Poems #43-45 found!

Poems #43-45 were found (and I assume, taken, as they're not there any more) by poet @redscribe, who tweeted:

"One of my favourites in my favourite library. #poetry @RowdenWhite @poemsinthewild"

Hurrah! Nice choice with the Dorothy Porter, too.

Poems in the wild #8

Poem #8 (2 of clubs) was released by my spiwited assistant @timsterne on a "mystery train" at Southern Cross station. It was a mystery train because it was supposed to keep going through the loop, but then they ordered everyone off, and it pulled out of the station on its way to who-knows-where in the wilds of Melbourne. Probably Flinders St. It is still on the loose, as far as I know.

One takes another by the hand

to prayer. Pages, fingers.

All take each one by the feet

to dance. Hoppers, splinters.

Another takes another

by the hips to fuck. Hands, heat.

All take another by the veins

to breathe. Blood, beat.

All known by one. Scrapes,  a kiss.

Another known by all.

Blisters, bliss.


Poem #9 will be released later today...

As an aside, I'm going back to full-time work next week, so I'll no longer have Fridays off. Poems will be hastily written and transcribed onto playing cards somewhere between me dropping Luka off at daycare, emptying the returns boxes, spending library funds at Readings, turning the records over, and picking up Luka again. (I make library work sound so professional. No wonder people always ask "Do you need a degree to do that job?" The answer to which, by the way, is yes you bloody do, and you also need excellent taste in music, books and novelty knee-socks. And strong arms.)

Sandwich hands

“You honest?”

“Sorry?”

“You honest. Can I trust you?”

“Um, yeah, of course.”

“Some of these girls, money goes missing – pfft – from the cash register, you know?”

“Oh. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Ok. You start now, ok?”

“Right now?”

“Yis.”

This, apparently, is to be the extent of my job interview for the position of Sandwich Hand at the Uni Bite Café. I’m 20 years old, and my only previous job has been five years working in a book store. This new job, which is about all I can squeeze in around my uni contact hours, will prove to be a somewhat different beast. For one thing, there will be vastly greater amounts of scalloped potatoes involved. The levels of scalloped potatoes I encountered while bookselling were suprisingly low. So low, in fact, that I eventually concluded that thinly sliced tubers gently absorbing large amounts of milk and butter were not actually relevant to selling books at all. I know, go figure.

My new employer, Joanne, having decided that I am probably not going to pilfer vast amounts of cash from the till, hands me a black apron and tells me to tie my hair back. She comes up to just under my boobs and keeps up a contant stream of muttering in half-Lebanese, half-English.

“You start training today, maybe three hours, this on your own time, then you do lunchtimes 12-3pm and we see how you go. What days you can do it?”

“Uh – I can’t do Thursdays.”

“Ok. I trust you, I give you these Monday Tuesday Wednesday Fridays.”

“Um, thanks.”

“You make coffee?”

“Sorry?”

Joanne looks up at me with an expression I will quickly become familiar with. If the expression could speak, it would say “How can you be at university, enormous white girl, and yet be such a complete idiot?” I don’t really have an answer for this, but luckily all Joanne actually says is: “Can you make coffee.”

I stare at the large metal machine. It’s got lots of knobs on. I get briefly distracted by my need to make a knob joke, and then realise that a) I haven’t answered Joanne yet, and b) there appears to be small ribbons of smoke extruding from her ears.

“I haven’t done it before, no.”

Joanne sighs, grabs a metal jug of milk and thrusts it at me. I’m going to be bad at this. On my first shot at frothing a jug of milk, I don’t dip the steam nozzle thing in far enough and I send a spectacular spray of milk all over myself and the bench.

“Aieeee!” yells Joanne.

On the second go, I can’t get the milk to foam before it starts to boil out of the jug.

On the third go, we switch to sandwich making. I sucessfully only drop one large salad sandwich on the floor. Joanne’s stream-of-Lebanese-consciousness has started to reach quite audible levels by this point.

