The Augusto Files

COSMARXPOLITAN

Thu, 09 May 2013 03:39:22 -0400

COSMARXPOLITAN:

Karl in the bedroom: “From each according to his ability, to each according to her needs.”

Freaking hilarious.

poetsorg: Sad cat poem by Spencer Madsen This is great. I...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 20:07:07 -0400

poetsorg:

Sad cat poem by Spencer Madsen

This is great. I don’t read enough modern poetry.

On Poetry

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 08:35:00 -0400

I used to want to write beautiful things. I used to hope for poetry. I used to sit quietly at my work, I used to write carefully and often. Before sunrise in the summer months, sweating in a bra and shorts. On cold winter afternoons after wandering around freezing parks. Late in the evening after drinking too much red wine. I used to take a notebook everywhere, I used to submit poems for publication, I used to talk about poetry and writing as if it were something I was striving for, striving to be. I had a typewriter and a moleskine notebook. I’d write poems on buses and planes and trains. I used to suffer when it was no good and rejoice when it suddenly seemed to come together. I used to think that I was working towards something, crafting something. I used to drink and rant and write and love and break hearts.

I used to think I was a poet.

I no longer write poetry. The typewriter is covered in dust, literally and figuratively. The only moleskine I have is a weekly diary. I shoot off emails and text messages quickly and with little thought to their form because there are things that need to be said, and it’s of very little relevance how they are said. I’m too busy, too distracted and too disinterested to write poetry. I don’t feel the lack of it in my life. At some point it became obvious to me that there was very little point in being able to say nothing beautifully.

At times I try to write well, like when I write things in this blog or when I write emails to my friends, but I’m not trying to create anything beautiful anymore. I’m trying to create things that are functional and intelligible.

This happened in three stages. The first was learning to speak French, and developing an appreciation for communicating over correct grammar and syntax. I can’t speak French fluently, but I can say what I need to say and be understood, and that is a profoundly important thing. I know this because I teach adults to speak functional (not beautiful or delicate or interesting) English and I see how hard they work and I understand that nuanced language skills are a luxury, not a necessity.

The second was the accumulation of this life of mine that has suddenly become so frantically, wonderfully, absorbingly busy. I have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to spend time in quiet reflection, crafting a beautiful sentence. I still appreciate when other people do, but I don’t waste any angst on it myself.

The third stage was not a stage, but a particular moment just after my daughter was born. She fell asleep after breastfeeding in the middle of the night and I lay there gazing at her slightly trembling, miniature, perfect lower lip that was wet with milk and I realised it was the most perfect thing I had ever seen, and that no amount of absurd, genius talent, no e. e. cummings or Brautigan or Chekov or Ahkmatova, could ever even dream of capturing so still, so overwhelming, so tiny a moment. And instead of feeling nihilistic, I felt excited by the idea that the most tender and exquisite moments in life have never been transcribed, and have never been read, because they are so completely and utterly beyond words that they are almost beyond human comprehension.

That doesn’t mean I’ve given up forever. I’d like to believe that I will write something beautiful one day. But I want to want to write something beautiful because I want to strive for it to be worthy of the content, not simply because I like the idea of writing pretty things.

I think I might be doing too much.

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 03:58:00 -0500

I think I might be doing too much.

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you...

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:28:32 -0500

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.

PS You have to be brave.

A wonderful description of falling in love. It is written by Jeanette Winterson and it comes from a collection of answers to big questions for children called “Big Questions from Little People.” I especially like the idea that falling in love with someone means finding the socks you have lost.

Irish Sea by Michael Alonzo Kominsky

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:23:30 -0500

Irish Sea by Michael Alonzo Kominsky

"If it isn’t found itself, that wind is raising the sea, and there was a star up against the moon,..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:17:57 -0500

“If it isn’t found itself, that wind is raising the sea, and there was a star up against the moon, and it rising in the night. If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?”

- Maurya, Riders to the Sea, by J. M. Synge

"And I thought after that That you were a lamp from God Or that you were the star of knowledge Going..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:16:25 -0500

“And I thought after that
That you were a lamp from God
Or that you were the star of knowledge
Going before me and after me”

- Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connaught

"What motivated him to throw a puppy at the Hell’s Angels is currently unclear"

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:40:57 -0500

“What motivated him to throw a puppy at the Hell’s Angels is currently unclear”

- a police spokesman said.

"Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent."

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:59:20 -0500

“Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.”

- Christopher Isherwood

The Sensational Misheard Lyrics

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 01:54:00 -0500

I tease Guillaume a lot when he makes mistakes in English. There are some things he never gets right – the pronunciation of “cutlery” is always cuttle-ree, and “half-arsed” is always ’alf-harsed. But the main reason I tease him is not because he makes mistakes, but because his mistakes are so rare. Despite not being brought up bilingual, his English is practically flawless. Which is astounding, especially when you consider how difficult Australian-English can be for non-natives and the fact that he only moved out here in his twenties.

Which leads me to this brilliant story. When Guillaume was relatively new to Australia, he was in a dishevelled, drunken, disorderly punk-rock band notoriously named “The Sensational Missing Beaumonts” with one of his closest friends, Nazz. Nazz was a lead singer and Guillaume played bass and sang backing “vocals”. Guillaume says it was mostly just a lot of shouting. The lyrics were apparently illegibly scrawled in a dirty notebook.

One day, Nazz and Guillaume were walking around West Terrace cemetery. Guillaume was singing one of the Sensational Missing Beaumont songs – “Bone Idle Idol” – when Nazz suddenly turned to him and yelled “What are you singing?”

“Bone Idle Idol,” Guillaume explained.

“No,” Nazz said. “The actual words. What are you singing?”

Guillaume sang for him: “Fuck you on the phone… ‘Allo, ‘allo,” and Nazz fell about laughing.

“Is that what you sing on stage?” he asked. Guillaume nodded. Nazz said:

“The lyrics aren’t Fuck you on the phone… ‘Allo, ‘allo. They’re Fuck you and your bone… idle idol.”

As Nazz says, the funniest thing about this story is the fact that NOT ONLY did Guillaume KNOW the title and still manage to mishear it, but he had mentally replaced it with ‘Allo ‘allo… Genius!

POSTSCRIPT 07 Jan 2013:

Nazz would like to add that he was so genuinely tickled by this event - and by how indicative this little “personality koan”* was of Guillaume - that he insisted that Guillaume keep these lyrics and got a kick out of them every time they sang this song on stage.

*This lovely expression is (c) Nazz 2013

"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free, and that to be free means to be brave."

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 06:14:12 -0500

“Be convinced that to be happy means to be free, and that to be free means to be brave.”

- Thycidides

Every year I scrawl a quote in the front of my Moleskine weekly notebook. This was the quote for 2012 - the year I lived in Vietnam, visited Cambodia, worked harder at a job than I have ever worked before, endured pregnancy, and had a baby girl. Some of these things were scary, but I end the year convinced that I am braver, freer and happier than I have ever been before.

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 04:47:00 -0500

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death:

This is a poem by Yeats - I just discovered this format on poets.org. It is a beautiful way to experience poetry online.

Celebrate good Obama, come on! Such a relief!

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:50:00 -0500

Celebrate good Obama, come on!

Such a relief!

guardian: Today’s eyewitness photo: Bat embryos – Molossus...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 01:33:57 -0400

guardian:

Today’s eyewitness photo: Bat embryos – Molossus rufus (black mastiff bat) – photographed by Dorit Hockman of Cambridge University, one of the finalists in the Nikon Small World 2012 photomicrography competition. See more amazing pictures from the competition here.

Amazing!

guardian: A sixteen-day-old male mandrill named Torres clings...

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:53:47 -0400

guardian:

A sixteen-day-old male mandrill named Torres clings to his mother Martina at the Safari Park in Cisarua, near Jakarta, Indonesia. Torres is the first baby mandrill born at the Safari Park. Photograph: Adi Weda/EPA

There are approximately 490,000 babies born every day and on the 24th of September our daughter was one of them.

She’s as cute as a mandrill and not much older than this one.

Dan Harmon Poops: I Think Romney Doesn't Actually Want to be President

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 22:27:58 -0400

Dan Harmon Poops: I Think Romney Doesn't Actually Want to be President:

danharmon:

Expert, Airtight Political Punditry by Dan Harmon

I don’t think Mitt Romney actually wants to be president. Not being, myself, a politically clued-in guy, I base this mostly on body language and tone of voice in these fun video clips that get posted by the other side. I see him getting pouty and…

This is excellent.

