tales from urban dilettantia

I made this one a while back; it was the most time consuming of the maps I’ve made to date, but also one of the most interesting to research.  Much credit goes to the National Library’s Trove database, the Metropolitan Cemeteries Board, and to various family history bloggers.  You can see some of Bessie Armstrong’s prize-winning recipes here and here.

015 – Some Residents

I hoard an alarming number of bits and pieces of Tiny Projects and Personal Projects and Just-Messing-Around Projects and This-Will-Be-Useful-for-a-Project Projects.  I’m a damn fine candidate for leaving this world in some bizarre digital reenactment of the Collyer Brothers‘ demise.  So, to free me of some of my digital clutter, have at this one:

Google Map: Travel the World

This project’s really just me putting pins on a Google Map every time I stumble across something that interests me in the (inaccurately named) Satellite View.  (This all started when I was panning around looking for inspiration for a different project, involving art and screen captures and screen capture art.  That project is still deep in the project clutter pile.  Please don’t ask me how it’s going because it’s not.)

As at the time of writing, it appears that 95 things have interested me.  Some of the points have been marked because they look pretty neat from the air (like the Boeing Everett Factory), and others because they have some particular historial or cultural resonance that interests me (for instance, Centralia, and the Blue Sky Mine).  I’ve included a link to more information for each pin, and a photograph where available.

I did want to port this original Travel the World map to the new Google Maps Engine Lite Beta, but unfortunately Lite has problems supporting the images and hyperlinks at this point, so for now I’ll keep adding to the version I’ve linked here.   Just turn on your (inaccurately named) Satellite View, click around, and come see the world with me.

Note:  The first map has had a Voronoi diagram constructed over it, using places one can get a drink around here as the initial set of points. You can read more about Voronoi diagrams here.

013 – Very Rough Voronoi Diagram of Where One Can Get a Drink Around Here

014 – Some Crimes

…you had such a vision of the street, as the street hardly understands… – T S Eliot, Preludes

011 – Dogs I Have Seen on this Saturday Morning

012 – Invisible Stars Above the Street, 10:30am on a Sunday

* Technically, the Sun is visible and the planets aren’t stars.

Whilst I have momentum, here are three more maps of the street.

008 – Things I Can See from Where I’m Sitting

009 – Some Businesses Operating Between 1910 and 1915

010 – Heritage Listings, Drawn in a Hurry

Here is the beginning of a tiny, tiny map project for tiny, tiny corners of time, in which  a piece of Beaufort Street is drawn over and over again. It’s sketchy. It’s arbitrary.  It’s subject to error and to change. It’s home.

001 – Streets

Just the street names and outlines; making a peculiarly conventional assumption that street outlines make a good base map, this is the base map.

002 – On the Ground

There are a lot of utilities down there.  To be honest, I’m feeling a little bit more sympathy for the people who accidentally cut through lines.

003 – Mentions in The Mirror

The Mirror was a dreadful paper that was around in the 1930s.   It appears to have specialised in dodgy competitions and always-amusing tales of sexual assault.

004 – Beaufort Steet Blogged

Fond memories of the Beaufort Street Bloggers.

005 – Time Travel

First they came for the trams.  Then they came for the trolley buses.  Soon they’ll come for you.

006 – Legible Tags

Whatever one’s opinion on tagging, YERN and TAPE and HUTONE are a part of us all. 

007 – Lies

The above is pretty much all fraudulent.

So that’s the ongoing mini-project of the moment, in lieu of actually working on the much bigger Secret Mapping Project of Procrastination, or indeed any of my other art or local history projects.

I’m really enjoy this growing collection of maps upon maps, each so different in form and meaning.   The complexity of street’s story grows with each drawing, and the scope for making yet more representations is immense.

I’m going to go for a walk up the road on the weekend and make a map of Dogs I Have Seen.  You’ll like it.  The dogs are excellent around here.

* A small correction from Michael, who notes that the #66 bus is now a Limited Stops route rather than an Express.  Thanks Michael!

I’ll update and re-run the whole Election How-To  series for the Australian Federal Election later in the year, but for now here’s a quick roundup for the Western Australian State Election:

Western Australian Electoral Commission has lots of information for you: the candidates, the polling places, the district and regional profiles, the inquiry hotline, early voting, social media coverage and more.

There’s a good overview up at the Wikipedia entry for the election.

And, as ever, the ABC are doing a sterling job over at their election site, with all the data, election calculators, candidate profiles, boundary redistributions, and – most importantly – the divine Mr Antony Green.

Finally, my FAQ published for previous elections is still broadly relevant.

Western Australian elections make me cranky (see: odds from SportsBet) so I shall now return to my regularly scheduled, obviously non-partisan, activity of Making A Troy Buswell Action Figure.  I just need some glue for the hair.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a body politics piece here before, and certainly not one about my personal experience of body shaming. It isn’t my area of expertise, and I’ve noticed that writing body politics posts tends to end with one’s entrails smeared across the wall. My somewhat narrow view of human attractiveness suggests that having one’s entrails smeared across the wall isn’t a good look.  Nevertheless, let us start bluntly.