After my three hours of training (on my own time, as she reminds me regularly), we’re both pretty much nervous wrecks. “Ok, enough for today,” Joanne says. “You clean the bella marine and then you can go.”

I look wildly around the café. “Clean – clean the what?”

I get The Look. She points silently at the bain marie. “Oh, right, the bain marie,” I say.

Joanne shakes her head witheringly. “Yes, the bella marine. Newspaper under the sink.”

My hands gradually learn the automatic movements required of the café assistant. True to my job title, I develop sandwich hands: my left hand is a pair of tongs, my right hand a sweaty latex glove with horrible powdery stuff on the inside. I have about twenty tiny burn marks on my arms and knuckles from the bain-marie and the damned frothing jug. But I have skills.

I can halve and wrap a towering salad roll in greaseproof paper, and twirl the corners of the bag shut without spraying shredded lettuce at customers. I can separate and layer hundreds of cheese slices into star-shaped dairy-plastic constellations and wrap them gently in cling-wrap so as not to break off any of the corners (an important lesson from Joanne’s reaction to any food wastage: don’t break the cheese.) I can grate large amounts of onions for sausage rolls as long as I breathe through my mouth and don’t mind smelling of onions for a week. I know at what point the spaghetti cabonara in the bain-marie needs re-hydrating. (This, for the unitiated, means that when the pasta starts to dry out under the heat lamps, it gets the leftover milk from the coffee machine jug poured over it. That pasta sits there all day, absorbing luke-warm frothy milk. Don’t buy it.) I can shuffle the bain marie trays around like Tetris with the added prospect of third degree burns. I can re-layer the biscuits in the jars so that the older ones are closest to the top. I can roll hundreds of plastic forks in paper napkins and stick them shut with my wet fingers. I can even avoid getting whipped with a tea towel when I don’t get out of Joanne’s way fast enough.

But I still can’t froth a jug of milk to save my life.

“Yalla, yalla,” says Joanne. I’m struggling to plate a sausage roll that keeps threatening to disintegrate. Yalla means ‘hurry up’. This is followed by a longer phrase that I’ve gathered means ‘Move your arse’. Joanne’s not in a great mood, because it’s her birthday and her two sons have forgotten. She’s dealing with this by picking up things and slamming them down in other places. The bain-marie trays cop most of it.

SLAM! The lasagna tray.

“[muttering in Lebanese] BLUDDY MEN [mutter mutter] NO RESPECK”

SLAM! The scalloped potatoes.

“HEPPY BERSDAY TO ME, HEPPY BERSDAY TO ME [mutter mutter]”

SLAM! This time it’s a soup tureen.

“Why I have these sons [mutter mutter] I don’t know which one of them has more cuckoo-brains; both of them.”

SLAM! etc.

Frank, her husband, who looks like a cross between Nero Wolfe and Fat Tony, and whose main function is to fry the chicken schnitzels and sit on the back step smoking, calls out “Shut up woman!” and goes back to his cigarette.

Joanne narrows her eyes at me and shakes her head. “You learn this one, girl. You got to treat the boys mean, keep them wanting or BANG they give you all kind of trouble. And no RESPECK!”

She shouts the last word out into the kitchen and I hear Frank mutter “All the time, shut up, bluddy hell.”

I’ve washed the last scraps of scalloped cement potatoes out of the tray, and then scraped off the creamy slime that’s coated the hairs on my arms. There are long washing up gloves provided but none of us bother with them as the time taken getting them on and off usually earns me and the other sandwich hands a “Yalla!” or two. It’s pay day, so I shuffle up to Frank’s chair on my way out of the kitchen.

“How many hours you work this week, twelve?”

“Fourteen,” I say. “I did extra on Monday and yesterday.”

“Joanne!” yells Frank. “Anna do extra on Monday and yesterday?”

“What? Ah, yis, yis on those days extra hour.”

Frank grunts reluctantly and leans sideways in his chair to pull out his wallet. He rifles through a thick wad of notes and pulls out my pay. “See you next week then.”

