of timber wall-studs. Alignment of horizontal parallel lines.  Harmony of internal boxes encased within an external box.  In architectural terms, the skin of any building envelope.

If you're lucky, there is an entry statement, that is a heavy four-panel door with leadlights; sash cord double-hung windows; front and rear verandahs; decorative posts and corbels. Inside may include skirtings, dadoes, pressed tin, ceiling roses, even fancy architrave profiles as features.  Or maybe not. Some homes are modest and plain. Others have had all the confidence of character worn or stripped over time. There is revision and erasure: Timber replaced with fibro. Modernisation is the driving imperative. Out of character additions including add-a-pats are likely to destroy outdoor amenity (ill-suited, and so aesthetic monstrosity).

Often smaller in footprint than federated cousins and Californian bungalows, these cottages were built in working class suburbs close to the CBD from the 1890s. Materials were cheap until brick prevailed.

At the rear, there is likely to be a bathroom/laundry configuration, sometimes captured beneath a skillion roof addition, a lean-to like an elbow crook of inclusion, a shoulder hug. These elements were once kept separate from the main house, disguised by vines according to early street plans. (She imagines chokoes, passionfruit, a washing line for clothes' drying. Surely the vines were productive as well as practical for screening?).

As for risks, white ants feast on timber, and weatherboard homes raised on wooden stumps were susceptible to attack. With only an ant cap as protection against marauders, these homes are forever dependent on regular checks to prevent any devastating insect activity.

Monday 8 May

I spent today reading the memoir Childhood by Shannon Burns (book reviewed in The Conversation). The title came up in my Twitter feed over a weekend which included the annual Melbourne Writers’ festival #MWF23. Seems strange that Saturday was also a big day for a coronation on the other side of the planet, but that did not register or matter much. I saw in reports that Helen Garner claimed she would follow that voice (Burns’ voice) anywhere. I felt a strong connection in the narrative around the salvation afforded me in childhood and adolescence as a reader. I could relate to this means of escape from reality. Some books and authors Burns mentions for their powers of transportation and engagement: Dostoevsky, Joyce, Kafka, Hardy, Tolstoy, DH Lawrence, Shakespeare, Shelley, TS Eliot, Romantic poetry. The canon.

Those habits of quiet observance Burns describes are clearly gained from experience, and I account for them now in adulthood as vigilance. Scanning the environment. This skill-set is highly valued in teaching where advice on pedagogy is more likely to refer to with-it-ness.  The tale of violence and poverty which is described in Childhood suggests another dimension of watchfulness altogether.  What Burns relates is his experience of mistreatment, and of pain that becomes internalised as an emotional state of remoteness. First, a habit, then a character trait. This is disquieting stuff to read, but the writer has such composure that, like Garner, I found myself compelled to follow and read.

Tuesday 9 May

My attempt at a psychological vignette of home:

  Home is an interdependent dynamic of being-in-the-world as an embodied self which is largely taken for granted.

The formulation, maintenance and reconstruction of dwelling within a material residence - that place we identify as home - enables an extension of our embodied selves. This extension is confabulated by an ego-state which conceives, elaborates, and naturalises the Self as embedded. Other material and abstract things like brands, and products collude in assembling symbolic meaning (see Bill Brown in relation to thing theory). In this ongoing process, the stuff we come to own functions in tandem with our psychology to yield a fluid sense of belonging in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world.

Narratives about home derive from various states of comfort and assembled identities in this mental space. Associations of security and status enjoyed in the home are therefore complex, relational, symbolic and contingent. When threatened by existential crises (one cancer diagnosis, say, concatenating climate emergencies, a pandemic, or the death of a loved one), any illusion of permanence is shattered.

Awakening to the ephemerality of this state of being at home either as yourselves (roles, identities, sets of attributes/qualities), or as framed within personal, master or alternative narratives is rude, and some individuals adopt strategies to avoid seeing into this abyss. Meaninglessness, or what Camus called the absurd, is apprehended.  Being without a home looks like being undone. Losing a home could be a near-death experience. Donna Haraway coined the term worlding to describe the nature of reality as a speculative state of belonging in the world along with other beings, both human and non-human. 

Backwards glancing, historicity or what we talk about when we talk about home.  Vignette on disruption in the aftermath of war:

On mobility

Mum says that she remembers the road trip Nanna and Grandad made up to Spennymoor in the late 1940s. Grandad found work at an open cut mine after being demobbed. Mum says she started nursery school up there, and the staff pulled out trundle beds for the infants to encourage their rest after lunch. Because mum did not want to rest, and was disturbing others by jumping on her bed, staff locked her in the bathroom with the bed. 

She says that Nanna and Grandad kept a rabbit which disappeared, and she never knew when they ate the rabbit, but she was aware that meat was in short supply.

She tells me that when they all drove back down to Shropshire, Nanna and Grandad sat up front in the cab while she sat in the truck bed on top of their sofa. Afterwards, back in the village, she says that Grandad found work hard to come by, and Nanna returned to working around the farm which her parents owned on Hurst Lane.

Still on iMessages, but a few days later, mum’s memory is jogged by questions about the woman I’ve always known as Aunty Ron who mum now calls Veronica. This woman is Nanna’s sister, and still living, so not my aunt at all, but a great aunt. Mum tells me that Uncle Bob owned Butters’ buses and that Nanna got a job working as a bus conductress to get away from the family farm. Eventually, Nanna, Grandad and Yorick all moved down the Hurst Lane not far from her family to lodgings that accompanied a farm labouring job which Yorick had managed to pick up.

From here, interwoven with gardening, this memory emerges from photographs I have seen in mum's collection. The visual images spark my poem:

Last Sunday morning you spend

carving our satsuma plum

tree, now an amulet worlding

in twister form, I see Grandad

materialise before the diabetes diagnosis,

or any amputation, and he's

wearing a singlet out working

in the orchard at Lynholm

in Wistanswick sporting

a 1950s short back & sides,

refusing to smile

for any camera

A handsome man, Nanna

reflected, a double for William Holden

when they first met on transport details, blind

driving, no headlights, mobile though, even as bombs fell

on roads, churches, fields, factories, all those 

English homes, almost a fugue state, the entire country 

in blackout but - him, her - they are vital, light as nebulae, 

diffuse, so very much alive

...and my memory proves unreliable since mum iMessages to tell me no, not William Holden.  Gregory Peck.

Tuesday 23 May

Reading continues:

• Psychological roots of the climate crisis: Neoliberal exceptionalism and the culture of uncare by Sally Weintrobe (which put me onto Slow violence by Rob Nixon)

• About that life by Matthew Cheney which explores the legacy left by Barry Lopez, and considers “why write”? Open access from Punctum Books

• Thinking on housing: Words, memories, use Peter King 2017 Routledge

• Our lives in their portfolios: Why asset managers own the world by Brett Christophers

• Practice as research in the arts by Robin Nelson 

• Rebel cities by David Harvey

• One-way street by Walter Benjamin

• Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research edited by Phillip Vannini, Routledge, 2015 which sent me backwards spiralling into Thrift...

• Non-representational theory: Space| politics| affect by Nigel Thrift - British context, 2007 publication. Galvanising chapter titles

• Deleuze and space edited by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert - great for clear Deleuzian insights

• Tim Ingold The perception of the environment

• Architecture & Resilience: Interdisciplinary dialogues edited by Kim Trogal, Irena Bauman, Ranald Laurence and Doina Petrescu, Routledge, 2019

• Housing and dwelling: Perspectives on modern domestic architecture edited by Barbara Miller Lane – see chapter by Amos Rapoport re: vernacular architecture, as well as the suggestion in reference list to check Marc Fried “Grieving for a lost home” in Leonard Duhl (Ed.). The urban condition, New York: Basic Books, 1963

• Michel Serres came up as a philosopher worthy of engagement. See Figures of thought

• Wild dragons in the city: Urban political economy, affordable housing development and the performative world-making of economic models by Brett Christophers

• The SAGE handbook of human geography. Huge collection.  See the chapter “Writing (Somewhere)” by geographer Juliet J. Fall p.325

• Place and identity: The performance of home by Joanna Richardson, Routledge 2019.  In the Foreword, Ann Minton emphasises that “the meaning of home is not just found within the bricks and mortar; it is constructed from the network of place, space and identity and the negotiation of conflict between those – it is not a fixed space but a link with land, ancestry and culture” (p.i). Helpful counterpoint to Amos Rapoport who aligns himself with cognitive science, specifically Steven Pinker. Richardson fuses philosophy and the study of home.
  
  

Monday 29 May

Twitter alert shared to the posting of this collection of poems in Rough Diamond Poetry Journal, and my work is among them.

Wednesday 5 April

Considerations:

• Home as embeddedness

• the longing in ‘(be)longing’

• Title: On the Australian worker’s cottage (for me it seems an ideal or iconic home. Eclipsed by the marketing of McMansions/ gentrification/ urban renewal, and infill or replacement of housing stock)

• gender roles/creative expression, change over time, and flow spaces (see Cieraad “Out of my kitchen! Architecture, gender and domestic efficiency”)

• building envelopes (architectural term for outside skin of the building - so, is your dermis the only real, regenerative home, and the womb a first dwelling which you must leave in order to be both of and in the world?)

• Pacesetter homes - research avenues tentacle off sideways (Syd Corser, a cautionary tale, refitting the suburban landscape and those pesky unintended consequences). See the next generation. Also SLWA collection; and Collections WA (via Trove) 

• third places between work and home (term via sociologist Ray Oldenburg) - the cafe, beach, park, supermarkets, pubs, bookstores... does the train/ highway commute in your car count?

I see that my focus on home (and the practice of homing) leans towards identity (Self vs other) as distinct from urban design which seems more concerned with the business of landscape, property rendering profits amid aesthetics of the external (note again that architectural term 'building envelope'), and home as a significant site of consumption as well as symbolic meaning. 

Sunday 9 April

The thunderstorm which was forecast but missed us means we now play catch up with sprinkler systems and essential watering.  

Two finds:

1. I came across a credible statistic that Perth’s annual rainfall has declined 20% over the last 60 years (due to land clearing and the effects of climate change. Confirmed by a quick search here). How to adapt? Plant trees; surround the house and regain amenity with the mitigation afforded by shade; plant xerophytic understories to minimise watering. I have been experimenting with a drift of hardy plants on the western border beneath a pair of peppermint gums - everything in this bed of ever-expanding shade (formed by maturation of ornamental pear trees which now block light around a raised terrace) has been grifted locally from kindly garden shares, cuttings as bounty, so architectural spikes feature like Lomandra longifolia, yucca, agave, Pride of Madeira.