41 Weeks

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 07:38:00 -0400

One of most frequently told stories in my family is the story of my birth. Or, rather, the story of how my Mother went into labour. She and my Dad were living in central Queensland and I was 14 days overdue. So on the 12^th of December 1983 she woke up, went out into the garden and dug a ten-foot trench with a pick-axe. She successfully went into labour and had me not long after.

Prior to this week, the fact that I was 14 days overdue never really seemed to me to be anything other than the funny set-up for a story in which my Mum does something a bit wild. Furthermore, I have internalised this story (as well as many others) as part of my Mum’s character and thus, by definition, it doesn’t seem uncharacteristic. “What’s my Mum like? Well, she dug a ten-foot trench with a pick-axe in order to induce labour when I was overdue…”

What I have never truly appreciated before is that this is perhaps not a story of my Mum doing something unconventional because that’s just the way she is, but a story about a woman reaching her breaking point. The point at which all patience and tolerance has been worn away and the only thing left to do is something completely insane. That perhaps this story, like so many others in history, is actually about the psychological moment at which a bloody and furious revolution becomes inevitable.

Ponyo is currently a week overdue, and I can feel madness creeping in around the edges of my brain. I am trying desperately hard to remain Zen, to practice mindfulness, to let my body do its job without bemoaning the useless fact that nobody knows what really initiates labour. I try, sometimes unsuccessfully, not to obsess about how I am trapped in an endless eternity of now, an unceasing Groundhog Day in which there is nothing to do but wait.

To emphasize the relationship between being pregnant with an overdue child and utter madness, the best description I have read so far of how I feel is in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. This passage is narrated in first person by the schizophrenic, murderous Sheriff Lou Ford as he waits in his home to be arrested for five counts of brutal murder:

You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything.

You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.

You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever; and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.

I suppose that a part of getting older (wiser?) is finding new aspects of old stories. When I think of this story now, I am full of admiration that my Mother lasted 2 weeks before she lost her mind. I sometimes doubt I am going to last another day. But I guess I won’t know until I find myself reaching for a pick-axe…

Photo of NZ soldiers digging trenches in Cairo, 1940.

The French News

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 03:33:11 -0400

Every day I watch the French news on SBS at 10.20am. Because I am still learning French, what I understand is limited. It’s a very good exercise for me but sometimes at the end of the day Guillaume asks me what I saw on the French news. It is often difficult to explain, or even remember. That is because what I usually understand goes something like this:

French News Report, August, 2012

It is very hot in France, and there are storms. Somewhere in the Pyrenees some people were injured by lightning. It’s hard for the people with hot jobs! Old people must remain vigilant at night and drink lots of water! It’s hard for homeless people to escape the heat. Some things are happening in a cafeteria on a ferry. A group of people on strike are burning tyres and cheering for the Prime Minister, and a lady says this won’t be tolerated very well by the German investors. Is Hollande doing anything? There are lots of people who say he isn’t doing anything, and then some people who say he is. Tax evaders in Britain are being hunted down, their photos have been published on the internet. In China, the woman they call the Chinese Jackie Kennedy is being sentenced in relation to the murder of a British politician. The river police use sonar technology to find cars and other things under the surface of the water. Visibility is not very good. They find lots of things like signs, dead pythons, and a lot of weapons. It’s hard for students in Paris to find apartments. Why is Fifty Shades of Grey so popular? It’s just pornography for Mums. Sales in sex shops have gone up.

While I do practise my French and get a certain amount of information, I would hestitate to call myself “informed” at this point in time. My knowledge of the conflict in Syria, for example, is hazy at best: all I really know is that the French refer to the capital as Damas rather than the English Damascus. Which usually starts me off on a tangent of wondering about the naming of places, and that is the end of my chances to become any more informed about Syria.

Wanna read an interview with my lover?

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 23:03:00 -0400

Of course you do! This article just came out in Đẹp magazine, Vietnam. Google should offer to translate it for you if you don’t speak Vietnamese. My friend Thuy wrote to me to say “Oh my god, I was so surprised that Guillaume was the stupid guy mentioned in this title, so funny, he is so humorous but not stupid.” Which is nice of her to say. According to the translation, at one point he says that he came to Hanoi to rest, that he does not need money because his wife has a good job now. Which he insists that he never said, but I guess we’ll never know…