I fold the notes over and stuff them in my bag. I’m paid the princely sum of $8 an hour, but I can make a sandwich for myself whenever I like (as long as I don’t use any of the expensive ingredients like meat). Frank has informed me that if ‘The Tax Man’ ever comes in, I’m to say I’m paid only in food. I’m not sure how sounds more legal than cash-in-hand, but as ‘The Tax Man’ doesn’t appear to have The Uni Bite high on his list of venues to personally investigate, I haven’t thought too much about it.

“Um,” I say. Frank looks up. “I’ve been offered a job in a library, so this week will be my last week.”

This is true. Last week after my lunch shift, I ran across to Union House, dressed in black (plus a light dusting of sandwich crumbs) and smelling a lot like scalloped potatoes, for an interview as a library student casual at the Rowden White Library. There were lots of questions, but strangely none of them were about whether I intended to steal from the till. Also no mention of frothing milk or breaking the corners off cheese slices. I got the job.

“Joanne!” yells Frank. “Anna going to another place, put the ad back up.”

Joanne appears in the doorway. “You leaving us? You no like us any more?” She wipes away a pretend tear but grins at me, and I can see it really is her version of a good-natured farewell. Sandwich hands don’t tend to stick around very long.

“I’m going to work in a library,” I say.

Joanne and Frank stare at each other in disbelief. “With the books?” says Joanne.

“Pretty much,” I say.

“Why would you want to work in a library?” says Frank.

I look over at the sink, where a pile of onions are waiting to be grated, and a couple more lasagna trays are soaking. I smell like elderly cream sauce and I’m a sweaty mess after only three hours of running between the bain marie and the sink.

I consider explaining the attractiveness of a job where I won’t be covered in food and sweat, and will most likely be paid a legal wage.

I shrug. “I like books.”

I'm turning the world into birds

The last 1.5 hours of my library shift last approximately 5.4 hours (5.9 if Daylight Savings has ended).

10am-7pm is hardly an epic work day, but that dingy hour-and-a-half after everyone else goes home appears to turn my brain into some kind of weary meat soup, and my only intellectual ability is to create more misunderstandings than that time I went to the supermarket and only bought a packet of AA batteries and a carrot.

Typical exchange #1:

Borrower: "Can I borrow these please?"
Me: "Sure." I scan their student card, hand it back and then attempt to check out the dvds. The student card hasn't scanned.
Me, enunciating badly: "Sorry, can I have your card again?"
Borrower, looking down at their cardigan: "Sorry?"

Typical exchange #2:

Borrower: "Sorry, these are a few days overdue. Is there a fine?"
Me: "No, that's fine."
Borrower, frowning: "What's the fine?"
Me: "No, it's fine, no fine."
Borrower: "Can I pay it here?"

etc. I'm tired.

At 6:55pm I wander around the library using my best Mum-voice to break through to the iPod-deaf students in the Science Fiction collection, and the stellar examples of young love that lie entertwined and lust-deaf in the bean bag room.

"THE LIBRARY IS CLOSING IN FIVE MINUTES!"

The iPod kids nod vaguely at me and re-prop their George R. R. Martins back against the door. The young lovers spring apart like I'm their dad and I've just walked in on a particularly practical homework session.

I turn off the music (I've recently discovered that playing the Labyrinth soundtrack just before closing is a good way to get rid of everyone, for some reason), click the bolts across the doors and turn off the lights. There's a muffled shriek and some mad rustling from the other room as someone who has fallen asleep both on and under a bean bag realises they're about to be locked in. They shuffle to the exit and I let them out.

The fluorescent tubes flicker out and I stand alone for a few minutes. Have you ever hung out in a closed library? It's really nice. Warm and dark and booky. Given that I start work again at 8:30am tomorrow, sometimes I consider just making myself a nest of bean bags and sleeping over. Pretend I'm Lynda Day sleeping at the Junior Gazette headquarters. But even without the frizzy perm, it might scare the cleaners to find a bleary-eyed, flannel-pyjamaed librarian where there should really only be empty bean bags and the occasional mouse.