2. An interesting definition of home as “a meaningful space, worthy of emotional and financial investment” (Kenyon, 1999, p86) in Ideal homes? Social change and domestic life.  At first, I felt myself getting stuck on ‘worthy’. Sounds like the LNP campaign trail hustling a strangely familiar rebranded demographic, worthy Australians. Deserving? Like us? An insider-outsider category which seems to fashion favourable parameters for the aspirational. But the contextual significance is based on students’ personal views of what makes home meaningful as distinct from a transitional, temporary space to study. Short-termism was seen as a negative impact (wonder aloud - what does this say about renting, especially in a prohibitively tight market?).  Reminds me of Erving Goffman’s “territories of the self”, a moving feast requiring constant vigilance to monitor and maintain. Similar to the garden.

Perhaps maintenance of the house - stuff management, cleaning, renovations, gardening, those elements which interviewees identify as regular intrusions, or most problematic - is also a symbolic risk inherent in the project of the Self. Circumstances change: weatherboards shrink and absorb moisture, concrete is beset by cancer, paint fades, roofs need replacing, paving buckles, inspections reveal signs of deterioration, faults emerge which demand attention to avoid any state of non-ideal disrepair.

Here in Bassendean we have known for nearly 30 years that we live on a 100 year flood plain.  Recently, a family historian from Sydney knocked on our front door to explain how happy she was to find this house where her father had lived his childhood years.  What she meant was that the dwelling is still standing.  She had travelled to Perth for her father's funeral, and shared his fond recollection of jumping from the front verandah into the river during one memorable flood cycle.  Time/ ageing/ weathering are all inevitable aspects of entropy.  In terms of existential threats, then, without descending into narcissism or despair, I must face decrepitude and finitude as core fears. The signs are apparent in my more-than-a-century-old cottage as much as they are visible in me.

According to William James,

a man’s Self is the sum total of all he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and his children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and yacht and bank account.

Setting aside the historical bias inherent in this view since The Principles of Psychology was written in 1890 (fittingly, around the time our house was being built on its quarter acre site), I am taken by two notions: first, loss of possessions is seen as loss of Self; and the investiture of Self can be weighted as an itemised list.  

This inventory I see as Exhibit A in the auditor's trail.  Accounting for stuff is both a material and relational pursuit. 

Wednesday 12 April

Reading criticism of thing theory (Brown) on the basis of lack of intersectionality.  See gendered orientations around domestic objects (Gayatri Suri) especially reference to Sarah Pink’s Home Truths. Intriguing insights to the orientation of human bodies towards things, specifically household stuff.

Accumulating Being by Greg Noble is another relevant point of reference given consideration of materialism. The modern dilemma.  See also Belks’ idea of “the extended self” (1988).  Tracing tentacles which extend even further: 

• social psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron write about the expanded self;

• Deleuze and Guttari consider assemblage theory (see also Manuel DeLanda’s speculative realism contribution to this theory that reality consists of assemblages all the way down, so that society can be understood as “an assemblage of assemblages”;

• entanglement theory via Ian Hodder;

• extended cognition from Andy Clark;

• alternative hedonism from Kate Soper; and

• Actor network theory (ANT) from Bruno Latour and Michel Callon.

In turn, a return spiral clearly directs readers towards Goffman in reference lists: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Quotes from Belk (article originally published in the Journal of Consumer Research):

• “During pre-retirement adulthood, Csikzentmihalyi and Rochberg Halton (1981) found that emphasis shifts from defining oneself by what one does to defining self through what he has” p.148.  

• Nostalgia comes to be seen as “a readily accessible psychological lens… for the never ending work of constructing, maintaining and reconstructing our identities” p.150 quoting Davis 1979.  

• Jager 1983 asks “How can a house lose its status as a confronted object to become a virtual foundation of our life?  All these questions lead us back to the body” p.152.

Belk draws the conclusion that “the house is a symbolic body for the family”.  Also, “the expressive imagery of the house that is definitional of the family is only fully acquired during consumption” p.152. Sounds like a religious experience.

Two takeaways: magic amulets/ totemic emblems; significance of collections (and the casting off of such possessions).

Radius of reach chimes like a possible title. The term was discovered in relation to loss of neighbourhood species in a Griffith Review article The man without a face by David Ritter (p.163 and quoting American writer Robert Michael Pyle).  Here also, a neologism for current times: Solastalgia = existential distress in response to "the cumulative impacts of climatic and environmental change on mental, emotional, and spiritual health" (Galway et al, 2019).

Thursday 20 April

Interesting viewing over the last few nights: First, Chris Petit’s 2010 film Content and then London Orbital (2002) which draws on Iain Sinclair’s book about walking the world’s largest bypass, the M25. I am reminded of Patrick Keiller’s films as well as Petit’s 1979 classic Radio On in which a young Sting performs Three steps to heaven.

Themes explored include:

• urban hellishness (love the term acoustic footprints)

• boxes as sinister nowhere places, mimicking the military industrial complex ie secure facilities

• boredom as the modern condition

• places as eroded, destroyed

• juxtaposition of roads/ driving in distinct landscapes eg America, England, Germany 

• Books as cultural reference points embedded in places both as part of their history, and in potential revisioning of landscape (Bram Stoker, Conrad, Ballard, DeLillo, Foucault, HG Wells, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain - where are the women?)

• Scathing critique of new urbanism, for example “Retail paradise” for “retail vampires” as genocide at the Bluewater shopping centre which Iain Sinclair describes as “temporary permanence… like a one-night stopover, an oasis for migrants” (Sinclair, 2002, p. 738)

In his review of Lights out for the territory (1997), Robert McFarlane commented on “sanctioned, official custodians” as “the government, the heritage industry and the developers” (see Kirsten Seale quoting McFarlane in the Sydney Review of Books). Now wanting to read a copy of Journey through ruins - Patrick Wright, cultural historian. 

See Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity by Marc Auge. 

Selected reference

Sinclair, I. (2002).  London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25.  London: Penguin Books.

Monday 24 April

Reading zone/ theorists, and recurrent terms which rise, buoyant:

• Flows, boundaries and hybrids.  Anthropologist Ulf Hannerz in Transnational Connections: Culture, People and Places (1996) traces origins of globalisation and flow ie 1970s world system theory - culture as flux. Interconnection and discontinuities. Recommends reading 100% American by Ralph Linton, 1936

• Raymond Williams - dichotomy of country and city

• Doreen Massey For Space > place as closed, coherent, integrated as authentic when an individual is ‘home’, a secure retreat p.30. Links to the serious disruption experienced by characters in The Company of Men during a period of economic rationalism, and layoffs (film watched last night with Tommy Lee Jones)

• See through the lens of social identity theory - Together apart: The psychology of Covid-19 - emphasises both the collective + interdependent nature of our existence

• Big Think article: The self doesn’t exist. Instead, we constantly shape multiple selves

• How feelings took over the world - see The Reaction Economy by William Davies

• Power, intersectionality and the politics of belonging by Nira Yuval-Davis (this requires a much longer reflective account!)
  
  

Saturday 4 March

My aunty in England sends iMessage photos of snowdrops in bloom, and eldest daughter is on her way to Paris where daily temperatures reach 10 degrees. Meantime, we have a heatwave and I walk early each morning, where the crossover between night and day remains nebulous.  I trigger motion-sensor security lights. This feels weird.  To see why, I take photos. 

Reading Byung-Chul Han's Capitalism and the death drive which led me to Walter Benjamin's essay on "The world of art in an age of mechanisation".  I followed a reference to the work of French photographer Eugene Atget. Benjamin remarks that his images are emptied, like a crime scene, but there is much that is evocative within each social-historical moment. Atget captures posters, building grime, washing hanging from balconies, the hatted bystanders, and horses pulling their wagonloads, blurry since the workday is in constant motion.  I pore over his 1898 capture of women and children in the Luxembourg gardens where Phoebe said she had been walking the previous day.  Seems odd that no-one is looking towards the camera. Atget himself enacts stealth. I must learn this art.

Interesting Terry Eagleton essay published in LRB "What's your story?".  Eagleton considers the narrative turn in literary criticism where everyone now is a story.  Sounds like a post-modern contrivance of narcissism.  More resonant for me (so, still thinking), is Kate Soper's article "Rethinking the "good life": The consumer as citizen" which critiques transparency, and chimes with Sharon Zukin's interrogatory position on authenticity (see Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places). For Soper, a gulf in meaning opens in the division between consumer and citizen.  So, theorists share the gift of monitoring weasel words: their scrutiny reveals an ongoing performance of persuasion, or truth-twisting under neoliberalism.  We see that Everything Is Political (one for the collection, in the style of Jenny Holzer's truisms which encourage viewers to look at unspeakable things).

I had my fifth Pfizer shot near the anniversary of our state borders being lifted for resumption of business (one year ago today).  Without it, Bjork would not be permitted to headline with Cornucopia opening the Perth Festival at Langley Park last night (remember when this event was self-consciously termed PIAF for Perth International Arts Festival? In the semantic shift, I see inscribed Destination Culture and the rise of the global city...).  

On my own habits of consumption, I have not purchased tickets to see Bjork.  But I did have the haircut I have been plotting, and Wes says I look like Bon Scott. The 1970s it seems will never settle easily, let alone disappear.

Tuesday 14 March

Mood: meeting myself sitting in the courtyard outside the main buildings at Dulwich Hill Youth Hostel in 1981. Morose and 17 years old.  In relation to “Silence as more than an absence”, see Schweiger & Tomiak 2022 paper Researching silence: A methodological inquiry.  My interest stems from their consideration of agentic silence as non-compliance, refusal.  Self-optimisation seen as a central socio-economic trend means never accepting reality.  The future can always be different. 

Quotes/ takeaways from reading:

• “My garden is an expression of me” sounds like an extension of self-identity from the house to the yard - title of an article published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.  Relevant to any consideration of hoping to change or influence gardening practices such as reducing water use and enhancing biodiversity, specifically increased integration of native plants (in Perth, the shock of so many vivid green front lawns);

• “An antipodean test of spatial contagion in front garden character” via the Landscape and Urban Planning journal. This paper proposes that adjacent gardens are more similar, and front garden designs “relate to house and lot characteristics”. So, what the planners term neighbourhood diffusion appears unreliable.  They also consider the nature of “streets in the process of transition from old to new housing stock”.  This is what I have been witness to while photographing around us;

• Relevant point of contrast from Pema Chodron: “The root of fundamentalist tendencies is a fixed identity - a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that.  With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn’t always conform to our view” (Chodron, 2012, p.7);

• “The house, a machine for living in”, Le Corbusier, 1923. So well-suited to his (modernist) times and, with the internet of things, probably even more relevant today.

Critical terms when considering home in relation to self-identity or belonging:

• Anomie - Durkheim

• Being-in-the-world and Dasein (being there) - Heidegger

• Habitus - Bourdieu (see Habitus: A sense of place edited by Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby, 2016, Routledge)

• Heimat (homeland or native region) - Blickle

• Performativity - Butler

Selected reference

Chodron, P. (2012).  Living beautifully with uncertainty and change.  Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Friday 17 March

Came across the literary critic Bruce Robbins.  Love his essay on secularism, Enchantment? No, thank you which demolishes Weber and Charles Taylor while nodding to Nietzshe, Foucault and Darwin. Quite a landscape. “Feelings are always interesting, but never reliable” (Robbins, 2012, p.89).

