Breathing Just a Little

(This is a weird form poem, almost but not quite a prose poem, inspired by the ground-breaking theoretical work being done by my close friend Emily, who is a rising star in the literary and cultural theory world and who I am enormously proud of). On the menopause of whales  did you know, she said, that some whales go through the menopause too? orcas and so on, the ones with teeth. only humans and toothed whales and chimps, that's all, and I said no, no I didn't know that, I didn't know that any other species stuttered and faltered and plunged into the twilight the way we do the way I am doing with a body that tries and tries to bleed every month but only sometimes, only fewer times than sometimes, succeeds with a mind and a heart and many sets of pyjamas drenched with a misery that has no name and has many names  my daughter says they learned in biology that menopause is a rare and strange evolution, counter-intuitive and seemingly aberrant, because breeding from first matu...

I have been sadly neglecting this blog, and I'm aware of it! I intend to get back into semi-regular posting soon, and I thought the best way to kick off was with a triple book review :-) It's been another hectic month between surgical recovery, work, and family stuff, but I have squeezed in four more new books since the three life-writing texts I reviewed back on 13 July. Here's a review of three of them. None were tough reads, which helps! Also none were stinkers, but neither were they perfect books. There were a lot of things I really liked about this book. The atmospheric portrayal of humanity's last years, the complex and nuanced unpacking of what true artificial intelligence in an embodied form might be like, and the exploration of the darker shades of human entitlement were all on point, and executed very well. The premise of the book is a future world that is very literally dying, or perhaps more accurately, becoming unsurvivable for humans. Into this world, huma...

The second quarter of the year, for me, runs from Easter until the middle of the winter school holidays (ie this very week). I realise my division of the year does not align to anything particularly, but it's just how it is in my brain! This has been a very busy, very tiring, but ultimately pretty good quarter.  I've been mostly well in an infectious sense - only one cold virus to report - although my digestive woes from my borked gallbladder were on a steady rise through the months. Thankfully, I had the surgery to remove the offending organ 2 weeks ago and am now about 80% recovered from the wounds (it has taken longer than I had hoped), with some digestive improvement already. In other health news, I have also finally entered the perimenopause, so I'm still working out what that means for me (both physically and mentally / emotionally). I've been very busy, you might say over-busy, with work - some big new projects have been claiming a lot of time - but the work has,...

I have recently read three very different books that can all be described as "life writing". One is an old-school "straight" biography, that tracks its subject from birth to death in a linear fashion; one is a memoir which is primarily focused on a particular formative experience / period in the writer's life; and the third is a combination social commentary / non-fiction told through the lens of the writer's relationship with her grandson and the sport he plays.  I don't often read life writing - I'm much more of a fiction person - so finishing three in July was a definite aberration for me (to be fair, I have been slowly picking away at the biography since February, but I did complete it this month). For that reason, I thought a comparative three-way review might be a good thing to do! I enjoyed all three texts in entirely different ways, with one stand-out that I would describe as exceptional. Each gave me room for thought about what makes truly g...

it's Sunday morning in July; the sky powder-pale and clear trickling around the edges of the still-drawn blinds with blue-ice fingers  and no one is awake but me, and possibly the old dog, snuffling blearily around in his garden the dawn-screeching cat has returned to the heater's embrace and wheezing slumber, and all the people are still lost in snores and dreams and my belly still stabbed me when I got up to fetch tea, but a little less sharply than yesterday, a little less miserably, as I hunched my old-woman crawl through the cold half-lit house watching the sparrows chitter and pick at seeds on the winter grass as the kettle sang its morning song a flinty smell of cold leaves and dew-soaked concrete in the air and tomorrow my daughter will leave before the light to go to another country she will end her day in hot bright streets, while we, left here, shiver and draw our blankets tighter travelling with people she has loved a long time, in memory of those who, lost, are no ...

 I am three days post surgery, and recovery is going ... patchily, but I am getting there. I had my gallbladder removed and an umbilical hernia repaired on Monday at a public hospital near my home. The Australian public health system waitlist, for anyone unfamiliar, often moves slowly, but once it gets going, it goes for gold. I got a call last Thursday to tell me my number was up for Monday, and the whole process cost me around $70 out of pocket (for my discharge medications). We are incredibly lucky to have access to quality care that doesn't bankrupt us in this country. The hospital staff were, without exception, lovely - professional, kind and thorough, and really helped me manage my anxiety effectively . They listened properly to my concerns and my underlying health interactions and as a result, the increased congestion, asthma and nausea I feared were either avoided or minimised. The anaesthetic doctor in particular was wonderful, painful bruised arm notwithstanding (not her ...