So I wander through the deserted Union House, with its permanent aroma of sushi and feet, across campus to my bus stop. I put on my headphones, partly to listen to music but mostly as a kind of hipster head-band to keep my hair out of my face.

In the peripherest of my peripheral vision, I see two sparrows flitting confidently along the ground towards me. I like a small brown bird as much as the next librarian, but I don’t often, well, hang out with them. I turn my head as slowly as I can so as not to scare them and discover that my new feathered friends are in fact scrunched-up-brown-paper-friends, probably originating from Baker’s Delight, that have blown along the steps towards me.

I’m vaguely disappointed at this dissolution of my prospectively Hitchcockian moment. But only briefly because at that point my bus turns up. One minute early! I wonder why everyone else looks so bloody grumpy about this, but after a few travelers ask the driver “Are you the 6:42?” I realise that this bus is not in fact 1 minute early but 29 minutes late.

The bus skittles towards Clifton Hill and past the tennis courts. I’ve let shuffle choose the tunes and it’s chosen Dolly Parton. While ‘9 to 5’ isn’t entirely accurate for my day, I’m the first to admit that ‘10 to 7’ doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais ménage à trois. (I may have done 1^st year uni statistics, but I only did French to year 10.) And at least it's not 'His Eye is on the Sparrow'.

I gaze into the middle distance as we pull up at Clifton Hill station. My gaze scans lazily along the bottom of the tennis court fence.

At the base of it I see a pair of seagulls. They are waltzing.

Their white bodies shuffle back and forth in perfect three-quarter time, like little pale boats cresting the same wave.

I blink, and lean forward in my seat. The feathered flamencos gradually resolve, and I realise the mesh that covers the fence all except the bottom 30cm is obscuring the very human, tennis-playing legs that are connected to the seagulls that are, in fact, a pair white sneakers. As the player dances back and forth, my eyes still catch a bird-like echo in his feet.

So at this point I'm seriously considering either taking up twitching or getting my contact lens prescription checked.

As the bus flings itself up along towards Alphington, I let shuffle take over again and am pleasantly rewarded by a corny rendition of 'Two Hearts Swing in Three-Quarter Time' by Michael Feinstein.

The bus lurches to a halt outside a shop whose signage simply proclaims "TOOLS!" and I try not to take it personally.

I lean my head against the bus window. An enormous raven whizzes right past my head and I instinctively jerk away from the glass in shock.

"Fuck me dead!" I exclaim under my breath. At least, I think it's under my breath but the looks from my fellow passengers suggest it is more 'under my breath while I have headphones on' than 'under my breath when I can hear the volume of my own voice'.

I peer out the window down the road, trying to catch the flight-path of this over-sized cousin of the writing desk.

I can't see any birds, but there is a cyclist waiting up at the red light ahead. His head is at about the height of my bus window, and he's wearing a large, black, aerodynamic helmet. It doesn't look much like a writing desk, but I think I've located my giant Quoth.*

I'm turning the world into birds. What am I going to ornithologically Rorschach next? Does Rorschach** even work as a verb?

My bus purrs on towards Ivanhoe, and the evening light clicks over to that syrupy golden haze that singles out each tree and tells every leaf it's a miracle. As the bus reaches the top of a hill, a large tree rears into view. It's been pruned vigorously to allow the power lines to run through the middle.

Large leafy limbs curve up on either side, straddling the electric tightropes. The evening gilt fades in an instant and the tree arcs in flightless silhouette. I briefly hold my breath at this clipped delusion. The bus drives on.

My iPod shuffles and the first notes of The Leisure Society's 'Love's Enormous Wings' curl around my ears.

__________________________________________________________

* Apologies to Terry Pratchett.

** Autocorrect suggested 'cornstarch' in place of Rorschach. I expect the next gelatinous mass I see will look like a pigeon.

An instance of comfort

I haven't blogged for a couple of months.

There's reasons and reasons.