The prompt to read Robbins’s essay came from Martin Hagglund’s This life. I followed another lead to Robbins's appraisal of Judith Butler in London Review of Books. “Dive in”. 

What if, instead of the Great Retirement, we invoke the great awakening (via Jeremy Scrivens on Twitter)? 

Selected references

Hagglund, M. (2019).  This life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom.  New York: Pantheon Books.

Robbins, B. (2012).  “Enchantment? No, thank you” in Levine, G. (Ed.). The Joy of secularism: 11 essays for how we live now.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp.74-94.

Friday 24 March

Came across a better definition of self-identity from Gergen The saturated self - not as something stable or fixed within us, but a "project of the self". So, the fabrication of any identity in relation to home/belonging is an active, critical process of making sense both of and for our selves.  This ongoing work is bound by material and cultural traditions. The cycle can be seen as one of becoming in relation to plural identities.

Finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The ministry for the future, and found myself enjoying the absence of dystopian gloom (a celebration of solutions when so much political willpower seems diluted, or just resolved to non-leadership on climate). The key point Robinson makes is that Earth is the only home we have.  Can there be a hopeful dystopian narrative? Seems a contradiction in terms.  Continued exploring solutions with Owning the future: Power and property in an age of crisis. Short read billed as post-pandemic politics. Ambitious since the dismantling of capitalism is envisaged. I found myself looking further afield, at broad scale, to ecology. 

Etymology of ecology (source of inspiration):

• eco

• oikos (Greek) household living place or home (emphasis on efficiency, appropriateness)

• deeply ingrained

• so, the economy of managing a household

This is interesting in the sense of the changing experience of home, and contrasting those changes with what sustains.  Good management demands being responsive and flexible, then.  The reductive binary of material/symbolic elements may be unsuited to the longitudinal view.

Continuing my sort/search mission:  Lee Stickells describes the most important component of urban design as “the affective form”;  Robert Freestone enshrines the Australian garden city as a schema for social reform;  in "The home of woman, a view from the interior" Alison Ravetz explores the gendered English domestic environment; originally published in 1972, George Seddon’s Sense of Place: A response to an environment is relevant to the unique landform, history and ecology that is the Swan Coastal Plain.

Thursday 30 March

Listening to a podcast about citizenship https://theatersimple.org/podcast-episodes foregrounding:

• belongingness/ 

• national and 

• cultural identity.

One subject comments that “everywhere you are, you feel a little bit foreign”. That sense of community which subjects emphasise describes working together to make something bigger. In this context, migrants can be seen to seek a better life, more freedom, access to rights, invested in the future imaginary/becoming. I wonder, Can we do better in voice and action? 

See Bochner’s mini-manifesto Heart of the matter.  Further wrestling with criteria of autoethnography...

Notes from Andrew Herrmann’s paper responding to Szwabowski’s “Forget all criteria” (which in his reference list he links to a paper titled “Haunted by the dark desire”):

• “impassioned and critical approach toward one’s self” p.3

• “means being self-reflexive and vulnerable and transparent.  It means recognizing our shortcomings, our biases, our irrational - and rational - fears”

• do the “difficult work” of critiquing our selves

• burrow down/ dig

• ask “the questions about ourselves and our decisions”

• beware "the autoethnographic mirror can be unflattering”, and

• so “we might see something ugly”

• at its heart, quoting Allen-Collinson, “is that ever-shifting focus between levels: from the macro, wide sociological angle on sociocultural framework, to the micro, zoom focus on the embedded self” (p.296).

Thursday 2 February

Interesting historical accounts of representations and domestic intrusions of television into the modern concept of home (imagine what these theorists would make of the internet...); all are relevant context to critics’ concerns about cultural standardisation.  See The Ideal vs Reality considered by David Morley (European focus), as well as Eric Hirsch’s Migrants of identity (especially the chapter addressing Domestic Appropriations).  Closer to home, and more recent insight, No place like home by journalist Peter Mares (2018) focuses on home ownership, property investment, and social and economic changes impacting on the Australian dream.

I am left wondering about Backyard Blitz, Grand Designs, and Sharon Zukin’s papers which link urban lifestyles to consumers and consumption. Gentrification is a possible corollary.

Staying with the nature of representation observed on TV, for me there is reflective surprise at how extensively the makeover genre evolved after Burke’s Backyard which was more of a folksy how-to, similar to Gardening Australia.  Perhaps their zeitgeist marks the end of a self-sufficient, can-do era. For more on home improvement, see DIY "worlds" and the co-construction of home and self (2013).  What is distinctive is that Burke’s Backyard was established as a televised magazine-style format with segments rather than an episodic case study exploring specific project successes with time-bound deadlines. I get the impression there is an underlying urgency to have it all now in terms of glossy materialism, along with attached symbolic meaning, and out-source work as quickly as possible. Instant makeover (insert magic wand effect).

Finished reading the Open University text edited by Doreen Massey and Pat Jess in The Shape of the World, Human Geography series.  A place in the world? comes to a (thankfully) hopeful conclusion suggesting that diaspora might be a more useful term to help overcome the notion that place-space relations are limited, especially if we perceive culture as fixed by boundaries, or exclusive rather than organic and mutable.  They also suggest some positive implications of globalisation (hybridity and local uniqueness), but that could be due to the historical phase of globalisation they identify, and explore more favourably (the text was first published 1995 and reprinted 2000). Massey & Jess consider global flows. I feel a sense of irony while waiting for delivery of prescription glasses from Melbourne which takes two weeks, and hinders my ability to read (outdated spares cause eyestrain and headaches).

Other tendrils:

• June Jordan’s poetry about home - political focus;

• Robert Fishman’s account of suburbia and its distinctive qualities, including as a utopian project in America (Silverstone also refers to visions of suburbia);

• implications of the garden city design - this is especially visible as a historical legacy in Perth’s geography;

• sideline exploration of Robin Boyd’s 1968 classic The Australian Ugliness; among other things, he is fixated with the garage taking precedence in Australian architecture, and critiques aesthetics, including local car design;

• new urbanism, including the Urban geography online journal which refers to the nature of third places/space between home and work, as well as life satisfaction (social concerns raised about increasing incidence of loneliness and homelessness - evaluation of which political responses are appropriate). 

Neighbourhood walkability, natural outdoor environments, and the impact of the built environment are explored as features of the social project of home.  I am noting some broad thematic patterns in these commentaries: Identity, consumption, culture, refusal, resistance, space/place.  I am preferring tidalist as a term of choice over non-dualism (see Anna Reckin on Kamau Brathwaite's prose/poetry as sound-space). Elsewhere, I find an intriguing reference to tidalectics in relation to Conrad's fiction - an oceanic worldview.

After initially assuming we choose where to live based largely on aesthetics and affordability, I am now more likely to consider the role of city planners and urban design along with social status depicting Living This Good Life in the media narratives. What then is a good place to live? Many interview subjects claim amenities are paramount as well as proximity to work/ availability of public transport.  No-one is keen on a long commute, and in Los Angeles that distance can reportedly consume up to four hours each day.

Monday 6 February

Verbatim theatre conventions:

• Direct address

• Monologues 

• Restaging the interview

• Narration

• Flashbacks

• Scarce movement and functional design

• Distinctly presentational rhetoric

• Language conventions as “often fragmentary, stumbling and repetitious”

• Tells rather than shows - one of the form’s limitations? Comes to be regarded as negatively un-theatrical

• Conventions are generally referenced as strict requirements rather than flexible possibilities 

Source.

Next, reading Parramatta Girls…

Love the “massaged verbatim” narrative structured around a reunion - the women arrive, share insights, and leave.  The deliberate shifts between juxtaposed past and present timeframes work to relate events rather than glorify violence or spectacle.  Empowering for those involved in the community engagement during the four years spent researching, I imagine. Warnings included from playwright Alana Valentine refer to trauma and real-life voices. Part of a healing practice?

Great follow up with a chapter in Verbatim: Staging Memory and Community by Roslyn Oades. See also the Parramatta Girls' Home website https://www.parragirls.org.au/parramatta-girls-home

Wednesday 15 February

Missed a deadline for Plumwood Mountain Journal, writing eco-poetry and striking the balance in syllabification:

Constellations forge

utopian futures, days

unlike those now past

So history is written or told.

Cassandra Pybus advocates for self reinvention (see essay Home Truth, edited by Carmel Bird).  My attempt:

She drops the car in for its annual service

Tyre pressure checking shows they were all deflated.  Washed, vacuumed and dusted down yesterday.

Busy in morning traffic crossing the city from east to west.  Bayswater is a workzone getting botoxed.  Gentrification underway.  Almost unrecognisable with 40km/h speed limits for traffic calming only leading to a likely unintended choke at the lights on King William Street.  The fresh-minted bike path on Railway Parade in Maylands looks as if it stepped from an art house movie and seems best suited to a Korean or Japanese context (cute paddlepops as signage to mark the divide between path and road).  Transforming as much as Dark City.

She notes the speeding get-to-work urgency of drivers in flow state, the jerky lanechangers who react in frustration.  Egocentric driving.  Often more confident of their reflexes and taking advantage of the contingencies inherent in shifting space.  In Osborne Park, the tributaries flow and stutter at intersections like valves.  Scarborough Beach Road onto Frobisher then a sharp right into the service centre. She thinks, Me and my eight-year old car don’t measure up to their customer base, yet here we are ready for our 96 month service.

She is warned that this may cost $1000. Because of spark plugs? As it turns out, the new battery adds another $600 to the cost and she is ignored while waiting in the white space dominated by an advertorial screen since someone has smashed a non-endorsed replacement windscreen. But that is later in the day. 

For now, there is a walk to Glendalough train station around the corner and she catches a run with commuters into Perth.  The freeway is at a stalemate.  Pace slows to public transport patience and picks up again in the concourse disgorgement.  Embrace the deluge, she tells herself. The sprint is on to platform eight where the High Wycombe line is revealed as new rupture. People scurry performing workaday. It is only 8.30am.

In the city, Carillion arcade has been emptied.  A sacking or purge.  Dusty windows, signage removed from ghost stores and boarding to redirect the pedestrian eddy. Hay Street Mall has the same vibe as Hobart in 2012. Business is not thriving or usual, then.  Covid has taken a toll.

With opening hours announcing 9.30am starts, she realises that this would be a waiting game.  Meantime, this rare outing shows public spaces are largely vacant and accessible.  The cultivation of the CBD as a distinct space and practice made of different daily rhythms has been reset.

Compelling article headings:

• Finding meaning in a changed life.

• The feeling of being alive.

Tuesday 21 February

Reading around new urbanism, third spaces, the built environment, urban sprawl, social change and affordability of housing makes me wonder if all the added complications don’t just serve as stress-inducement to 20/30-somethings.  Tumultuous transition period already fraught with the nature of adulthood and perhaps parenting 101 now made over into something much worse. This is confirmed anecdotally in conversations I have with both daughters as they work to live and make sense of these same tensions.

