Hi, my name is Cedric, and i'm a little greedyguts. Today I ate: two tiny chocolates from the Bastyr dispensary (they have vital nutrients etc in them). Then I thought I was doing well, so I risked a small cream puff after pho with a yoga friend (who actually runs food-compulsion and body-obsession workshops)... Then I went to the gym, but was draggin' badly, so bought a 200-calorie dark chocolate bar before I went in. Then when I came out, I stopped at Pagliacci pizza and got two scoops of their gelato (one chocolate, one apricot). Then I went immediately to Dilettante chocolate a few doors away and bought a bag of chocolate covered hazelnuts, pistachios, blueberries, and ginger - another 300 calories or so. Thank god it's midnight and my access to more, and worse, is curtailed.

The premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, supposedly a Labor candidate, is honoring Joh Bjelke-Peterson, the former longtime premier, with a state funeral. Bjelke-Peterson's long record of bigoted rule included banning any unauthorized congregation of three or more people. That was just one of his more benign pieces of legislation. He ruled for decades under a dispensation of juryrigged electoral boundaries, extremely heavily skewed in favor of country voters, and against the majority of Queenslanders, who live in the capital Brisbane. The setup earned the state the slogan "One Sheep, One Vote."

Mr Beattie

If you wish to let the old bigot go peacefully to his rest, perhaps you might consider letting him just be buried, as soon as possible, in the hope that his day will be forgotten and put behind us in all its ignominy. Instead, by lionizing him, now, you are continuing your own ambivalent record in racial matters - the stadium-name incident; your mealy-mouthed response to the killing of the aboriginal community member on the island that was a stronghold of Bjelke-Peterson-like persecution and abject racism - and you are kowtowing to the right that seems to be your odd bedfellow, and you are reminding us all of the very dark days of Joh's shameful reign, even as you seem now determined to whitewash his infamy and abet all the bigot's remaining kind. This man, as Mr. Laver so aptly says, "was an egomaniacal bigot and also a person who ran a ruthless police state orientated towards his capitalist cronies."

MATCH SCHTICK

Ever wonder what people say to each other on match.com and similar online dating services? I do, too, but I can’t imagine anyone is ever going to tell me. But I, at least, can tell you some of what I’ve said to women there, and you, dear reader, may, if you like, let me know just how on, or off, track I have been.

(I should note, by the way, that so far I haven’t recycled any letters, but instead have written each note afresh. I may, however, diverge from this approach, if only because virtually none of the recipients have had even the courtesy to reply with a polite ‘thanks but no thanks’ – the (virtually always bad) karma of dating will come back to bite they asses.) (This, too, may be something you, reader, may care to throw light on - even if at my own expense.)

Excisions are to protect the innocent, and me.

To someone or other, whose friends, she claims, applaud her:

Well, if your friends are right, they’re lucky to have you. And so much the better, if you’re all those other good things. It appeals to me a great deal to get to know people who are thinking, learning, and breathing, all at once.

Just with respect to who you are, we would seem to have some things in common - and I’d be interested in seeing if we might become friends, regardless of what should come of that, if anything. I’m always keen to have friends who are in the thinking trades, as I write journalism about academic research, myself.

We have some points in common - I’ve lived overseas a while, too. Actually, for 25 years in the US, and for about 3 in Switzerland before that. I grew up in Australia (to the degree that I grew up, at all). Reading, learning news things, talking about them, sense of humor, definitely... I travel quite a bit for my work, mostly in the US, but occasionally beyond. I’m planning to go to Mexico, Australia, and perhaps Namibia this year - oh, and hopefully East Timor, and Tasmania (my ancestral roots), while I’m in Australia visiting my mum, dad, siblings, and a mob of nephews and a niece (in between wandering the bush just for the sheer pleasure of breathing eucalyptus vapors [which she cited -ed.]). We have plenty of other points in common, too (hell, the match.com computer says it’s so), but you can read about those on my profile, -----.