The first reason is that I went back to work (3 days a week) on December 1st, which has been wonderful, scary, and full of organising. I express milk twice a day for Luka while I'm at work (in the archive room, gazing around at the history of Melbourne Uni's Student Union), and most of my thoughts have been centred around if I'll get a let-down and whether I'm leaving enough milk for Paul to feed him while I'm away. I've been 'topping up' his bottles by expressing between feeds on my days off and on weekends, but recently he's been scaling back his intake so I feel more confident that whatever amount I can "get out" at work will be enough for him. He's also been eating more (at last!) so that helps too.

I think I'm in the swing of it finally: I get home from work, sweep the boy up into my arms as he makes excited noises and bites my face (flattering, but kind of painful) while Paul puts the day's milk into the fridge. I cuddle the boy or play with him until he goes to bed, then if I'm working the next day I wash the pump and pack the next day's containers, my lunch, and the cool-bag. In the morning I feed the boy when he wakes (or occasionally I gently wake him first), pick up my bag, and go.

This doesn't include the time between putting him to bed and the morning feed. As those who know me can testify, Luka wakes up a lot at night. He always has, and now he has just turned 1, he shows no sign of changing the pattern.

But the mention of a 1st birthday is of course an excuse for gratuitous birthday-photo insertions:

Right. Back to the night times. Often I've got no idea how many times a night I go to him, but for the past few nights I've kept a piece of paper beside my bed, and each time I get up in the dark I grab the pen and make a wobbly slash at the paper. Luka goes to bed about 7pm. I usually go to him once or twice after that before I go to bed myself at 11pm. Between my bedtime and 7am the next morning the bit of paper says I get up between 2 and 5 times. I breastfeed him each of these times.

So, I'm a bit tired.

Now, here comes the contradictory bit. I reserve the right to whinge about Luka's sleeping, as I haven't had a night's sleep for over a year, and I wouldn't complain if he suddenly decided to sleep for...well, even 4 hours in a row.

But. Before you send me to sleep school, or recommend a controlled crying program (although I think it has the euphemism "controlled comforting" these days), I should say that while I can stand to listen to him cry, I'm just not willing to.

I've done it once. It was probably our worst night's sleep since he'd been born. He went to bed as usual at 7pm, fed at 8pm, 9pm and then after another hour just started screaming. Paul and I took it in turns for 5 hours between 10pm and 3am, and he still wouldn't stop screaming. I'd fed him, fed him again, walked him around, tried Panadol in case it was teething, given him some water, sung to him - and ran out of ideas. So at 3am we went to bed, shut the doors, turned on the fan, and waited. After 20 minutes of screaming (not crying or yelling, but screaming), he fell asleep.

He woke again for a feed at 4am, went quietly back to his cot, and I didn't hear from him again til his usual 6am feed. So. I don't know what all that was about, and he can't tell me. It was the first time that sort of thing had happened, and at the time I just didn't know what else to do. So I ran away.

That night made me think a lot about why Luka wakes a night, why usually a feed settles him, and why that time I couldn't solve his problems.

I've read some books that reassure me that I'm not 'weak' if I can't bear to listen to my baby cry at night. That's true, but the fact is I can bear it - I was really, really tired, and when I left him to roar for 20 minutes that night it didn't bother me AT ALL.

So I thought a lot more about teaching-to-sleep, or sleep training, or whatever you want to call it. It's worked for a couple of friends of mine. More than a couple, actually. And I'm glad it's worked for them.

But I Just. Can't. Do. It.

I CAN switch off from his cries, that's not a problem. I'm just not willing to ignore him. He's calling for me because he wants me - and while a feed settles him, I'm pretty damn sure that at over 1 year he's not hungry. But he wants me to be with him. He wants comfort. And I think that's a valid request.

Am I a softy? Probably. Definitely. Perhaps I just haven't reached the level of sleep-deprivation that would drive me to start a teaching-to-sleep program. But you'd think after having no more than 4hrs sleep in a row since 17th January 2009, I'd have peaked by now? Who knows.

And how does this relate to books, you ask?

Well, if I haven't mentioned it before, I'm really tired. And still reserving the right to whinge.

I've tried to keep reading the books on the favourites list. I started to read The Bourne Identity, and I stalled. So I started to read Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and I stalled.

