they call me on and on, across the universe

this is here, kitchen + country, for now. sorry bougainvilleans; that strip fell off the wall. no symbollism intented.

took a big breath and had some work people over for dinner tonight (i once knew how to cook, but coming here, forgot everything. by myself, i tend to get on to one thing and eat it over and over. last week = guacamole. week before = scrambled eggs. week before = packet soups + noodles. yeah, it's pretty dire. i say yes to every dinner invitation; everyone else seems to know how to cook, so they can cook for me.) there is a new volunteer at work, a vso (british). she was asking a thousand and one questions, and it was funny to find how much i'd adapted to only half-consciously, how much this place sneaks under your skin. before coming here, i hadn't lived in a foreign country before, just travelled, so this is new to me.

having said that, i kind of wish i had a one year contract, rather than two. i'm used to moving about the place every six-twelve months, moving house if not heading off to another dot of light calling me from another map. the challenge in coming here is not the overt one, it's learning to be satisfied with the everyday, becoming a bit more patient.

ugh. it's a struggle i tell ya. Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox. mundane - shouldn't i be struggling more with existential dilemmas? ethics and economics? human rights as a colonising discourse? - but true.

**

Book Meme: I’m not really sure how these games go, but because it’s from a blog worth reading – sepikmom! – and because it’s about books, here goes:

Total Books Owned:
Let’s make it easy and say “right now in house in PNG”: actually…about 75. And these are ones I own. God; how quickly I accumulate…And there’s: Library books: over 25. Books from friends: 7 I think.

Last Book I Bought:
1. Another Rebus novel (the late ones are excellent; ‘black and blue’ is really, really superb.)
2. “The Greenest Island” (paul theroux) – acute. Good.

Last Books I Read:
-“The Line of Beauty” (alan hollinghurst) – the first two thirds of this 1980s-thatcher-upper-class-london novel, the writing skates along smoothly – a bit too much so; I wasn’t sure that it hadn’t won the booker just because the main character’s gay and everything’s so stylised. But then suddenly hollinghurst puts a bit of muscle behind the slide and the narrative flies ahead and everything “goes black and glittering”, like ice at night. I would have liked a bit more politics, but impressive.

-Thesis on raskols in Lae, PNG (submitted to work but read for interest): young-man-hanging-out-with-the-bad-boys anthro piece, and analysis is at times a bit light, but not many other people have lived with raskols and written about it, so was definitely worth a look.

- “The Perfect Spy” (le carre) – yep very “dad’s bookshelf”, but in desperation one night I picked it up and ended up reading far too late into the night. Surprisingly, it’s not stupid! Gripping, totally indulges in all of that romance around spies and spying.

-“The Sky Travellers” (bill gammage) – first Hagen – Sepik patrol in 1930s. fascinating historical detail, but what’s most impressive is that it tells of events and how they were interpreted from all parties’ perspectives: it’s a “two sided” history; haven’t read much png history like it, and to give gammage credit I actually don’t think it’s been done with such seriousness before.

- “jamaica inn” (d du maurier) – hm, ok; maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. Don’t pay for this one.

Books I [Would] Like To Read:
1) War and Peace; half way through, but it doesn’t count until I’ve made it to the end.
2) Actually this is one I feel I ought to read: Hakluyt’s “Voyages and Discoveries”: someone lent me this, notes and journals from early dutch exploration around the world. Interesting in the abstract (“request to be advised in the killing of a whale”, “266 christians delivered out of Turkish slavery”), but don’t think I’ll actually get far.

Books that Mean[t] A lot to Me [at the time]:
This is a bit random. It’s hard to say, without seeing your books lined up before you. For each “…” read: “…at the time”
- eight months on ghazzah street, Hilary Mantel
- no road (muecke) (not really for content, but for what it does, how he moves)
- Ulysses (joyce) (such a discovery…)
- seth’s suitable boy
- the death of William gooch (dening; just for the prologue)
- portrait of a lady (james) (…this was a long time ago)

- meg and mog; yok-yok; and all those beautiful books my lovely aunt sent to us in the antipodes over the years. each of the above books actually make me remember people, more than the books themselves. From words to the world, to the words and back and forth again. This is the only pattern to life I know.