What have you returned to school to study? I write mostly about arts & humanities, but often also about science and social science topics, too. I live in -----, and rejoice in sitting in cafés chatting about Art, Song, and Ideas.

I’d never heard of Vichy showers until now - looked em up, sure look inviting.

Best wishes,


====

To: someone whose match.com moniker was written back to front:

Tnub ot kcarf hguohtla ,llew ytterp lleps uoy. I’m an almost flawless speller, except when I confuse American orthography with that of the rest of the English-speaking world. I’m from a part of that myself, but that’s really neither here nor there, other than that my forebears in Tasmanian apple-growing country seem to have endowed me with i) an oversized skull (could be due to inbreeding); ii) a ridiculously strong constitution; and iii) long life - my people all live forever, or at least to a decent approximation of forever. Still’n’all, I’ve been feeling that it’s time to get on with the matter of companionship, after a mixture of muddles in the past, all with wonderful lessons and moments, and painful ones, too, of course, but... So it goes. My point is: Yeah, I’d like to meet someone like you, even if it ended up we just got into one groove - I like to do a variety of things, although I must do them all sort of on automatic pilot, because I can’t really think of specific things, at the moment. I’m a bit disdainful of the seeming mandate in Seattle that it has to be hike, bike, or go to movies, although I do those things, sure, why not. I’m glad you can’t really ski, because neither can I, even though I spent a few years living in Switzerland as a teenager, and have been in Seattle for 18 years, now. Again, the Tasmanian provenance enters into that: I have huge calves, the result of too much australian football in my youth, as well as coming from Irish potato-digging stock. Thousands of years of squatting in the slushy fields, troweling for spuds. So, I just can’t find ski boots that don’t force me forward to a 45-degree angle. Still, I go on ski trips with friends, if they’re for a few days of chatting&laughing, reading quietly, eating sumptuously, sitting in hottubs, and the like.

Oh, and you’re not much good at cooking, either, you say? Excellent. That could be the one thing we do together, because I’m pretty good when I make the effort - or, rather, get organized, but that hasn’t happened in decades. Instead, I look far and wide for more and more pared-down ways to eat fairly healthfully with the least possible resistance. I’d rather be reading a book, frankly, or wandering about contemplating this and that. I, too, prefer fiction. It’s by far the most likely way of getting at the truth, as far as I can tell. Again, I’m not too organized - I just read at random, as various books float into view. I see, too, that you prefer both brains and bodies in working order - reading, lots of chatting, and my work (writing about all kinds of topics in scholarly research) provide pretty well for the first of those, while swimming and wandering about, with plenty of traveling to farflung places, keep my heart strong. Can you waltz? I used to be really good at that, and other dances like it, but haven’t done that in ages. There’s a whole lot of things I have done, but it’d be boring for you to hear them, and in any case, that hardly matters - we all do something.

Spark is a more telling thing, as you say. So here’s the deal: I tend to be hopeless, shy, and those sorts of things, at first meeting someone. But I’m fine with talking; it’s just that like Gerry Ford, if I have to ride a horse, shout over loud music, or paddle one of those funny boats they have out on Green Lake, while chatting, I do fairly poorly. And, even if the conditions are just right, it’s not until a little way down the track that I’m the things my friends say (and of course, half the things they say I am are either their projections or are not the things I most hope I am...)... But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m already slightly anxious writing to you because I have very little experience of dating, because all my big-deal relationships just happened; and, it makes me a little nervous that I’m very new to this match.com deal, and lack practice at meeting someone like you who is many of the things that appeal to me in a person - you hate shopping; you work with kids and youths; you have time off for travel; you study the piano (I don’t, but I like pianos and have done lots of stuff around music, including writing about it for years, and broadcasting odd varieties of it for many, in the past); you’d like to go to Brazil (I was just asking a friend who’s there right now, getting married, to keep notes for me on how to do that (visit Brazil, not get married)); you escaped school after 8th grade, which may well be part of a larger, difficult story, but at least appeals to the part of me that, as someone who has been around educational institutions for all his life, finds them very suspect - I mean, how can it be right to institutionalize kids almost at birth and MAKE them do things? And can both high school and college possibly both be necessary? I’m being a little rhetorical, but unless the institutions prove their usefulness to the people who are mandated to attend them... I mean...

