Journal

This is what I’ve done this Sunday eve

When I got back from the Gold Coast, it was time to take a walk. When I got back from my walk, it was beer o’clock. When I went to the bottle-shop, they had Mango Beer. And really, that’s all you need to know to figure out how I reached this point of the evening. # So here is one of those things that I discovered this weekend: when you read something aloud to my father, particularly if it’s non-fiction, the text isn’t really a text so much as the beginning of a conversation. We discovered this on Friday night, when my mum was going through the copy of the second Women of Letters anthology I got her for Christmas (This, in and of itself, is something worth writing about, ’cause I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to buy books for my mum and it’s only occasionally that I get it right outside of the cook-book genre). My

PeterMBall 06/01/2013
Journal

Gold Coast, Redux

It’s my mother’s birthday this weekend, and while I’m not inclined to disclose her actual age, suffice to say that it’s one of the numbers where you generally get together and celebrate a little harder than usual. It also means that I’m back on the Gold Coast for 48 hours, although I made some smarter choices about coming down this time and I’m therefore somewhat more sanguine than I was last time I arrived down here. At the same time as I’m down here, my brain is mentally marking off the last days of my holiday from the dayjob. Part of me is really happy about this, ’cause I kinda miss catching up with my work colleagues by this point, but I’m also going to miss the writing time. In the two weeks I’ve had off, incorporating both Xmas, New Years, and at least one birthday celebration thus far, I’ve managed to clock up over 8000 words of short fiction

PeterMBall 05/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Recent Reading: January 4th, 2013

So here’s the thing about my reading habits: I tend to do things in lots of four. On novel by a male writer, one novel by a female writer, one non-fiction book, one short story collection or anthology. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule; ebooks tend to fall outside this reading pattern at the moment, since they’re largely things I read on my phone. Books people lend me tend to get read fast too, lest they fall into the vast pit of my to-read pile and never emerge. Poetry gets read whenever I want, ’cause I’m much more likely to dip into a collection and read a poem or two than I am an entire book. For the most part, though, the pack of four is my approach of choice. I have personal rules built up around it, the same way I have personal rules built up around eating out (when there’s pork belly on the menu, order the damn pork

PeterMBall 04/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Six Thoughts After Re-Watching Labyrinth

ONE I went and saw Labyrinth at the China Town mall last night, which meaning posting this and inviting you all to get your groove in is practically mandatory: If you aren’t at least singing along to this, wishing you were Jareth and drawing odd looks from your workmates, then I’m afraid you are dead to me. TWO I love this movie. In fact, I love it with the kind of deep and abiding love that can only come from being exposed to *sheer, raw awesomeness* when you’re very young. God knows how young, ’cause I couldn’t actually tell you when I first saw it, but I’ve watched the film *a lot*. Like, as often as I’ve watched the Princess Bride a lot. Or as often as I re-watch The Gilmore Girls or The West Wing a lot. And yet, it’s not a movie that I love unconditionally. It’s simply the bits that I love, I really love, while the bits that

PeterMBall 03/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Things on My Shelf: The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

It’s been suggested that there’s an undercurrent of gloom running through my posts of late, which is one of those inevitable things that happens ’round these parts every Summer. I’m pre-programmed for deep seriousness December through February, largely ’cause it’s too damn hot and I spent the better part of a decade being broke during those months on account of doing session work for Universities. Also, they’re my drinking months. I brood when I drink. Still, in deference to the fact that not everyone is as fond of embracing their inner gloomcookie as I am, I figured I’d spent a blog post talking about awesome things. Specifically, this awesome thing, which ranks among the coolest books in my collection: I picked this up at a Melbourne bookstore back in 2008, although I’ll be damned if I can remember which bookstore it was. A friend of mine took me there, and it was back in the days when I’d never really

PeterMBall 02/01/2013
Journal

Stupid Paperbaghat

It’s been a while since I busted out one of the dreaded paperbaghat pics, but I was tidying up the study a little and figured, yeah, what the hell. The flatmate is back at work today, which means I can indulge in some of my old living-on-my-own bad habits: Tradition dictates that I order pizza while wearing the dreaded paperbaghat, then answer the door while wearing it. I mean, it’s happened a couple of times now. But for once, I’m going to break that tradition. This one, internet, this one’s just for you.

