reasons I am a dork #1

This graph really annoys me. Get OFF excel, people and use proper softwares. Or at lease GET RID of the join-the-dots black line. There is no point (no pun intended) on joining the dots - that's what the red line is for. And while we're at it! what's so special about the green data points?

But mostly it's the join-the dots that irritates me.

Image baltantly stolen from this article over at Larvatus Proteo

Of course climate change is a pressing issue. But is it REALLY SO DIFFICULT to click on the x-y scatter plot without a line? that black line is bad science people. bad. It's sort of the maths equivalent of a wrongly used apostrophe.

anew

I bought a new notebook yesterday.

It's (well past) time to keep the past in the past. The old book will remain half filled. I am done with the events that are written on those pages. I am tempted to do the one thing I have not done with all the other many and various journals I have filled and filed away over the years - burn it.

The new book is bound in orange, my favourite colour.

Lost Paradise

There's a lot I would say about Cees Nooteboom's Lost Paradise if I had the training in text dissection. But I don't have that training. Instead, I will fumble through my impressions.

• There is, at times, an almost painful egotism in the novella; the prologue and epilogue in particular. I wonder though, surely Nooteboom is more self-aware than this? Dis he want the reader to know this was not `just' another novel, that there is something more directly personal in the words.
  
  Cees Nooteboom travelled to Perth, Australia for a literary festival in 2000 and it is clear that was the impetus for the novel. But the clumsiness of the Epilogue and Prologue, well, he should have written an article for a literary journal. It would have been published, he has the chops and the reputation. And I wouldn't have been left wondering at how large his ego has grown with his literary success. Too much, I expect.



• Reading the passages where we hear white australians talking about the state of Australian Indigenous people I felt...cheap.
  
  It was a cop out. Yes, I was reading comments that we often hear coming from the mouths of white australia. Yes, this -I imagine - was the author's intention; to put it there on the page for the world to see, without commentary, to let us be judged as the comments deserve.
  
  But for me, what I was feeling (aside from unease) was brought into focus with the episode of South Park that aired on monday night (episode 1101, With Apologies to Jesse Jackson) where Stan's dad says "the N word" (Nigger) on national television.
  
  After fighting with Token for the duration of the episode about the use of the N-word, Stan eventually comes to the conclusion that

  not knowing the point is the point. He explains to Token that, as a white person, he will never understand why Token is so upset by the word, and why it can make black people mad when a white person says it in any context. Token is finally satisfied that Stan gets that he doesn't get it, thus creating an understanding between them.

  
  (quotation from the Wikipedia page on the episode)
  
  And this is it. I don't get what it's like to be Aboriginal. And Nooteboom certainly doesn't get it. He can come, he can witness, he can hear the unsympathetic sympathy, the borderline blame and the sometimes (ofttimes?) racist views that otherwise sophisticated, white, Australians have on this complex issue.
  
  I think what most left a sour taste was the knowledge that a large portion of young, educated, white austrialians would read the book and get righteously irate at the bad white australian racists (a group to which they unconsciously belong) all the while getting the same cheap literary thrill that they get from reading Kundera.
  
  And I'll leave that point there.



• In contrast to this, I was struck by the turn of nuance, the way in which Nooteboom describes depression without seemingly paying attention to it. This seemingly innate, natural treatment was subtle and true as his treatment of the previous issue was clumsy. This is something that he 'gets'.

These criticisms aside, I enjoyed reading Lost Paradise; a slender volume and easily devoured and digested in a couple of hours. The story of Alma and the Angel Project, the condition of the aging middle aged in a youth worshipping culture, the silly things we do to ourselves following unpleasant episodes in our lives, of how easy it can be to give in.

Nooteboom's prose is, as always, well crafted and has an almost dreamlike quality, is a pleasure to read and, quite evidently - gives the reader some things to think about.


Lost Paradise, translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty, is published by Vintage Books
ISBN: 9780099497158
I bought my copy from The Book Grocer

Do listen to this.

June Strangelets

This has made my audio week.

Squelchy, bleepy, plonky goodness for your ears.

I just had an eargasms.

mute

i opened this temporary space with the remark the i sometimes long to have a space to write about myself.

this reminds me of the bag i sometimes see, carried by a man up the escalator at parliament railway staion, that proclaims narcissist personality + internet = blog.

i used to have many words.

one of the side effects of living in an abusive domestic situation is that my voice has been lost. i would write on paper, on that other blog - the southside one - emails, letters, postcards. it's slowly coming back, there is even a bit of the old moxy peeking out.

it's hard having that wall, the wall that was built up to protect myself but has stilted my expression.

i remember the rows we would have. his "arguments" shifting sand. he would declare this was as he wasn't interested in the main point and interested in the side points. really, it was a way to never lose an argument. arguing was too frustrating and the only way was to give up. if i did keep at it, it would end up as an assault of personal abuse.

shutting up and shutting down was the only way.

but i want my voice back. it's so stilted now. it comes and it goes in fits and starts. i want it back.

now please.