I have nor fangs, nor brands, nor scars (not of the purposely inflicted variety, anyway), but I suppose I do have some barbs, but I’ve been working on filing those down.

I’m about as ardently anti-Bush as they come, but I have to be careful not to attract the attention of the Forces of Darkness that object to foreign suckers like me who decry american excesses and uglinesses.

And so on and so on. I’d be glad to tell you more.

All the best,

-------------


To: someone who claimed to be “classy”:

I'm most of the things you seem to be: I love dark chocolate almost as much as life itself, alas. I'm classy - lower-middle classy, and intelligent enough to make much of it. That, you'd have to gauge for yourself, too.

By the way, I'm new to this, too, and really am quite shy. I can certainly be attentive in conversation, on first meeting someone, but to have much sense of who I am, I'd imagine you'd have to talk to me for a fair while, perhaps over two or three pleasant dinners at quiet restaurants that encourage and permit quiet conversation. I'd expect that that would be true of just about anyone. If that's you - in addition to classy, intelligent, and fun, and keen on back rubs, possibly, somewhere down the line - then perhaps you'd like to look over my specs, below, and see what you think.

+++++++++++

One woman claimed to write bad imitations of Edna St. Vincent Millay, so I wrote her this (but got no response):

Afternoon on the Web

I would be the gladdest thing
  Upon the Web wide whirled!
I would lodge the fairest flower
  In your russet curls.

I would snear at clouds and gloom
  With ever-widening eyes,
And make the keys clack til we met,
  If only on the wires

If you but sent your greeting
  - your isp to mine -
And I would rush to send back word,
  And hope to hear more soon!

- with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and to you (and, to tell you the truth, I doubt that I’d presume to do much of this until at least a second or third meeting).

#########



From the sound of it, we have many things in common – although not the climbing, I’m afraid. I’m definitely a lowlander – it’s the age-old Irish roots, before my forebears were dragged off to Australia for trivial and desperate acts against the English propertied class. Oh, and the kayaking is something I have never tried, other than in the calm waters behind the UW stadium (where, I might add, the geese can be quite threatening).

I grew up in Australia, lived in Switzerland for 2-3 crucial years in my late teens, and have been in the US for 25 years - oh, 26, next week. Seems like yesterday... I came to visit old friends, and still have them, spread all across the continent. I see them fairly often, still - we go on trips here and there: the Central California coast, one year, Corsica or Morocco, the next.

All of those activity-related issues, I think, are easy to negotiate. I like doing things that people I like like to do. And I like to get people along to what I like. That’s lot of things - I, like you, have so many interests, and plenty of energy for them. Most of all, I like fiction. And chatting. Lots of things, though - they’re all on my profile, ----, but so much remains unsaid in these summaries.

At the risk of being familiar, I relate very much to what you say about love, tenderness, trust, and so forth. I’ve come up via some hard roads, and put in a lot of effort to learn the wherefors of love, faith, and courage (I always had the humor, and a readiness to volunteer, regardless of the dangers). Having been urgent for love, earlier, I’m now at ease with the notion of love as slow, gradual, and not exclusive of self-development. Nor does it seem to alleviate the need for self-sufficiency.

Did you like that latest Almodovar film? I thought it was really fine - I resonated with much of its portrayal of youth, the church, much else. Its quirkiness was appealing, too. I recently bought the dvd of Fellini’s Roma - how brilliant and wonderful. When I was at university, and then the first two years I was in the US, I must have watched a zillion films, and some of the ones I saw then, I feel like I can almost replay in my head now. For me, right now, the most powerful filmmaker is Mike Leigh. It’s all so dependent on each viewer’s emotional and intellectual makeup, though, isn’t it? My friend ---- never misses a chance to rib me for having been blown away by Little Man Tate. Something about the boy math wiz aspect of it - and the sad little man all alone. As for Leigh, it took me a year to fully recover from Secrets and Lies. I was destroyed within 10 seconds of the pre-titles set-up scenes.