PeterMBall 02/01/2013
Big Thoughts

The Things I Think About On New Years Day

ONE It’s the first morning of 2013 and in the writing room, writing. Not even writing, really. More dragging myself back into a writing mindset after being not-a-writer for the bulk of last year. There are days – today is one of them – when the fact that I still do this amazes me. I figured I’d kick this year off by telling you a story (it is, after all, what I do). I want to start it with something like once upon a time I met a girl on a bus, but truthfully it’s not the kind of story you’d expect from that kind of opening. The way you starts a story sets up the ending, makes promises that need to be delivered, and I can’t deliver on that one. So instead I’ll start it like this: when I was twenty and still at university, I learned not to tell people that I wanted to be a writer. And

PeterMBall 01/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Seven Notes on A Lover’s Discourse While Halfway Through the Book

One Habitual marking of quotes is one of those weird habits you pick up when you hang around universities for too long. I still do it, despite being out of the game for the better part of six years now, which means I frequently end up with shelves full of dog-eared books, notebooks filled with hastily scribbled details, and the occasional stray post-it with a quote scrawled across it with the bibliographic details on the back. Since I don’t really teach classes or write essays anymore, the vast majority of the quotes I mark tend to be because I truly adore the phrasing. There’s a great deal of beauty in theory and criticism, if you look for it. Exquisitely phrased ideas that sucker-punch you the same way a perfectly formed poetic line does, or well-turned phrase in a piece of prose. I’ve been reading Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse for the last two weeks. It started as a bit of

PeterMBall 30/12/2012
Journal

A Catch-22 Kind of Day

On the Gold Coast visiting my parents (and heading off to see The Hobbit with my dad and my sister). It would have all the makings of an awesome day, were it not for the fact that: a) I really want to settle down and have a solid writing day after all the distractions of the holiday period (which, realistically speaking, goes on through to the end of Jan or Feb given the timing of birthdays among my family and friends), and the inability to do that is making me tetchy; and b) I’m on the Gold Coast. I know plenty of people who love the Coast. My parents fricken’ adore it here, which is probably one of the reasons I lived here from ages twelve to twenty-three or so. I always feel bad that I don’t come down here and visit them more often, but then I come down here and visit them, and I realize the one important problem. I

PeterMBall 27/12/2012
Journal

As promised, the hat of awesome

Many Sri Lankan love cakes died to bring you this photo. Thanks for the donations, peeps. I have never been so happy to abandon my dignity for a good cause.

PeterMBall 21/12/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Makin’ a Racket

I’ve been worrying my flatmate recently, ’cause I seem to have developed a jaunty whistle of late. This is not, as a general rule, the sort of thing that happens around our house, least of all to me. ‘Course, historically speaking, this isn’t actually true. I spend a great deal of my day with little fragments of music running through my head. I always have, one way or another, and I’ve always been fond of having music on while I work. What’s really happened is that I’ve inherited my sister’s stereo with it’s five-CD turntable and I’ve moved it out of my bedroom and into the study where I write, surf the internet, and occasionally play computer games. Up until this point, all my music had to run on either Fritz the Laptop (which meant he couldn’t do anything else) or play on the DVD player attached to my TV. Neither of these have been particularly optimal, so my music

PeterMBall 20/12/2012
Big Thoughts

13 Notes for a Story That Won’t Get Written

I shouldn’t be trusted with the internet at the moment. It’s summer and I am maudlin, and these two things do not go well together. I find myself picking at old scabs and realising that the wounds beneath them never fully healed. I find myself creating drama, simply because drama is easier to handle. Inhabiting drama makes it easier to exist. It’s good for writing, I’ll give it that. Less good for everything else. # Two instincts wage war within me. The first demands silence because silence is my natural state, because what does not get said cannot be examined. # I’ve never hidden my heart. I’ve never placed my heart inside an egg, to be placed inside a duck, to be hidden in a well inside a secret courtyard, located in a keep on a distant isle far from charted waters. I’ve never done this, but I’ve been tempted. # Through it all there are words, ’cause writing is

PeterMBall 19/12/2012