After this morning’s walk I see something different:

Our home as ‘embodying a life of peace and contentment’ and ‘dull suburban confinement’ belong to different registers, appearing both to coincide and contradict.

Nailing the paradox.

Maybe my often-repeated Big Question - knowing all this, then how do we live well now - which sounds materialist in orientation, should be reframed as “How Do We Best Cultivate a Life of Peace & Contentment?”

In response, this cluster analysis:

Avoid Shift Improve

consumption traps vegetarian values alignment

attention drains reduce/reuse/recycle holonomy

imperial/colonial patterns thrift/frugality mindfulness 

bad faith habits divest/balance

See A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries. Erlebnis at global scale.

Reading list:

• Dave Eggers’ The Every (beware the culture of distraction)

• Kim Stanley Robinson The Ministry for the Future

• Geographies of Urban Politics by Pauline McGuirk

• See David Madden In Defence of Housing

• Sarah Williams Goldhagen Welcome to Your World: How the built Environment Shapes our World (2017) - architecture critic

• Colin Ellard Places of the Heart: the Psychogeography of Everyday Life (2015) 

• interesting article by John Eberhard (2004) Architecture with the brain in mind

Found quote: “We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche” Jung.

Another found observation: Home situates the self.  So, embeddedness can equally appear as a bunker mentality.  Given the face of constant change, certainty will be seen as desirable.  Coined by urban geographer Neil Smith (see The New Urban Frontier, also Philip Lawton), the revanchist city (and revanchist planet), as a powerful mechanism of control accounts for repressive attitudes and revenge enacted towards potential opponents.  

Monday 2 January

She finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, and made an immediate search for the accompanying Stella Maris. Still drunk on McCarthy's syntax and lyricism while reading the sample opening chapters on iBooks, there was a forced pause while she realised that a break was needed between the pair of novels to make way for a shift in perspective, especially one so vulnerable and fractured.

So, she turned to Ali Smith’s Companion Piece: A Novel instead, and finished that over the Christmas-New Year extended revelry period along with the memoir When Breath Becomes Air which failed to live up to effusive reviews.  Perhaps it was the difficult subject matter.  Death.  The writer's courage in the face of that certainty.  She questioned the credibility of high-achieving values, so much striving.  The egoism of the memoir was jarring after Smith's considered social commentary, and her ironic ear for argot.  The tone of the post-modern age.  In hindsight, the texts might have failed as a back-to-back partnership.  One was accomplished and the other more virtuous, youthful if bleak and, as a bestseller, popular rather than literary.  She persisted with reading, though. They did not so much join the revels as persist with their typical days which featured company for selective meals outdoors. They shared the cooking.

*

Their eldest daughter turned 31, and the all-adult-family crew joined them on the terrace for plates of cauliflower and split pea dumplings, spiced potatoes, chutneys and salads; a gluten-free pear cake followed made with buckwheat flour and sour cream. Everything baked had been cooked that morning in the outdoor oven with only the gunpowder potatoes left to stir fry after lunch, then cooled.  There were bottles of champagne, frosted flutes, iced water with lime slices, and coffee and chocolates afterwards. She forgot to bring out the sparklers when evening fell purpling like a curtain, and the mosquitoes buzzed.  A lone frog sang in the drain beside the hibiscus hedge. Even the possum made an appearance, peering down from its lookout, remote among ornamental pear tree branches.

Xavier offered to wash the dishes.  The party relocated inside to the kitchen, everyone wearing masks while the immunocompromised drifted outside to a lone bench, and sat in the dark, meditating.

Saturday 7 January

While she plays the piano each afternoon, YouTube ads which she repeatedly skips intrude to promote Spotlight homing (make this, cushion with that, get comfortable, be crafty), as well as NAB/ Commonwealth Bank enticements.  

Belonging is commodified.  

In one narrative, a primary-school aged boy wearing his uniform gets to stay in the suburb and make friends.  A contrived happy ending.  That guilt-inducing message is the advertiser’s key appeal for settling down and being lumbered with a 30-year mortgage - conformism and gaining a sense of feeling grounded in place/community.  The video footage of being-with- others in Anywheresville on a residential street, houses blurred to render them indistinct or anonymised rather than desirable property, could just as easily be constructing a tale of childhood bullying. 

She wonders what it is about her search habits that identifies her as a suitable recipient for these commercials.

Wednesday 11 January

I am reading a friend's loan copy of Verbatim: Staging Memory & Community.  What most intrigues me is the exploration of truth, and a resurgent fascination for journalism where authenticity is sought.  Scholars quoted propose that audiences listen more closely to the verbatim performance since words spoken are real, honest accounts.  I am not so sure that any post-modern reader/audience participant could be so gullible. Perhaps the claims made are in relation to specific subject matter addressed as social commentary.

Now I am interested in seeking out some of the examples of tribunal hearings they identify - performance of actual hearings (imagine exchanges in board rooms), council rooms, legal settings - to explore political topics in the depth they deserve to be considered with the goal of coming to a real appreciation.  No more two-minute sound bites. The constraints of mainstream media distil words to semaphore signal news. Two questions: 

• Who has the time?  

• How much less well-informed are we now, living with such data/information wealth?

A sideways thread I follow to examine the how of verbatim theatre throws into sharper relief why you would choose to follow the investigative approach.  Reviews of David Hare's verbatim play The Permanent Way comment on the writer's ability to explore what may seem on first glance to be a dull topic (the railway system in Britain), but the approach serves to characterise from within lived experiences enormous tragedy caused by agents of economic rationalism.  The human predicament so accurately, painfully exposed.

Monday 16 January

Wondering about the semantics of the weatherboard worker's cottage as captured by realtor-speak.  The enthusiasm for revitalisation which, like pork, distinguishes the product from pig.  As an investment project the house itself embodies symbolic resolution of the self without any of the sanding, sweat, nasty asbestos or lead-based paint discoveries, revelation of white ant damage, a dose of sudden rising damp to match the drain of unanticipated expense. My widened eyes are meant only to see the cash register stuffed with windfall dollars as I ring that future sale.

I also wonder about the significance of makeover shows. 

Montage views of change processes on Backyard Blitz are not too different in motivational intensity to The Biggest Loser.  False pressure of time as metaphor.  Why does the clock always tick? Mortality?  Cost blowouts? According to David Morley, "traditional ideas of home, homeland and nation have been unsettled, and the electronic landscapes in which we now dwell are haunted by all manner of cultural anxieties which arise from this destablilizing flux" (Morley, 2001, p.428).

Wherever mammoth change processes are condensed into convenient 30-minute timeslots, suspicion follows.  Even Grand Designs, while mocking hubris, compresses the lengthy span of years spent project managing.  Host British designer Kevin McCloud takes puckish delight from inevitable conflict.  In fact, the show's formula extracts associated stress of ambitious renovators embarked on the dream home confabulation while neatening the narrative of trauma into Trials Overcome.  Success in Adversity. 

Selected reference

Morley, D. (2001).  Belongings, space and identity in a mediated world.  European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(4), 425-448.

*

On the weatherboard cottage

The Australian worker's cottage is grounded, simple in layout.  There is a passageway and four rooms are typically arranged off this central spine to form a grid beneath a hip roof clad in corrugated iron.

If you're lucky, there is a four panel entry door with leadlights, sash cord double-hung windows, front and rear verandahs, a claw foot bathtub, decorative posts and corbels. Inside may include skirtings, dadoes, pressed tin, ceiling roses, even fancy architraves as features, or not.  Some homes are both modest and plain. Others have had all the confidence of character worn or stripped over time.

Often smaller in footprint than federated cousins and Californian bungalows, these cottages were built in working class suburbs close to the CBD from the 1890s.  Materials were cheap and readily available until brick prevailed.

Out the back, there is likely to be a bathroom/laundry configuration, sometimes captured beneath a skillion roof addition, a lean-to like an elbow crook of inclusion.  These elements were once kept separate from the main house, disguised by vines according to early street plans.  She imagines chokoes, passionfruit, a washing line for clothes' drying.  Surely the vines were productive as well as practical for screening?

White ants feast on timber, and weatherboard homes raised on wooden stumps are always susceptible to attack.  With only a modest ant cap as protection against marauders, these homes are dependent on regular checks to prevent insect damage.

Wednesday 18 January

Our weatherboard cottage

This was not the ideal family setting when we first arrived along with the furniture in 1996. Inspired as we were at being second home renovators after the experience of our cottage in Albany, we knew that Wes’s kidney disease was progressing towards either dialysis or organ transplant, and his energy was dissipating.

Taking stock of what we had just mortgaged ourselves to was a sobering moment. First, our youngest, then aged two, trailed after the emptied removalist van on its uphill departure, demanding a return trip home to Albany. She seemed displeased with the new arrangements in this worker’s cottage with its admittedly daggy 1980s kitchen, interior Roman blinds with pelmets and netting, tacked-on sleepouts and metal-roofed patio with extensive timber pergola surrounds.

As I recall, the house interior was boxy, dark and airless. Looking back, writing this, I feel concern for these people, my young family, myself. So much to deconstruct. Where to start the renewal?

Second, the garden was a veneer of sawdust and discarded log piles spread over an enormous verge thinly disguised by reticulated garden beds in a front yard containing palm trees, fig trees, plumbago and enormous bougainvillea against the fence. A lone lemon flanked the kidney-shaped lawn. Twinned lounge room windows were overhung with jerry-rigged awnings draped with hanging baskets, and looped reticulation cables. Brick paving, multiple gates, and internal rows of cyclone mesh fencing out the back could only have been designed as a guard dog run and set the scene for a defensive compound. 

We discovered that the reticulation timer was set to run twice a day. Our immediate surrounds were moist and strangely tropical in Perth’s dry heat.

Monday 30 January

Reading Philip Langdon on the new urbanism which links to the 15-minute city concept now gaining popularity (and critiqued here).  Scope includes suburban vision and design (see Morley & Silverstone), planning and policy, historicity, cars vs gardens (outwardly focused as distinct from the inner retreat).  In the references to utopia I am reminded of The Truman Show as well as Don’t Worry Darling.  

This week’s reading of invasions of privacy - tech intruding on porous borders, surveillance - reminded me of the impact which Sylvania Waters generated.  This was one of the first reality TV shows I can recall watching.  Free-to-air, and we were tuning in for that weekly hit of train wreckage that was matriarch Noelene. The family were clearly victims of psychological profiling (narcissists before Big Brother), and their home life was a representation of the comfortably wealthy in contrast to second son Paul and his girlfriend who were renting the type of cottage that was very familiar to me from our student rental days.