I like, too, what you say, so plainly: “I seek constancy in a man who enjoys what I have and understands that what I seek of him is also what I expect of myself.” As confusing as the world can be, I seem to have a high degree of ability to understand people, to the degree that they show themselves to me, and reveal themselves, nonetheless.

Best wishes,


====

Dear xxxxyyyy,

That looks like the Sydney Harbour Bridge behind you - with the proper spelling of harbor. And one of those beaches could well be Manly or Bondi. I know the Harbour Bridge well, as I lived in Sydney for a while. I grew up (if indeed I did grow up) in Canberra which, you may know from visiting Australia, is a place that no one likes to admit coming from. It really is dreadful, and all the more bizarre given that it actually looks quite nice. It’s like a huge arboretum, and if you go up to the top of the hills (upon which the city planners, as part of their East Bloc-style master plan, deemed it unwise to build) you can look down and see nothing but trees. You can almost forget that literally thousands of square miles of suburbia lie beneath. It’s often referred to as a place that’s great to bring kids up in - translation: it’s really boring, and teenagers despise it for being a place that’s great to bring kids up in.

But that’s all long ago - I’ve been in the US for 25 years. I also lived for a few years in Geneva, which may have been my salvation (if indeed I’ve been saved, or salvaged. I believe I have. I luv life, too, in an odd way. Well, there’s no really reasonable alternative, is there?) Like you, I work in an education-related field. I’m a journalist and write about all kinds of topics in academic research. If you want to know anything about research into shyness, the fate of Bertolt Brecht’s theatre in modern America, or robotic endoscopes modeled on animal physiology (specifically worms and sea slugs), then this week I could tell you, although by next week I should have moved onto something else, and may have forgotten that I ever cracked The Good Woman of Szechuan.

For me, Coltrane was an angel come to bless this meagre planet. I grew up on jazz - thanks to my parents’ interest, which they learned in Tasmania, of all places. Django, Louis, Fats, Bessie... those were my formative musical demigods. Later came Miles, Trane, and everything else in jazz that pushed things forward. For several years I hosted a community-radio show featuring out-there jazz, and I love anything that really has the thrill of the new, but I’m also a great fan of the heartmelting ballads of love won and lost, and of a lot of the other music you mention that you like. I write a lot about jazz, but get out to it sparingly, as I guess I’ve become pickier over the years. A friend of mine always jokes about how music in a virtual realm - on CD - is fine by him. I sometimes wonder about the whole nature of spectatorship - unless there’s something really transfixing on a stage, it’s odd to see 300 people all facing one way, towards it.

There’s more info about me on my profile - “-----.” I guess it’s all accurate enough - certainly true. (I recently read some research that showed that about 60% of people don’t tell the truth about themselves on their first meetings with others - I was astounded.) I can’t really tell how “compatible” the things I am and do would make me with you - I completely agree that it’s all in the chemistry. I’m happy to know someone who has her own thing happening, and to encourage and accommodate it, and to come together in various ways. By the way, I can, and do, admit to a slight fetish about women who are taller than me - the whole male-ness thing, in this curious culture, is so warped, and I like a constant reminder that size and strength are definitely not godgiven pluses. I grew up playing rigorous sport (australian football, in particular) and really liked being buffeted about - there’s some relationship between that and what I like about the physicality of love. It’s like dancing, which I used to be very good at when I was young, although I’ve not had too many opportunities to waltz in a while. Do you like to waltz? I’m a bit hopeless when it comes to dances where one has to figure out yourself what to do with one’s hands. But not unwilling.

