This morning, at the quack of dawn, we heard and then saw, this bird on a pyre — a duck on our neighbour’s chimney pot. Our neighbours have form with ducks and chimneys — some years ago, the other neighbour came back from holidasy to discover a wild duck — by that time it was, [...]
READ MORESeptember, 2011
Letters from Hanoi: nuptialrama
Dear D_, Our week here’s nearly gone: it’s been a moist most pleasant stay with the right proportions of gallivanting to rest: about 6 to 9 hours on the street each day. Unlike, say, KL, Hanoi is easy to gad about; apart from the mind-suspending Zen practice of crossing traffic, and the accompanying pollution, it’s [...]
READ MORELetters from Hanoi: for pho’s sake
Dear D_, Travel is literally dislocating and, I find, often dashed uncomfortable. Mother, for instance, finds it hard work to sleep in hotel beds. Our friend B_ packs her pillow. And one acquaintance carries dried food as a fallback on days of especial internal delicacy. On a clear day you can see pho-ever But benign [...]
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Letters from Hanoi: revolutionary Argyle
Dear D_, Did you catch my last post? It included the frivolous caption of the soldier wearing a revolutionary Argyle vest. And weaponising a bamboo garden torch. It had a fine payoff today at the Vietnam Revolution Museum where, near the end of a long circuit, the frivolity was scooped up, bundled and rubbed into [...]
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Letters from Hanoi: puzzles and riddles
Dear D_, I think you might like this place, it has a certain feeling about it — a tipping quality, as if it is trying to remember who it wanted to be. (But then, one always seems to travel with a mirror.) Happily, Hanoi is replete with puzzles and riddles. Puzzle One: Are the Vietnamese [...]
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Letters from Hanoi: scooter culture
Dear D__, We spent the morning “getting lost” in the Old Quarter. The maze of shop streets, souk-like, demonstrate where supermarket aisles derive: a street of shoes, and one of silk; a street of hair grips and sparkly plastic bows (so powder pinked your teeth ache); the street of mechanics — suddenly smoke-blackened and greasy, [...]
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Letters from Hanoi: “stay visible”
(Yes: furry koalas dangling from a windscreen in a Hanoi taxi.) Dear D__, Hooray, we’re in Hanoi, finally. Sixteen tedious hours: from stepping into Tullamarine to stepping out of Noi Bai International. I hadn’t intended, but then I did. Ponder. Here’s the mulling; skip if it doesn’t please: ‘Not that which is in the mind, but [...]
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Poetry Week Friday: Grief in September
National Poetry Week: Number five of five. (I made this drawing on the first anniversary of 9/11, in the small town of Ferndale in California, a city lined with old Victorian buildings. At around noon, we sat on the lawn of the library with its flag at half-mast. It was calm on that sunny day, [...]
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Poetry Week Thursday: Bees on a summer’s day
National Poetry Week — the Thursday edition. Martin Johnston was the son of famous writers: George Johnston, author of My Brother Jack, and the journalist, essayist and novelist, Charmian Clift. Born in 1947, Martin was shuttled (shuffled?) around as a child — in his friend John Tranter’s summary: “Australia in the late 1940s, London, a Greek [...]
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Poetry Week Wednesday: Channeling Buddha
Day 3, National Poetry Week. I dug up and reread Judith Beveridge’s spectacular Wolf Notes (2003). Centering the three sections is a suite of 38 poems, ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree,’ a take on Siddhatha Gotama’s search for salvation: Buddha and Nirvana. It’s in the first person and Beveridge practices a hypnotic ventriloquism, [...]
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