This year, I lost ten kilograms.

(I wonder what you thought when you read that? That’s so unhealthy. That’s so healthy.  Go you. For fuck’s sake, how uninteresting. Something else?)

Backstory: this year I took up rock climbing. It transformed my social life, my experience of the outdoor world, and my body. It stripped a layer of fat from my body and put on wiry muscle where I’d never had muscle before.  I’m as strong and fit as I’ve ever been. I can climb a tree, swing from one arm if only for a brief moment, and I’m on my way to doing the first chin-up I’ve ever done. I find myself liking my physical form for what it does, rather than what it is.

But here’s the thing.  Many of you haven’t seen me in person, so you won’t know what I look like.  Perhaps you’re imagining someone around average size dropping ten kilograms.

In fact, I’m five foot four. I’m very lightly built. I have tiny wrists and hands and ankles.  A year ago, I was an Australian size ten – the second smallest size one can generally buy. Today, I’m at the lower end of a size eight. I am skinny.

Culturally, I have the mammoth privilege that comes with being thin. Cheap, pretty clothes. Doctors diagnosing my illnesses, rather than telling me the only problem is my weight. Tiny airline seats fitting me. Hell, this year I’ve found I can shop in the children’s section. And most significantly, I’m not on the receiving end of widespread bigotry and condemnation.

Great. I know how fortunate I am, to the extent that anyone in such a position of privilege can ever truly know such a thing. And so, when I talk about being on the receiving end of body shaming, I want to be absolutely clear that I’m not dismissing my privilege. Shaming someone for thinness is not ‘exactly the same’ as shaming someone for not being thin. That’s bullshit. It is not equivalent.

However, there’s a belief that feeds discrimination, and a behaviour that heartbreakingly crops up from time to time even in my most feminist of social circles. It’s the belief that it is acceptable to pass judgement on my shape. On anyone’s shape. Boobs and thighs, belly, arse, ribs are all fair game for comment and criticism.

Too often I’ve seen people – feminists, activists, smart and caring people in almost every way they can be – point at pictures of skinny women’s bodies and decry them as ‘Horrible’. ‘Ugly’. ‘Disgusting’. ‘Urgh’. ‘Needs to eat a cheeseburger’. Bodies just like mine.

I may be as privileged as hell, and may not generally be on the receiving end of a cultural barrage of crap because of my body shape, but you know what? I am not okay with you posting pictures of women who look like me and commenting on how hideous they are. It is absolutely unacceptable.

The enormity of the social problems we face when it comes to physical form is beyond overstatement. We exclusively, pathologically market our clothes as displayed on the bodies of women far to one end of the bell curve. We objectify and idealise a single shape amongst the multitudes. We encourage self-loathing and self-harm. We are the architects of a society of shame.

Now, when those of you who really ought to know better post a picture of a woman’s body – of anyone’s body – and tell me it’s disgusting, you’re promoting the acceptability of linking physical form and shame. I’d like to say my feelings aren’t hurt when I see you saying my shape is wrong, but that wouldn’t be true. It is always going to be personal, just as it is always going to be political.  And, besides, it doesn’t help fix a single thing.  It simply reinforces the insidious idea that there is a ‘right shape’ and a there is a ‘wrong shape’.

I’m not wrong. I’m not ugly. I do not have an eating disorder.  I’m not sick or vain or brainwashed or setting a bad example. I’m just me, a rock climbing, skinny bitch.

To shame the body of another human being is to perpetuate the behaviour that feeds discrimination and self-loathing. But beyond that, it plunders you – our best and brightest, our feminists, our activists, our fighters. There are so many battles to be fought in this arena – battles around education, agriculture, advertisting, poverty, bad science, mental health, and the way we define spaces – both public and private.  So, wake up.  Give up the pointing and the shaming.  Instead, choose your battles wisely, and fight well.

(So much has happened since I wrote this. I’ve been sitting on it, frightened to let it go out into the world and become reality.)

Nothing happens for a reason.  The incident that will ever mark the beginning had not the least connection with the things that followed it. I learned of a death – a bad death – six months too late, from the front page of a newspaper. Shock at the brutality of it. A sharp twist of betrayal and a wordless horror at the manner of learning something, surely, I should have been told.

I lied there, when I said there was no connection between the incident and that which followed. I am an unreliable narrator. The connection is this: I promised I’d cry about it on the weekend, and for a number of reasons I never did. I’m sorry, Tim.

I presume the wider world hummed along and something in the shape of a weekend occurred. Someone would surely have noticed had it been omitted, and all going to plan, I would certainly have grieved. However, in place of a weekend, all I have is a collection of stupid, frozen, cliched moments, and a dawning realisation that there is no more grace, no less banality when things happen to oneself than when they happen to others.