Thursday 1 December

Ibises roost in the tree canopies above tidal water height beside the Swan River/Derbarl Yerrigan this morning. Their wing movement is the eye-catching flutter of white handkerchiefs. There seems to be a link between this moment, now a memory as well as an image since I took a quick photograph, an unworthy snap, and learning how to play Saint Saens' The Swans, and Autumn by Vivaldi.  This month marks my one-year anniversary of purchasing a red Casiotone electric keyboard. Daily practice fits between a cup of tea at 3.00pm and cooking dinner around 5.00pm.  I am remapping my brain.  Playing notes and melodies now feels to me like touch typing. I allow myself the slow pace. The easy options.  I build a pattern of keystrokes and sounds. My fingers recreate motion as familiar as the flutter of white handkerchiefs.

Reading Richardson, Writing a method of inquiry. She recommends crystallisation over triangulation. The distinction is one of complexity over reductionist simplification to some type of middle ground passed off as certainty or expertise.  Reminds me of learning to play the piano.

Thursday 8 December

In Worlding refrains, Kathleen Stewart claims that "Bloom spaces are everywhere", and attending to "nameable clarities" is a way of encouraging possibilities to proliferate.  What might grow?  I keep track of reading her collection of assemblages titled Ordinary Affects in this Twitter thread.

My daily walk when I take photographs is a way "of attending to what is happening".  A vibe I catalogue using Instagram.  There is also a Tumblr cache which I prefer for the appearance of patterns or themes.  Christmas decorations are making an upsurge.  Caravans are on the move.  The lone shopping trolley stages appearances. We have entered the Noongar season called Birak. Lemon scented gums are shedding their bark around the suburb, peeling on verges, and filling culverts in parks with shredded outer layers.

They moved to Bassendean 26 years ago when the suburban landscape was a mix of brick, fibro and weatherboard, mostly unrenovated cottages on subdivisible quarter acre blocks or smaller, and parents still went to the Sunday sesh, dropped their kids over for a play before heading off and returning later (no mobile phones to check on their whereabouts).  Now there is gentrification, renewal, a shopping centre stocked with Asian condiments, online banking so the physical branch has disappeared, and an open air cinema in the park alongside the library.  The local council in tandem with the RAC are promoting community consultations to redesign urban architecture and streetscapes.  No solution (yet) for the moribund top end of Old Perth Road which T-junctions at Guildford Road busyness, and culminates in or begins at a train station.  The local pub has had a $7 million upgrade which they call a reno, and installed a playground for the kids.

Wednesday 14 December

The photos you take on morning walks catalogue performance of Christmas celebrations, lone shopping trolley appearances, children’s play, renovations and building work, signage, and patterns, especially leading lines and cloudforms.

Performance of Christmas ranges from whole front yard scenes generated with cardboard, lights, tinsel, and dirigibles as installation art.  You do not have to look far.  From your study window, behold neighbours who craft a garden tapestry which flashes through the night in red, green, blue and white.  Topiaried callistemons died on their verge two summers ago, yet the festooning of lights, baubles and tinsel fabulates rigid silhouettes as a magic forest, and tentacles into the metallic grille of boundary fencing festooned with silver stars.  Heaven on Earth.  A landing strip of sorts for Santa.

There he is in dirigible form, too large for the sleigh, sometimes rigid with air and grinning, otherwise withered and flat to the bricks.  A morning after the night before Santa.  His companion elf - revealed on closer inspection as a reindeer - is similarly disaffected by the taxing heat and strain of outdoors spectacle.  This house opposite shelters three generations, and the grandparents undertake school runs, mowing and garden art duties.  Being for others is suggested since the exhibit faces outward, to the street.  Seen by the children of the house only during arrivals and departures, this tableau seems taken for granted since they are typically indoors when at home, and they are never sighted playing out on the street as your daughters were 20 years ago.

You wonder about the cost and value of this all-night spectacular, especially as you are seated in the front row for free, a passive onlooker rather than any participant.  You inadvertently look on occasion, take note and dismiss.  There is a flickering glow, a radiation throb which emits through the angled slats of loungeroom blinds.  No resentment on this side of the cul de sac, just disinterest in material spectacles. It is the meaninglessness over which you stumble, puzzling.  Why bother?  As with Halloween which another neighbour explained as “only a bit of fun”, you wonder who produces and markets the fun, and who it is intended for.

The isness of performing Christmas arises elsewhere in low key staging with HOHOHO banners in carmine, sculpted snowpeople ornamenting front verandahs or balancing on balconies.  Perth temperatures in mid-December can range between 27 and 40 degrees Celsius. Myths of northern hemisphere narratives prevail here in Australia as they did in your English childhood.  Only that time-space included sleet and continual strikes, and pressies were thin on the ground beneath your real pine tree in the coal-heated lounge.  You did not succumb to these contrived arts when your children were young, and the products had not reached saturation point in the 60s or 70s when you were a child, but you do recall annual receipt of hairdryers, tape recorders, vinyl LPs, and limited edition chocolate.

Safe, then.  You learned resistance to commerce and advertising.  Removed and remote on most fronts by now, since you are vegetarian and similarly unmoved by SBS promotion of Coles ham.  Look away from the feasting, non-carnivores, you are excluded from the demographic and immune to meat industry messaging.

Lone shopping trolleys appear as the perfect antidote to excess - an ironic symbol of anti-consumption.  Seized either for radical pursuits, escapees renegading from the bounded confines of trolley bays and centre car parks, they appear abandoned.  Alongside the bike path.  Next to the local MP’s office on West Road near the roundabout.  In the park or adrift on verges.  Always empty, they convey an absence, innocence (nothing to see here, no really), but are clearly transgressing. Stolen? Missing and wanted? It is the season for excess as well as escape.  As such, escapees reflect a postmodern imperative to be liberated.  Freed from service, and roaming out in the suburban wild.

Children’s play, by comparison, is more disturbing.  You see that we have moved beyond the early pandemic solidarity of stuffed toys fixed to shrubs or lashed to brick pillars.  Chalk messages on footpaths take a more sinister turn with one North Road site featuring a CSI crime scene silhouette.  Spreading like a rhizome through Bindaring Park is an engineered jump installation for bicycles featuring fractured melaleuca limbs fixed in place with mounded clay to create inclines for airborne feats.  You alert the local council ranger to eco-vandalism, and receive their dismissal on official letterhead in reply.

*

Thursday 22 December

You are keeping an eye on the frog which inhabits the succulent beneath the lounge window in your front yard. Either that, or the frog keeps a lookout for you.  It plays dead whenever you are near, and the mottled green camouflages its movements from one part of the canopy to another, following patterns of shade.

Alongside the terrace, among deadening spikes of once-pink pelargonium, the spotted scrubwren family huddle in a woven nest shaped like a pouch. The nesting parent startles whenever you come by - usually while dragging a hose across the lawn (“common but shy species” in Perth gardens according to the bush bird guide). 

Daily observations include raking each morning, and watering by hand for pots and baskets.  Water restrictions mean that sprinkler use is now limited to twice a week.  You have topped up the mulch to keep root runs cool.  Visitors drop by: parrots are wrecking the plum tree with their early fossicking - fruit is still unripe, hard - and their appearance timing grows earlier each year after discovering the bounty of your Santa Rosa plum tree.

Friday 4 November 

Reading Bruno Latour Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime.  Late to this luminary, and he died recently, on October 9, so feels like catch-up labour.  I have a note marked in my folders flagging actor network theory, or ANT, as a follow up (Latour, 2005). I hadn’t counted on his revelations and insights to globalisation, identity, and the shifting horizon of modernisation.  Flight, abandonment of the elite, and rationale for denial of the climate devastation.  The ruins of our finite ground.

It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather of how to live in the same world, share the same culture, face up to the same stakes, perceive a landscape that can be explored in concert.  Here we find the habitual vice of epistemology, which consists in attributing to intellectual deficits something that is quite simply a deficit in shared practice (Latour, 2018, p. 24).

I understand now why I have been struggling to understand the Trumpist approach and its followers, or the Brexit lunacy, or populism in general. Neoliberalism aside since we have been acclimatised by the steady application of policy-heat for 40 years, hyper-politicking is a trauma-inducing reality TV show for any viewer.  Latour explains that we inhabit mutually incompatible worlds, several territories.  I am re-directed to Donna Haraway and her neologism worlding to mean making worlds together. 

Wednesday 9 November

Reading Janine Mikosza’s memoir Homesickness and I love what she has achieved with style and form: splitting her narrator(s) into the Jin part who is suffering trauma, and the caring interlocutor, the one who wants to help move the healing process forward, but is also impatient or more brash, less vulnerable. That Q/A structure within each section defined by rooms in the memory palace of real childhood houses (drawings, memories) enables expression of anger, so much hurt and pain. The self-awareness which emerges may not have been available with the limitation of any singular first person narrator. Distancing enables she/her which eventually recombines in healing to become we, clearly me.

How to do that which is so very hard? Some tips and links here.

Wednesday 16 November

Having completed recording and transcribing an oral history, and editing the 25 pages of that transcript down to a seven page vignette, I return after a two-week hiatus to pick up elements of my literature review. Searching through diary entries, I encounter re-directive messages like “see 12 November” which prompts closer attention to voice and the domestic confinement of space/place.  There is also a further instruction on that page to “see 31 October” which prompts consideration of three interconnected elements:

• self-other

• psychology and philosophy

• environment, which I take to refer to the reading I have started on ecological concerns, mostly texts by Timothy Morton, Alice Crary and Donna Haraway’s Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene.

This diary crumb-trail is handy for reminders of how intertwined reading/ thinking evolves.  This physical flicking through pages and dates shows that I have not yet integrated Yi Fu Tuan’s topophilia in relation to discussion of space and place in the literature review, either.  I also notice that there is a growing pattern of connection between my Ancestry dot com mapping spread throughout October, and the listing of geographical synergies I managed to capture as I took notes (Spennymoor, County Durham, Hodnet, Newcastle Under Lyme, Stoke on Trent, Woolaston, Ayrshire in Scotland).

From the re-reading, Bollnow’s philosophical position strikes me as quaint and of its time, but useful for conceiving of a holistic lived-space.  Without a social-cultural dimension, the lack of critical perspective becomes a limitation of his theory.

Clare Cooper Marcus is more compelling with her consideration of Jungian archetypes in relation to modern architecture and design theories 13 years after Bollnow was writing.  As a symbol-of-self in literature, poetry and dreams,  she claims that access to the unconscious or psyche reveals that “we project something of ourselves onto its physical fabric” (Cooper, 1974, p.131).  I like the idea that in working with her students, Marcus encourages them to capture images of houses from their childhood aged between five and 12 which reflects a “bias of happier times”.  Perhaps, although that was not my experience.   I am reminded of the Share House Project and their art explorations into memory, especially capturing the floor plan of your childhood home as a sketch. 

Saturday 19 November

Today I messed up the 10.00am Google Meet login for Shut Up & Write, so I wrestle instead with theories of self/other.  First, I am more than happy with Vainikka’s broad definition of self as a "reservoir of beliefs, understandings, and sentiments of oneself" that are the result of internalised practices and memory.  For bearings, I then reread Marcus Antonsich’s paper In search of belonging: An analytical framework.