All I want to do is read for comfort, and so I've mostly been reading Paul Auster. I'm aware I may be the only person in the world who reads Paul Auster for comfort, but from the first page of his books, I'm in a familiar place. It's a place where I can connect his allusions, his character names, and his images back and forth to his other works. It's a place where I know I won't be satisfied by the ending, but I also know that a 'satisfying' ending in one of his books would be a let-down. His books rough up against each other, they reference each other without creating anything you could call 'connection', and you're left with the feeling that if you just read them again, you might understand. But that's just part of the fun - because you wouldn't.

How strange that this discomforting kind of reading should provide my comfort.

But that's my story, my excuse.

Perhaps reading Auster provides a good correlation for my experience of motherhood: I don't know what I'm doing, but who does?

*This post brought to you between two feeds.

Due dates

This morning I lent a dvd to a borrower and stamped the due date in the front (yes, we still stamp date slips at the Rowden White Library).

Me: "There you go."

Borrower: "Thanks. When is it due?"

Me, looking at the dvd: "In a week."

Borrower: *horrified pause, staring at my 6-months-pregnant belly* "A week??!!"

Come and work at the Rowden White Library

Our lovely lady librarian Aimee has gone to a new job at the Bionic Ear Institute (or as we like to refer to it, the Ionic Beer Institute).

Fool!

But you can apply for her job:

Library Officer @ the Rowden White Library.

It's fun! There's often cake! But it's no easy task; you can't just be ace and like cake. You have to be a qualified librarian and ace and like cake.

It's a tough trifecta.

Dress-ups and acceptances

The Rowden White Library 70th birthday party of course went swimmingly, with about 400-500 students (and post-students) turning up to dispatch massive amounts of cake and booze:

And staff in their costumed best (we each came as different sections of the library):

Alice Pung made a nice speech about how we are great (yay us), and of course we all sang 'happy birthday' to the Rowdy. There's something nicely absurd about 500 people singing "Happy birthday dear library...". We're still finding rogue helium balloons hiding in corners. More photos here.

Then I got a cold (which sucked), then I got 2 poems accepted at pageseventeen and 1 at Westerly (which does not suck). So now I can feel a little bit writerly when I go the the Melbourne Writer's Festival tomorrow morning to see Kate Atkinson and other randomly chosen sessions (o! the joy of a volunteer's free-entry lanyard).

Happy Birthday, Rowden White Library!

My beloved home away from home (I suppose some would call it my workplace, but what other workplace has a room full of beanbags so the tired/pregnant can sleep in their lunch break?) is having a special day.

The Rowden White Library is turning 70! Just look at old RW, he's in the mood for celebratin':

We're having a party.

You don't have to be a member to come along. Past students/library lovers/people with nothing else to do welcome.

There will be booze, and cake, and Alice Pung.

And library staff in costume. We have a habit of this:

Do Come:

Date - Wednesday August 13th, 3pm

Place - Rowden White Library, 2nd Floor Union House, University of Melbourne

Fellow liberrian Aimee and I are making the slideshow for the party (like the ones you have at your 21st, except longer and with less photos of you in the bath or dressed up as a gollywog), so we've been finding old photos of the RWL from the Student Union archives.

This is the library in its gentlemanly original incarnation:

But my favourite photos are from the 70s. Gotta love Listening Lounge hallway pashing:

And novelty shoulder massage*:

Wonder whose boobs they were?

So yes, come party, eat cake, hear Alice, see me dressed up as the SF/Fantasy Collection, and go 'yay 70 years of library'.

* Boob-on-shoulder massage is no longer provided as a service at the Rowden White Library.

Manga happy

Favourite manga title of the day (from the series One-Piece):

"The Crap-Geezer"

Indeed.

Huck is found by another Bookcrosser!

My book release for Huckleberry Finn has been caught! Hurrah!

It's finder says: "Caught the book while returning a library book at the RWL. Perfect timing, as I needed another fix anyway, and I've always been tempted by huck finn and friends... I think I might try and leave it where a nice Apollo Bay person can give it a go..."