Things. I am suddenly a person with a partner who has cancer. It has spread. I am a person with a partner who will probably be alive in five years, by virtue of a mix of medical science and dumb luck. There’s probably, and then there’s probably. I am a character in a an awful film, a poorly written book, a farce. I am a person with feelings that have come straight out of a self-help pamphlet. From the inside, nothing will ever be the same. From the outside, I am immaculately, mind-numbingly predictable.

I find myself biting my tongue when colleagues ask How are you? How is he? replying Okay…okay… in an appropriately subdued manner. This is a misrepresentation. I am an unreliable answerer of questions. Inside, I am smiling radiantly and answering Well that’s a stupid fucking question right there, isn’t it? Inside I am beautiful and rude and angry and trying so hard to be heartless in the places it doesn’t matter, in order to sustain enough heart to go around.

I am artificially busy. I make phone calls like a woman who has never hated the telephone. I instruct nurses to bring drips. I break rules, prioritise ruthlessly, make mistakes, cause offence, and forget to be my obedient, compliant, excruciatingly anxious self.

This is a horrible thing of course, I said to him, but it is so very interesting. I am learning so much, so quickly, about so many things.

Nothing happens for a reason, and the banal and fascinating, lovely and horrible nestle within each other in unpredictable ways. And, in all sincerity, I hope someone dear has the presence of mind to slap me if I ever forget that this is how things are, to shake me if I ever start asking why.

“I’ve been asking people around me to write about personal positives in their life, the way they make a difference in their own way, as part of their daily experience of living in the world. Now it is my turn to share with you about my life and how I try to make a difference. Where I spend the most time, energy and effort in making a difference entirely revolves around love.” – Jaunita Landésse, setting the agenda for the 51st Down Under Feminists’ Carnival.

It is interesting that I’ve been invited to write about the way I make a difference in the world in a week where I’ve been struggling to even co-exist with the world. After many hours of begging my brain to think-think-think, I decided that the best way to address the subject was to take the scope above and to fill in the gap in this sentence:

‘Where I spend the most time, energy and effort in making a difference entirely revolves around _____.’

And when I did this, I found my answer.

Curiosity. That’s me.

It is perhaps more evident that curiosity drives my inner world, than it is that it drives the outer. I’m a life-long learner, a researcher, a dilettante who hyperbolicly claims she’ll try anything twice, an adventuress, an analyst and a woman who describes herself as ‘interested in everything’. (That’s a lie; I’m not in the least interested in Rugby League.)

If you’ve visited this blog in the past, you’ll have seen that it’s quite the jumble of things. Specific topics (cycling, politics, statistics, happiness, art, polyamory), a repository for my lists of hundreds of interesting Wikipedia articles, and tales of local history that I’ve spent hours and days and weeks researching just for the love of researching. If I have one defining characteristic that has not changed in the least over the past three decades (if you ask my Mum, I expect she’ll tell you I was a most curious baby) it’s overwhelming, unconquerable, fervent curiosity.

How, then, does this curiosity make a difference beyond my internal world? If you’ve had a conversation with me about something that excites me, you’ve probably noticed that (a) I talk really, really fast, and (b) that I love to share the knowledge grown out of the seed of an initial fascination. While it’s hard to gauge a degree of influence, many people – at work, at home, here on the internet – have mirrored my enthusiasm and have taken the time to tell me they’ve appreciated the sharing of my interests. An even better indicator, I think, is that people often go on to send me links, books, thoughts and pieces of news related to a discussion we’ve had, long after the initial conversation. We go on to listen and learn together.

I am most certain that the infectiousness of curiosity makes a difference in the world, as does the distribution of learning. I’ve learned this not from my experience as a giver of curiosity, so much as being on the receiving side of similar excitement from others who share this passion. Their curiosity feeds mine, plants new seeds and ideas, travels off in random directions, and iteratively feeds back into their wonder and awe as it returns. To learn for the joy of learning, to discover for the joy of discovering, to chase trails, to unwrap stories and to adventure on – these are the ways I write my own story and make meaning in my world, and perhaps too, in the worlds of others.

Now, wonder and awe are magnificent things, but has occurred to me as I write that curiosity also makes a difference in a more intimate way. It brings difference into the world because I’m interested in you.

I truly want to understand what makes you happy, what makes you sad, why you do what you do, what you think, how you feel, how you think, what enchants you, what enamours you, where you come from, your stories, how you’re just like me, how you’re utterly unlike me, and how you occupy and interact with your world. And I think, again from being on the receiving end rather than the giving, that it does make a small, warming difference to meet someone who is curious about you. It is good to, in that moment, know you are an interesting creature. And so, in a tiny, intimate way, I can give you the gift of my curiosity and all that entails, and likewise, if you too are interested, you can give that gift to me.

Curiosity has become more than a personality trait. More than an instinct, a proclivity or a habit, all these though it has been. But beyond them, it has become a guiding philosophy; it is my self-determined raison d’être and my maker of meaning, in a universe where I perceive no other meaning than that I create.

As Jaunita lives to love, I live to discover.

Spiralling out, keeping going. That’s the person I want to be.

_{With a loving nod to Cary, comrade in philomathy. Lateralus is your song.}