(denim imprints/threads)

“The stories are mostly about the life spent at home…Yet life is mostly lived by timid bodies at home, and since we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains, we see the differences in lives as deeply there too. The real differences among people shine most brightly in two bedrooms and one building, with a clock ticking… [x] years [your assignment length] to find out how and why. Not just how and why and in what way [x] is different from [y], but how [someone] with the normal “universalist,” antinationalist reflexes of the kind, might end up feeling about the idea of difference itself – about the existence of minute variations among peoples: which ones really matter and which ones really don’t.” (Adam Gopnick)

Bought some jeans recently from the secondhand. (Came over without any. And now there’s no going back. I love them; I live in them.) As Johnny Cash played on the Christian radio, I flipped through the books: The Diary of Adrian Mole; the Best Eats guide to Melb 2004; Othello; Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House; Who Moved my Cheese; James and the Giant Peach; something by Satre, by Christie; scripts of the Goon show; Mongolian cookery; Mills & Boon.

(I came away with a some essays by that New Yorker writer – ah! That NYr style: one of my addictions. Just not the same reading it online – and Robert Drewe’s The Drowner. Sadly, the books are usually more expensive than the clothes – you’d get a good shirt for 60 toya (30 cents), a book for 1.50 k (75 cents) (uh, and what is this – am I complaining?!)).

I’m the only female who looks at the books; the others are always males. Here it’s men and boys who loiter around the book area, and they pick up and read anything – ANYTHING. From Judith Kranz to Ian Rankin. There’s a voraciousness about it, they seem to devour words, any words. Unsure about this: men in clothes shop reaction? Maybe. But suspect it’s also a display, being seen as reading. (Noticed it at work too; there’s a guy who I think might be illiterate, but who I’ve seen quite publicly pick up a paper (English) and peruse it carefully, knowledgeably.) Literacy isn’t taken for granted here, and so it carries more performance.

But life itself is more performative here, more public, more shared. “More” of course meaning different from how I am used to living, in my little town. I like this, the textured quality of learning: as much as I learn about here, I learn about where I came from. And me: I’m a thread in there somewhere too.