I appreciate the boldness of his two questions:

• What do you mean that you belong here?

• How is belonging claimed?

Memory work is flagged along with permeability of self and the pesky physical boundaries of place.  Our sense of belonging (and the call of home) will then emerge in narratives as longing.  Co-presence is the term Antonsich deploys to conceive of the permeable identity boundary of the self in relation to communities of belonging.  A dynamic, then: Becoming self in tandem with knowing place.  Rootedness and attachment as theories of home that are swirling for me from sad contemplation of endangered Little Penguins.

Pointers in my notes so far on Self identity:

• Descartes’ concept as a simple, self-evident fact: “I think, therefore I am”.
  

• Bruner - Self-making and world-making, 1991 - focuses on narration as a living of life.  Home is the "central axis" p.703.
  

• Kant
  

• Piaget
  

• Carl Rogers sees self-concept as active, dynamic and malleable.  A humanistic term for who we really are as a person.
  

• Giddens – Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age.  Polity Press, 1991.  Raises the spectre of morality which smacks of conservative thinking.
  

• Erikson, psychoanalyst.  Identity as unfathomable and all-pervasive, 1968.  The individual struggles within a social order. Eight psychosocial stages. He suggests that the final years of life are a struggle for integrity over despair. 

• Malpas - subjective space.

• Judith Butler - Giving an account of oneself  and her paper "Performative agency" in the Journal of Cultural Economy.

• Fortenberry https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302393636_Self-Identity

• From Mari Ruti’s The call of character: Living a life worth living

...self is the broadest, often encompassing the other two. Identity, in turn, includes both our private everyday sense of who we are and our social persona—the culturally intelligible personality that others relate to. Finally, character is what in many ways resists the confines of sociality, expressing, instead, something about the most eccentric frequencies of our being (p.15).

Wednesday 23 November

Dialectic of lived space:

inside outside/ external

mentally near mentally distant

personal, intimate, private public space, official

domestic sphere far away 

jealously guarded infiltrates through media and migration

moored, rooted     unrooted, non-place, transit

belonging, permanence     movement

symbolic comfort and security     absence - consumption and materialism

grounded     constructed

Drafting here to check for accuracy and right-fit as I move into methods:

What underpins self is a deeply-held sense of belonging, of feeling at home in the world, of having a uniquely recognisable identity. This much seems clear to the point of banality. Accepted theories of self development explain that a child’s sense of self emerges through distinctions, beginning with an ability to distinguish ourselves from other people (Mother, for instance), as well as other objects and things which exist in specific places (Proshansky et al, 1983). By constructing an analytical framework of belonging in place as a study of process rather than status, “feelings of belonging to a place and processes of Self-formation are mutually implicated” (Antonsich, 2010, p.651). Distinctions necessarily arise in defining the divide between those intimate feelings of personal attachment, rootedness or belonging at home which are “unavoidably conditioned by the working of power relations (politics of belonging)” (Antonsich, 2010, p.662).

Moving from a theoretical to a methodological dimension, capturing the language of self while it exists dynamically here at home within both a permeable identity boundary and communities of belonging is elusive and difficult. The home-place in which we are grounded is itself porous, symbolic, and mythologised, defined in the modern sense as a "phantasmagorical space in which the far away infiltrates the domestic sphere" (Reynders & Van der Land, 2008, p.4).  How hard can it be to tell a life story when purpose, trajectory and selection of events as narrative elements appear naturalised?  The form is familiar.  Yet narrative begins with inscribing the first-person subjective account which is "notably unstable" (Bruner, 2004, p.694).  

Capture is critical. Challenges of this inquiry include rendering complex pluralities of meaning, along with scale, as dynamic.  

Friday 25 November 

Still contemplating the video we watched last night about the sculpture that was House rendered by Rachel Whiteread from her concrete casting of a single-standing Victorian terrace home in 90s London. The actual house was scheduled for demolition as occupants in that area were rehoused in modern tower blocks. I saw ill-considered social policy driving change. What an opportunity for a singular housing study about gentrification, though. Metonymic. One for all, and all bar one.

The logistical problems for the artist and technicians looked enormous, but what a grand concept… And then ephemera - as a work/ piece which functioned as an exhibit only for 80 days while the temporary building stood its ground within a ghostly community of demolished others; houses which had sustained people living their lives for more than a century. 

Paradox: I first saw the smooth facade as a mausoleum. Materials destroyed twice, and a performative reincarnation along with conspicuous consumption/ waste. Jerky bulldozer action syncopated the spectacle.  We watched the process of art-making as the crew spray-layered walls with the unsustainable pumping of so much tidal concrete. The artist was seen dressed in bib and brace overalls while labourers wore protective kit including headlamps for seeing in the dark (windows had already been boarded over). Victorian, claustrophobic labour conditions. A stairwell removed is then seen only as a shadow zigzag on the exterior. An imitative ziggurat.  As apocalyptic as Hiroshima.

The ghost/death theme continued on display as the “piece” and its brutalist edginess of white, uninhabitable domicile turned sculpture held presence, resurrected on its own reinforced footings. Absence bundled into territorial presence, but an edifice, a wasteful shrine.  Nullified territory. Expunged yet transformed. Memories linger just like the ghost house.  Photos, too.  Footage in the documentary showed a passing stream of rubberneckers, and lingering contemplation at the fenceline.  I saw the changing tastes or faddism invested in wallpaper, then a mirroring of sorts as graffiti defaced the surface of the sculpture. I wondered what the neighbours thought.

Why do we do what we do with our houses (dream, slave, makeover, renovations) when living a life is enough? Perhaps the house as a symbol of self attempts to extend shelf life (ours).

I was reminded of the symbolism of the whited sepulchre in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A place of death, of administrative corpses.  I recognised a reverberating scream about what is essentially wrong in the world. As it plays out with the climate emergency, I felt the enormity of forces I have no way of opposing. I felt the determination of bulldozers, and the symbolic erasure of a shared community caused by demolition/ what passes for urban renewal. Dynamic forces. Some bureaucrat’s idea of what is good for urban development while meeting KPIs. Whiteread’s sculpture showed that what was removed once stood in the way - us, the superfluous people.

Wes said this morning that he had dreamed of how to serve up a slice of the House sculpture as if it was dessert. As if he could eat the walls.

Wednesday 30 November

Plumwood Mountain journal are inviting responses to five provocations:

1. Name a technique for change-making (disruption)

Anti-consumption

Assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980)

Copresence

Diffraction (see Barad)

Early retirement

Eschew futurism and techno-fixes

Meditation practices

Non-compliance

Rhizomatic learning

Self-care as a political act of defiance

SF = Speculative fabulation, string figures, science fact, speculative feminism (Haraway, 2016)

Songlines and storifying to situate

Sympoiesis or making with (Haraway, 2016)

Systems thinking (see Meadows, Wheatley)

Tentacular interventions

Unexpected collaborations and combinations (Haraway, 2016)

Visible mending in words and actions

 
Revised as a poem titled Visible mending:

Grounded here in anti-consumption

(the bonus of early retirement), I tell myself

to “eschew futurism and techno-fixes”.

What works?

meditation practices,

non-compliance &

rhizomatic learning.

This Self-care is an act of defiance.

Through tentacular interventions, healing comes

to fill space between words & actions.

2. Ask a provocative, deviant question

• In what ways is the Capitaloscene an act of spectacle worthy of hominid redemption?

• How can the Anthropocene be rendered as a multiscalar experience so that humans grasp what looms as terror-inducing enormities at macro-meso-micro levels?

• What would it look and feel like if the business as usual model was hijacked, seized or fallowed for essential deep-cleansing?

• Where does hope reside in the ruins of potential omnicide?  Grim provocation, I admit, but drawing on the Buddhist concept of meditation in cemeteries. What if we contemplate that now, while we can?

3. Give a specific example of cultural change

Forty years of Neoliberalism and the notion that rampant, expansionist globalism could be checked/paused/interrupted by SARS-CoV-2.

4. Give the Earth-centric meaning for some common human-centric terms

Donna Haraway gives us Chthulucene (multiple species stories) for kin and worlding for belonging - being on Earth/ Terra with the critters in interdependent ecosystems. Her definition of oddkin means that “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost pile” (Haraway, 2016, p.4).

Bruno Latour gave us globabble as a neologism drawn from globalise. In Down to earth, Latour explains the inherent paradox:

“For 50 years, what is called “globalization” has in fact consisted in two opposing phenomena that have been systematically confused.

Shifting from a local to a global viewpoint ought to mean multiplying viewpoints, registering a greater number of varieties, taking into account a larger number of beings, cultures, phenomena, organisms, and people” (Latour, 2018, p.12).

5. Set a task for a poet

Render long, deep history as bundled entanglements or space-time compression.

Birth the new vignettes as multispecies, possible modes of being, or transcendental places by theorising voices.

References

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980).  A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, D.J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Cthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Meadows, D.H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Wheatley, M. (2007). Finding our way: Leadership for an uncertain time. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

2 October

The reminder note in my diary to check Lefebvre for “textures” meant I found more in Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Weird.  I had some disorientation before realising that there was very little in Rhythmanalysis, but a great deal more on texture in The Production of Space.  Running around in circles, like looking for a parking spot inside the multi-storey shellstack.  Insert sounds of the Hallelujah chorus playing.

Flicking back and forth between tabs on all of these texts, and finally stumbling across this highlighted note disclosed what had already been uncovered in the earlier circling of my process: “It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p. 80). 

Advancing “by approximations”. Here this morning I see that the feeling of being lost is very close to the actuality of finding what I didn’t even realise I was looking for. Lost and learning.  Understanding here is of the how rather more than the what. I just need to keep searching. The coalescing takes place without being forced. I see I am the centre, centrifugal even, and need to hold steady.

Friday, 7 October

I am searching for the house as a "transfiguration of the ordinary" (Kerkezi, 2022, p.7).

Reading warnings to “mind the research gaps”. Go with hunches.  

Interesting this morning that I dreamed of a return to work and the mess of the hot desk.  In a surprise appearance, Robert De Niro had the desk alongside me which has to have arisen from our recent viewing of The King of Comedy.  In my dream, though, De Niro’s charismatic presence was less Rupert Pupkin than a combination of Louis Cypher in Angel Heart (compelling menace), Jake in Raging Bull (dynamic and damaged), and Travis in Taxi Driver (manic charm verging on insanity).

Also wondering about the extent to which home is a way out into the bigger/ community-global space - how we come home, leave home, and go home, what we keep out as well as the anticipation of metaphorical return. Can there ever be a nostalgic recapture? I am thinking that, like reification of childhood memories, this longing infuses our sense of self but is ultimately delusional.  What if none of this is to do with buildings?