The one thing I forgot to put on my profile is that I’m a pretty clumsy, or at least inexperienced, dater. Is it an oddly American concept? I’ve always just gotten to know people. I’m initially a bit shy and, even if I manage to talk to people with apparent ease, I always come away feeling that I haven’t really been myself. That becomes possible after things become clearer, etc. Supposedly I’m rather amusing - so my friends say. But in the last few years I’ve been trying to curb my smartarsed mouth in order to emphasize other levels of interaction.

Is that book by David Shipler good? A friend and I were just looking at it at a book store, this afternoon.

I’m sure we must have passed each other many times walking around ---- Lake, rain or shine.

Best,

=====+++======

Dear ----Poetry---,

Someone who reads poetry. That’s nice to hear. I could talk about that late into the night. Or the other poetry: music. Or fiction. Or politics (but it makes me rage), cooking (I can still remember doing it), films (I’d probably make you mad with my opinionations, but I believe I don’t insist on them)... I used to be quite able to soul-search and -satisfy literally all night, but my new year’s resolution is to sleep more - more, at least, than 5 hours a night. I really have needed more, so now I’m working 8 hours, and sleeping or at least snoozing for 8. Eight hours for thinking and doing and knocking about, which in any case is what my job is about: researching topics in academic research, and writing about them for a college and university audience. As a result I can talk about a lot of things as if I know a lot about them - some, I may.

I like your emphasis on kindness, and your admission of life’s absurdities. As for labors of love: I ain’t scayered. Leaps of faith: check; hell, they sure are called for, often enough. A partnership in crime? Weeell... OK, but no crimes of moral turpitude, as those can get me kicked out of the country, because I am a longtime permanent foreign sucker in your proud land.

I like your emphasis on listening carefully, too - I like a relationship where both have listened so well that they can intuit half of what the other will say, and still be thrilled by the other half. I have a seemingly pessimistic, but ultimately inspiringly metaphysical theory that the more you know about someone, the more ignorant of them you become: all those minute particles of unknowing that ideally you never tire of chasing down.

Five fruits and veggies: check. I’ve been going for a few months to a nutrition clinic to really get myself set for the second half of life - and I mean that literally, as I come from a long line of long-lived Tasmanians. I have pounds to shed, but I swim a mile a day, and am strong as a Tasmanian professional woodchopper. I go to the gym every day but really that’s so boring, I won’t say anything more. Actually, shooting hoops isn’t boring, what am I saying.

Dancing: I used to be quite the waltzer in my youth (I could send you a funny article about that), and although long out of practice, still have something of that skill, as I do my outside jumpshot. I not only look younger than 48, but act it, and developmentally, no doubt am it. And don’t worry about the sunscreen: I grew up before all the kids at schools down there were made to wear those funny and very cute legionnaires’ caps, in dazzling colors, but I’ve long been averse to broiling, burning, or peeling.

You can hold you own in repartee and debate? Thank gawd. Can you wrestle? Any woman who can pin me and/or send me to my room when I’m naughty, I could adore.

Oh, and I could teach you to throw like a “boy,” even though I can throw only 40 of the 99 yards I could before the fateful, terrible moment in 1975 when I threw with all my might, early in the cricket season, and my shoulder just about went over the barn with the ball.

I’m not sure about the dog kisses - until recently I was almost phobically afraid of dogs - but my friends acclaim me as intrepid, so I’d be ready to try, but not on a first date: I’m not that kind of boy.


===000000===


Dear “In the spirit of full disclosure,” [a wine expert-ed.]

I’m never quite sure if I’m fully disclosing or just shamelessly bragging, when I make my pitch in these letters, but I’ll err on the side of verifiable claims, and if at some point in the future we should meet, you could feel free to call me to task.

I relate fairly closely to much that you write in your profile. I laughed when I read your sentence “Everybody wants the same basic things from another person, to be understood and respected,” because I have a good friend who is German, and has been through some quite exotic trials in his life, and he always says to me (you’ll have to imagine the still-strong accent): “Peet, vee all have ze same basic vonts and needs.” I’ve tried to bear that in mind while undertaking the match.com quest.

