Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

From While Not Writing A Book, in Helen Garner’s essay collection  Everywhere I Look:

At the health farm, fasting. I must be hallucinating: when I walk past a pile of folded towels I see them as a huge club sandwich. I present myself for reiki treatment. The woman announces that she is going to massage my aura. I submit with a sigh. I don’t have any trouble at all believing that people have auras: you only need to have seen a dying and then a dead body to know this. But I wanted my massage to be about my gross earthly body.

I do not know how many ways I can recommend this book, but I’m putting this quote here so I can add one more to the list.

This appeared on my twitter stream this morning and, naturally, I retweeted it on account of it being awesome. But twitter is a temporary medium, and this is one of those things which deserves a bit more permanence in the this is good, go read it stakes.

So…over on Letters of Note, there’s a copy of a letter Alan Moore wrote in response to a very young 8-year-old comics fan, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful bits of fan engagement I’ve seen in a very long time. If you’re a fan of Moore – or of seeing how good writers engage with their fans – I’d encourage you to go read it.

I don’t get hangovers anymore, on account of avoiding alcohol in the name of not making the sleep apnea worse than it needs to be. But there are days when I miss alcohol, and there are days when I definitely miss that mild morning-after feeling where you’re slightly seedy and aware of it and things can be made better by the application of good music and prodigious amounts of bacon.

Today I feel hung-over. Not because I drank, but because my brain just unloaded a whole bunch of crazy on me last night and it resulted in an evening of adrenaline and sleeplessness. And a morning where I slept through my alarms – all fucking five of them – and had started to get that shaky feeling that comes from taking the anti-depressants late.

So I have cooked a pile of bacon. And applied good music. And maybe, quietly, dispaired at the idea that I will never actually create something as glorious as the film clip to Pulp’s This is Hardcore.

Also, that I will never own anything as cool as the pianists ring around thirty-eight seconds in.