Are the current SBS travel promotions somehow linked to the reluctance of many to emerge and reimagine the world and our being in it mid-pandemic when so much is still uncertain despite protestations of continuing in curiosity and wonder (wait - what - to consume tourism?).

I am still thinking about de Certeau and his idea in The Practice of Everyday Life that “stories about places are makeshift things.  They are composed with the world’s debris” (1984, p.107).  What else is there but debris? Advertising reminds me that this is so even though I make sure I am exposed to little in the way of commercial/ persuasive messaging (see YouTube Commonwealth Bank ads, and the NAB push on SBS).

Property, identity and gender are all problematic in this extractive paradigm.  See for example the Grattan Institute policy document exploring Perth and Peel The housing we’d choose.

So, for the methodology section of this inquiry... (yes, the gap is clear).  Today I wallow in the quagmire:

• seek the unfamiliar to undo “tortured systematicity in this work” (St. Pierre, 2014, p.24);

• Deleuze and Guattari conceive of plateaus, bodies without organs, rhizomes - advance by approximations; 

• break with the self-other dichotomy;

• inquiry as divination - MacLure 2020;

• wondering rather than coding;

• “incredulity towards metanarratives” - Lyotard 1989;

• St.Pierre - method is always “what will have been done”.  And we cannot see the new because we’re limited by the structures of the present, and we have no language yet to say it; practice for the new = “we will be living it”;

• Derrida advised that we have to overthrow the structure so that something different can happen (1967/1974);

• concept as method involves what Judith Butler called careful reading (1995);

• Haecceity as a “mode of individuation that is neither that of a subject or of a thing" (Lecercle, 2002, p. 93). See Deleuze as well as philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker;

• Non-representational research as a “correspondence, in the sense of not coming up with some exact match or simulacrum for what we find in the things and happenings going on around us, but of answering them with interventions, questions, and responses of our own (Ingold, 2015);

• Flat ontology;

• “cracks in the mirror, fusions at the edges” - see David Harvey chapter in The condition of postmodernity; 

• also “performing memory work as inquiry” Barros, Hadeer & Gajasinghe in International review of Qualitative research. They discuss confabulation “as memoirs, journal entries, photographic narratives, and so on. Confabulation guided the authors through questions related to the meanings of self, other, and culture often taken for granted in (auto)ethnographic research”. 

Saturday, 15 October

Wes turns 64 and officially achieves Seniors Card status.

Came across “artists embrace non-linearity” in my reading on qualitative methods/ autoethnography. This made sense for me in relation to Wong Kar Wai’s plot description of In the Mood for Love symbolised as an ouroboros which he identified as a motif in the work of Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar. Fitting that the circle/ cycle motif is mirrored in reading connections.

A boy walking up our street with his stroller-pushing mum this morning says “she’s got lots of flowers” loud enough for me to hear. His mum responds that it is very pretty. Daisies are getting there while nasturtium surges over the fence, twisting on itself in an urgency to erupt in an orange crush. I remember how sad I felt in February when the entire verge died from lack of water and an onslaught of late-summer heat.

Meanwhile, I am listening to Einaudi’s album Seven Days Walking. I like trying to play his easier tunes on my piano. Beginner mode, slowly. The patterns of his rhythm become recognisable as he cycles through and repeats sequences. There is a strong sense of satisfaction at being able to keep to his tempo while stretching to the reaches of my left and right hands.

Monday, 24 October

Searching for evidence of my great-grandfather’s life nearly a century ago in Western Australia:

• Martin Godfrey Jones

• Birth: 1899

• Death: 16 Mar 1929 (aged 29–30)

• Burial: Karrakatta Cemetery and Crematorium, Karrakatta, Nedlands City, Western Australia, Australia

• Plot: Wesleyan-Dc-0227

• Memorial #: 213625631

• Age: 30 years, Last Residence: East Perth

He is buried in the same grave as his father, also named Martin. Dates recorded on the headstone for Martin the elder in 1951 are incorrect, but I guess that is what happens when grief causes memories to fray.

I am down the rabbit hole of genealogy mapping and behind-paywalling census data. Births, baptisms, christenings, census, war service, death.  Such frustration when everyone you meet in the family is named Martin or Adam or James. On the female side, we have a tsunami of Agnes, Ann, Sarah and Elizabeth.  My favourite is Minnie Clutterbuck. And I learn that Aunty Winn was christened Winnifred Ruby.  There is even another Phoebe appearing in the 1800s.

Places are predominantly Shropshire, Northumberland, Gloucestershire, Scotland for those further back down the line, mostly Ayrshire due to Adam Logan’s origins. One Welsh connection with Davies. Surprising number of migrants. At least three generations already came to Perth 100 years before my family arrived here. One woman moved to Michigan in the 1800s. I discover family in New Zealand, Wales, Kalgoorlie and Bunbury.

Using these genealogy tools (Ancestry dot com, My Heritage, Find My past, Find A Grave) I feel conceptually framed within populist contexts of Who do you think you are?  Producers probably expect a gleeful response to bad apples in the family tree…. I have gaps, intrigues and queries.

From the genealogy dig and fan-shaped overview of the ancestors I can now scrutinise, I see how my paternal line is a powerhouse of hardy Scottish forebears. I imagine them as a series of nested dolls wearing kilts.  Even though my great-grandfather who arrived in Fremantle aged 30 in 1929 aboard SS Borda died soon afterwards from spinal meningitis, and is buried in the Wesleyan plot at Karrakatta cemetery, here I am, his great-granddaughter, a European settler nearly 100 years later.

What I notice among the ancestors are wood turners, tailors, farm labourers, motor mechanics, hauliers.  So many practical menfolk are able to turn their hand to a trade or to production, craft, transport, and support their families.  Definitions of self as capable, enterprising and hardy. The modernising principle.  Service during WWI and WWII is common, with many already married before departing for the front, most of them RAF or infantry. Big families in the early 1900s and further back.  Farmers living in Wistanswick.  Six, 10 or 12 children is not unusual. One couple produce 13 offspring in 19 years.  Many die young.

I am frustrated at the lack of Newcomb family detail for my maternal grandfather (John, but better known as Jack). Cannot find a marriage certificate and I do not know the names of his parents. Hit a wall there. Much of my time is spent emailing, Telegram/Instagram messaging and iMessaging family.  They must be getting sick of me :-)

Saturday, 29 October

The catwalk

Our neighbours moved

out yesterday

One hired Europcar reversed down

the battleaxe driveway;

their stained BBQ unleashed

on the verge to graze; empties

laundered in the recycling;

five cars, two trailers in/

out dock loading on our

council strip; their watch

dog, Max, a bark-shaped

vacancy, strayed

I see this morning on

my walk, sashaying

down their drive, clear

as a runway, over-the-road’s

cat moved in

3 September

Somewhere as everywhere, nowhere (Julieanne Schultz writes a chapter in The idea of Australia with this grounding as a component defining the national identity. Eucalyptus scent). Naming as intimacy.

Meeting a new word: ipseity (which I had to walk out of the study to recall from yesterday’s reading).  Means individual or personal identity, selfhood. The quality of being oneself. Can be plural, so ipseities.

Ethics of representation explored while writing-stories (see Laurel Richardson, 2000, Writing: A method of inquiry). See Banks & Banks for ethnographic fiction (Fiction and social research: By ice or fire). Also Death at the Parasite Cafe.

Ethnographic drama. Crystallization. The Written Suburb.  Brenda Ueland recommends transferring field notes into drama. Layered and sandwich texts. Deleuze and Guattari would consider lamination in the making of this sense.

10 September

Reading Sebastian Smee’s Quarterly essay.  Identity. The hidden life. Happiness. Social media and social changes wrought.

13 September

To the narrator, the diarist, the autoethnographer. 

What troubles me is your self absorption, the narcissist's unwavering gaze, the unrelenting "I", private thoughts and insights shared, period of self-interrogation, a privatopia, contemporary pilgrimage, cyclic solipsism.  See Edensor for more on the leisurely stroll of the flaneur.  Walking in rhythms.  Place ballets, dwelling-in-motion, mobile homeliness. Everywhere, places of yourself are becoming.

I encountered a course syllabus on the history of daily life in Modern Europe: Cooking, clothes and comics.  Can I write Food, family and future fear?

Three challenges of this methodology (source?):

1. finding the author's voice;

2. negotiating policies and procedures; and

3. addressing validity concerns for autoethnography.

20 September

Considering dichotomies, and in what ways they may be important in this study:

• Positivist vs constructionist

• Fixity vs fluidity (see Frost & Selwyn)

• Space vs social relations

• Emotional vs material

• Mundane vs spectacular

• Domus vs voyage (see Morris, p.46 At Henry Parkes motel on the need to question a fixed position) 

• Settled vs mobile

The organisation of space over time seems critical in making distinctions. How, who and why - the language of power is articulated through discrimination.

5 August

Music thread this morning from Wish you were here by Pink Floyd to Money by the Flaming Lips. We decided their cover version had more phat funk. Then I played Hurricane by Grace Jones and Gil Scott Heron’s New York is killing me.

Is the space limbo or vacuum? (W)hole, centre or margin.  Much depends on who is defining the space.

Space to be. A place (something we construct).  Path-breaking activity.  That place is always becoming. Home is becoming a centre of contentment.

So, here now? Emergent.

Future imaginary evolves in the making through ebbs and flows.

All is dynamic turmoil. bell hooks said that everything is struggle. Permission granted. Thatness, thingness, poetics, homing, immanence, isness. Deleuze & Guattari consider the rhizome, the fold.

10 August

There was a scent of rain in the air during my walk at 5.00am - promise. Picked up a spiky cutting for the garden along the way, grifting.  Now the rain is in full downpipe sluicing mode. An at-home day with books and thoughts.

Morning buns coated in caramel sauce before heating for breakfast with coconut milk in cocoa.  Wes soaking tomorrow’s oats in yoghurt. The work!

Twitter comment from a writer always writing in present tense to keep readers on the journey with her.

There is a scent of rain in the air during my 5.00am walk - promising.  Pick up a spiky cutting for the garden along the way, grifting. Now the rain is downpipe-sluicing. Here at home with books and thinking.

18 August

Thinking about Joanna Hogg's creative impulse with Exhibition the other night (her third film). Stupendous. The architect designed house was personified along with the architect to whom she attributed the film.  Two dysfunctional artists inhabiting their respective spaces and sparking against each other in conflict - bed, dreams, conversation.  Last night KANOPY offered up Unrelated.  How the terribly English lead actor made the audience cringe with her intrusions on the family, her supposed friend.

2 July

Cataloguing lost/ missing/ found things.  Knowing as I do so that it is me, the fragmented self, who searches.

From LitHub:  "It’s worth asking what we want from poetry. Do we want to be challenged, or do we want the poem to reflect what we have already seen and heard? And probably that most necessary question to ask is who benefits from all of this conformity?" https://t.co/iAqIY2RblT

5 July

I have been weeding, and the scent of basil lingers on my left hand.

