Oh hello.

I'm about to start a seven week teaching prac so naturally I had to Google myself to make sure there was nothing sordid about me on the internet that colleagues or students could ring A Current Affair about, but instead of finding that stuff I just found a really lovely recommendation by a fellow Brisbane writer, Sophie Overett, for my piece Yours and mine from Stilts issue 2. 

"Yours and Mine by Rhiannon Hartley is a short piece of memoir as opposed to a short piece of fiction, but it was so lovely I wanted to rec it anyway. Written for the sex issue of Stilts, a local, Brisbane journal, Yours and Mine covers relationships delicately and frankly, from pubescent boyfriends to falling in love with best friends. It's one of those horribly intimate pieces that resonates more than I generally care to admit, and that's really why it works."

It's really nice to be read and appreciated by people I don't know, especially when they record the experience on their blogs so I can read about it months after the fact. 

You can read more from Sophie's blog here and you can read Yours and mine and the rest of Stilts issue 2 here.

Obsessing over this week:

Julian Assange

Much like the wreck of the Costa Concordia or world hunger, the fact that Julian Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London was a really big deal until it wasn't. 

Much like the wreck of the Costa Concordia and world hunger, he is definitely still there. Unlike the Costa Concordia or world hunger, he is also running for the Victorian Senate and launching a new search engine called "PLUS D." He also has a sun lamp. 


North Korea

Seriously what is UP with this whole situation? WHAT IS HAPPENING? How does the world deal with a problem like this? And I don't mean the nuclear "threat" because I find the rhetoric about all that to be a bit off. It's a mean truth that we only pay attention to countries like this when they're making bizarre-o threats to other Western countries. I've been thinking a lot about what happens when they stop making threats and, like the Costa Concordia and Julian Assange, we forget all about them for another five years and therefore also forget how poor and oppressed their people are. 
It's just so weird. 
I'm applying for a tourist visa as we speak. And if I get it I'll definitely be deleting this blog post. 


London Grammar



Put that inside you. 


Watergate

All I do is read conspiracy theories pertaining to American politics. 

I mean actually. Hours of my day. 

I don't know if we've learned anything but All the President's Men was on the other night and I think some really good docu-drama bio-pics are going to come out of this decade too and I fucking love that shit so I'm alright with it. 

I have committed a violent crime.

And in the same way,
That third girl
The broader one with the beautiful face is
the one you will keep going back to
not because of the face aforementioned
but because of the entire conjecture over
her being a woman at all
and everything that comes with that.
Because just as the moth is both near and far away
and just as your mouth is both open and closed,
and just as you both do 
and do not have a scar on the back of your hand
Your girl is both a woman and something 
else
And you both killed her
and breathed into her
life
And you both loved her
And felt nothing for her
Because you are both innocent and guilty
Because you are both beautiful and
ugly.