An open letter to Andrew Darby

It was with a feeling of pride in the calibre of Australian scientists, and in particular our fearless women scientists, that I began to read your article in today’s Age. Though slightly condescending in tone, I felt that the headline What’s a nice girl like you doing with a Nobel Prize embraced the antiquated and, what ought to be decades old, attitude towards successful career women and women in non-traditional fields.

Dr Blackburn’s career has been highly successful and she (quite rightly) has won prizes that acknowledge the quality and importance of her work. And now, a Nobel.

Our country’s first female Nobel Laureate.

I read your article with some interest and cheered her success.

Until you capped off her life’s achievements with Dr Blackburn is married to biochemist John Sedat, and they have a son, Benjamin.

May I ask how this is relevant in any way, shape or form to her career? Or was it just that you felt you needed to tell the world that she is actually a real (read non-threatening) woman because she has a family? May I ask whether you would have included this snippet of personal information has she been male? I say you wouldn’t. Articles on our previous Nobel Laureates don’t mention that they have families.

And neither should they.

It is articles like yours about our successful women that patronise us and send messages that a woman’s true worth lies in her ability to mate and breed. We can win Nobel Prizes and yet the parting message about us is that we are not freaks, that we still tend to husband and hearth and children.

Your article is no better than a tabloid article about an A-list actress that says she’s a box-office success in passing and spends the rest of the time talking about her broken marriage.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

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The world whirls past. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

Right now, time stands still for me.

My feet are stuck to the floor. It's not the floor's fault, I've lost the muscle memory that allows movement.

My legs petrified as the dark and crusted emptiness inside.


*******************

Things are not so bad. I knit, I read, I make. I love my friends and I want to tell them the real answers when they ask. But I know those answers aren't real. They just feel that way. The real answer is that my life is good. I have people who I love and who love me back. I sleep nightly with a much loved furry being who is more family than most of the human kin. I work. I play. And on occasion, I fuck and I'm good at it. (so I am told. A shallow vanity that pleases me.) I remind myself that life is good, that I have what I can have and there is no use allowing the rest to eat me up from the inside.

Things other people like

In this life there are things that other people like and you do not.

I'm not talking about the rough and tumble some people like this and some people don't. I'm talking about things that, when you mention your dislike people stare at you like you are from another planet and invariably tell you the you are wrong and "if only you had it the way I cook it/explain it/etc." that you would see the light and be enveloped in the rightness, the way things must be.

Here are a few of my things

• avocado
• tomato juice and consequently bloody maries
• tarantino movies
• oysters
• The Red Hot cunting Chilli Peppers.

warning: emo post

For the first time in about 6 months I woke up this morning with tears running down my face. For a while there it was just about every morning. So that's progress. And I've come off the medication since then, too.

I have felt it coming on for a few days.

I think I know the reason for it too. I've had a number of conversations in the past week where people close to me have talked about finding me a boyfriend. And you know what? I just can't put myself through that. I've worked extremely hard at regaining equilibrium and I am not going to chuck that out the window. And no, it's not "the type of men" I have been involved with (in general), it's me.

You see, I am not good in relationships. If I am myself I end up depressed. If I behave in such a way that I don't end up depressed, I wind up despising him. So it's best for me to stay unattached.

Which is something that eats away at me as I want, very, very much, to have children. And as I am soon to turn 35 I have to accept that this will not happen. It's something to keep locked the trunk at the back of my head where I keep the things that never stop hurting but I have to just ignore whilst I get on with my life. A trunk that's been rattling this week.

The end.

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