An aeroplane soars outside, beyond the study window on my right.  A murder of crows cawing in the river gums.  Stillness of clouds which hang.  I distract myself with the view of yellow roses lining a fence across the road. No breeze, yet the card tied to our Japanese bird-windchime performs a pirouette.

Where I am situated is here, here, here, then-now-future-hopeful. Distant train howls over the railway bridge as it decelerates into Success Hill station. Traffic sounds increase in volume as each surge of the lights allows motion in the symbolic turn from red to green.

Muted echoes of barking; hard to tell if the dog is locked inside a shed or travelling on the back of a ute tray, in transit.

Meanwhile, the crows are now visible in flight. First a tight crew of seven or eight, a trailing outlier lags behind, all head east. Then I catch another bird, seemingly unrelated to the first group, headed south over our roof.  The breakaway bird.

6 July

The dreams about Albany began when we left. 

I was sad.  There were regrets. Since our house sold so quickly, Wes went on ahead to Perth and borrowed his mum's car to do all the legwork.  He reconnoitred houses/ real estate/ property lists/ The Market and made a list of 80 after settling on either Bayswater or Bassendean.

I dream the Albany house and garden as a recurring motif. Often, in my dreams, I forget to water a patch. Or I discover an area I had no idea existed. These areas insinuate themselves until I have a hard time remembering when I am in a wakeful state whether the garden itself (in reality) was so elusive or indistinct. My memory is now much like the dreams themselves, unreliable.

Multiple dreams of hoses, sprinklers, wandering along paths to solve the problem of my oversight or confusion.  The gardens become malleable, misshapen, nothing like the real thing.  Sometimes, neighbours loom, and it is true that we were overlooked on the northern side by a double-storey brick veneer.

12 July

Began viewing the Open Culture sourced Russian film epic War and Peace (1966). Marathon. Scale and pace are attuned: Battle scenes, in particular, gave the impression of how only the mighty can fall as they cling to notions of how to proceed.  Hussars on horseback, swords drawn and charging only to be toppled by French rifles.  Of course, you are positioned to feel for those who are trampled, fallen, confused and riderless horses included.  The clenched-jaw approach of nobility raised to perform their duty.  Great viewing on a big flat screen. Seven hours in all.

Imaginary lives lived remind me of The Great Beauty - a contemporary Italian view of similar characters. An elite. I see their vulnerabilities.  Even Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath had literary successes (and VW had an enviable Bloomsbury address), but both writers experienced depression and their lives ended in suicide.  What was Tolstoy's secret, then?

As for my Ideal Home. A Jungian expression of an inner self? The archetypal home.

First, isolation. Not to be apart, but to be self-contained.  Trees, garden, paths through the bush to walk, and views to encounter, plants which display seasonal shifts. Scented, coloured, ornamental grasses to wave in any breeze. OK, so landed gentry now with range? Yes to space.

Outbuildings, studio. Sleds, stables, kennels.  Do we need goats and llamas? Yes, the smallholding is populated with creatures.  A cat sleeps in various garden beds, following the shade, or sun, depending on the season.

A pool like the one in lots of French films. An archetypal body of water surrounded by paving and weathered recliners. A bank of shade trees cut into a column, forming an avenue. An outdoor room, then, and very much part of the house, which seems to have become a grand design.  Cooling, restful, tranquil. Music plays from open windows, or is that a French door?

Inside, open plan living.  Floor to ceiling windows facing north.  Timber. Scandinavian style, minimal furnishing and a neutral palette. Plain. Comfortable. Sleeping spaces are separate. Perhaps a pavilion. A wing reached from a long book-lined corridor?  With reading nooks and enormous bi-fold windows, or a clerestory window allowing free passage of light and air. I can be lured into this scene by a piano.

14 July

The day after my winter Covid booster and flu vaccination.  Twice-spiked left arm. 

Came across Adrienne Rich's prose collection On lies, secrets and silence.  Great title for a memoir.  Also in tune with current political manoeuvres.  Populism and its net results. Same awareness emerging in the cataloguing of desperate Vandemonians who were condemned to poverty along with their descendants.  I am applauding Janet McCalman's research skills as I read The repressed history of colonial Victoria.  This account is huge. 

Prompts this diagram:

Macro Meso Micro

Big Bang universe Long deep history House & home

Global flow/ trade routes European colonial settlement Migrant, permanent resident

Planetary limits Island continent Family, local community

Multiplexity Unceded lands Street where I live

Interdependent Relationally defined State-city-suburb

Ideology Geography/ topography Walks, patterns and seasonal/ daily cycle

Language, semiotics Beliefs and values

Psychology The economy

18 July

My goodness - this Praktica camera is so heavy.  Once, I carried it everywhere while coveting dad’s Canon all along in the waiting until my birthday when I knew that what was wrapped and officially presented would be a 35mm SLR.

The weight of this Praktica 

(rediscovered in the blanket box)

With this camera I was singled out at a convention held at the Entertainment Centre, and asked to accompany security guards to a back room.  I refused. I showed my press pass and still they insisted.  I refused.

With this camera, I walked the east-west gridlock of Perth's CBD, stopping alongside street furniture and looking up, at buildings, clouds, following lines to connect patterns and make stories through composition and happenstance. I recorded the spectacle.

With this camera, I catalogued the passage of pets I left behind in the family home (also abandoned). Muffin and Fat Cat and Scruffy. Their haughty dignity, surprising tomfoolery and being-in-action frozen with depth of field centring on whiskers, eyes, an open, ridged mouthceiling, a tongue.

With this camera, I photographed both our daughters on their birthdays, and catalogued their startling transformative emergence alongside our house renovations (dismantling, refitting, painting, waiting for the rain to subside, watching holes fill with water).

This process of recording The Wonderful Life was such a fascinating distraction to me that for sometime I stopped with photographs altogether and only bore witness in case I missed something. This stage coincided with the daughters' adolescence, and a familiar reluctance to appear as a subject of any photograph. Especially one taken by your mother. 

Which explains the volume of family snaps mapping birth to 10 or 11, then the lack of any documented evidence until graduation from high school (and even that is haphazard).  Caught and Uncomfortably Forced Moments.

Until they asserted themselves as people who disliked being photographed, that is.  So, there is an ideal (what photographs I would like to have in my collection/ a portfolio/ on file), and the record I have.  Willingness is everything, I see. And there is the obvious point to be made: I have never sought to have my photo taken.

1 June

[Possibilities for the newly-retired] Job ads like the senior adviser to the new Labor government - would have to be in a world without SARS-CoV-2, and I would have to be 10 years younger, but I would love to contribute to shaping this new world order. Even if it meant living in Canberra.

2 June

Recalling alienation:

Standing on Subiaco train station once it had suffered the post-modern makeover, made underground, skyshrouding, caved, a tiled crematorium where once there had been an openair field with wooden steps overarching each set of tracks (Perth/Fremantle, now freshly tunneled, roaring into and out of darkness, a secret lair, a scream in the nightmare of entangled sheets and waking).

8 June

As to what is meaningful: the walk through Basso oval in the pre-dawn of dark and streetlights, utes departing for their working day ahead; seeing what our daughters are learning and understanding; sharing company, and comparing life pointers/ directions.  Hopes and dreams, baby. Hopes and dreams.

I am enjoying my morning email poems from Paris Review.  Also the connection with journals and magazines via Instagram and Twitter. So much more accessible than 25 years ago when I was trying to connect with the world of ideas from Albany.

16 June

Reading Breathe, Joyce Carol Oates, Harper Collins Publishers.  

“For what is writing but a way of distracting the self from what is essential: life, death. That is, life threatened by death?” (p.60).

21 June

Watched Rudy Burkhardt documentary, Man in the woods - Swiss photographer, filmmaker and artist was living my kind of self-directed life. Photographing the mundane.

Three schemes appearing in the research:

1. Home & mobility

2. Embodied use of the affordable home

3. Home and state (metaphor and practice)

8 May

Stuart MacIntyre explains that the writer (in his case, a historian), stands back from the mountain range to allow perspective of the shape and form.  Reminds me of Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.

Field guide? Life as a map? Voyage/ trajectory/ graphic arc or quagmire? I am feeling stuck and muddied with unknowingness.

12 May

Rhythms, like everyday life, are most noticed when they become irregular (Lefebvre, 1992). Rhythmanalysis can be seen as a form of urban poetics. A dance. A space ballet. Movement offers a way through mess, even if all is incoherent or just plain noisy.

Listening to Australian Book Review podcasts – Simon Tedeschi reads aloud from his winning essay, “This woman my grandmother”. Reading Kate Middleton’s poetry. Revisiting The Road to Wigan Pier.

Shorts to tackle the walk this morning with a 20% chance of rain.  I carried an umbrella.  I also stopped to take cuttings from an upright rosemary hedge on sentry duty alongside the column of a front fence on North Road.

Again, sounds of rain on the tin roof and dripping with longer spaces between leaves, then down to the concrete driveway. A spattering of notes.

13 May

Daniel Miller writes that banners "confront their different contexts... both facing inwards to the community who produce them and outwards as an expression of that community to others" (p.16).  

My question at this point in the journey is therefore: knowing all of this, how to live well? Wes says in capital letter-subject-form, To Meditate. Our fathers were not good role models for This Working Life (come to think of it, neither was I).  The rellies who proclaim “we should have been enjoying our retirement/ her old age/ life processes...” are the ones I watch and learn from (how to avoid pitfalls). I am listening to the daughters' tales of how they are managing now, in Covid times.

16 May

Thinking of the city, Perth, as my place, a home. One memory in particular which forged an idea of myself in its labyrinth.

I remember you as Alice in Wonderland,

performing on the streets of the CBD

wearing a yellow-blonde wig. I wish

I had a photograph of the satin blue

dress with its white pinafore.

I recall the squirty girls 

at Myer's cosmetics counter, so many

free samples when all you wanted

was to cut through to Menswear for an

oversized black woolen jumper.

I remember fellow migrants, Barbara 

and Jackie, sisters working upstairs in Coles

cafeteria, telling us we should leave school, too,

be more independent. Be like them.

17 May

Reading Belonging as everyday practice. "Habit is necessary for a feeling of familiarity, of being at home" (Bennett, 2015, p.958).

We were forewarned that the power would be off around 8am, but lights switching off still came as a surprise at 8.15.  We have each hung out a load of washing, and Wes is chilling croissants in a powered-down fridge. My laptop screen is dimmed, grey-hazed.

Last night’s viewing of French-Japanese co-production, Vision, yielded glorious drone shots of mountain colourhaze and a frustrating fantasy of herblore mystique. I stopped counting the number of times Juliette Binoche said “I don’t know” in either French or English.

20 May

Grey outside, but cloud cover means slightly warmer at 16 degrees. Fruit loaf crusts for breakfast this morning, warm from the oven.

I am still thinking about trauma: what it is and how it forms. How it serves, if anyone (certainly built into the system), and how it is overcome, borne with or forgiven.