I work at home, quite contentedly, as a journalist, and have several circles of friends that I try to keep up, but I have noticed that most of the people in the various circles are already matched up, having babies, or just trudging along in their settled courses, so I figured, a while ago, that I’d better make more effort to meet women who might want to share more with me than the chats, dinners, trips, and the like that I share with my existing all-and-sundry.

So I’m encouraged when I see comments – in your profile, for example – about valuing honesty, and being hilarious, intelligent, and attractive. I’m at least the first three of those (some women friends were over this evening and said they’d be happy to act as references, and an ex said she’d do the same, but threatened complete honesty - I ain’t scared). I’d want to spend close, deep time only with someone hilarious and intelligent, and it’s really evident to me that those qualities, without honesty, are wasted and toxic.

As for interests and so forth: I’m not much use at gatherings where you have to talk at high volume; I’m good value at dinner parties, because I like to listen to people as much as to share my thoughts and my stores of information useful and useless. I’d say that conversation is ideally like the most gravity-defying waltzing. Champagne and pizza in a West Seattle apartment sounds wonderful, although I’d drink sparkling water because I come from a long line of teetotalling Tasmanians (who live forever), although I’m quite happy (and far, far from wowserish) among those who do drink.

I am also comfortable with: most people and most of their friends, mums and dads, grandparents, kids and their friends, neighbors, exes, bosses, ministers and religious skeptics (I have a soft spot for Jesuits, and nuns), and just about anyone else but blowhards, cruel people, and people who talk a lot but can’t converse. My idea of a good trip is to somewhere like Bulgaria (love those people), or friends way up in the north end of Manhattan, or by car, slowly, through the most ramshackle of the South. I hope to make it to Mexico, Australia (to visit my mum, who’s been ill), East Timor, and Namibia (to visit friends there), this year, but I’m not a jetsetter, just take the opportunities as they arise. I’ll eat anything that the locals eat, other than undercooked entrails and those exotic crustaceans in the South Pacific that kill anyone not habituated to their toxins.

I, too, adore music, and like to meet others who do. Do you know a version of Nick Drake’s “River Man” by the jazz singer Andy Bey? Bliss. I used to host a community-radio program for 8 years - experimental jazz, more or less - and I still write a lot about jazz and improvised music: a local monthly, liner notes... I like anything good, any genre. Same with books, although I’m afraid I’m considered a sinner in my bookgroup for not really liking One Hundred Years of Solitude (I could tell you why and would be willing to be set straight), but there’s much else that I do admire. I read a lot for my job - nonfiction in many fields, and fiction because that’s my particular interest. I haven’t read The Meaning of It All, although I did read and write about an earlier, fairly technical book about the making of the OED, and also The Madman and the Professor, about Fowler and the asylumed nutter who fed him definitions, which frankly was disappointing. I try to write about novelists as often as I can for the newspaper I work for, and sometimes I’m astonished at whom they allow me to write about (they’ve come to trust me, apparently) because it’s stuff that no one there would ever actually read. Same thing for musicians - avant-garde and just out-there composers, for example.

I’m not much at watching American sports, although occasionally I’ll go to the Sonics or Mariners, because a friend works in the press box, and gives me comps. I am a major fan of Australian football, however - I played it from age 7 until I came to the US 25 years ago – and whenever I go back, I round up my nephews and we go as often as we can. They’re my great joy, when I go back, as I do most years, and if I can only convince them that they must, must, learn to kick with both feet, then I’ll consider my life in sport to be fully achieved. Another trip I’d like to take is back to Australia for a 5-day cricket international: you just sit in the warm shade, reading a book in between each ball - bliss!
I still play softball - my team is about to hobble out for its 18th year (I have imposed a no-retirement clause).
My oddest claim to fame is that I once was chosen for the Swiss national rugby squad.

Oh, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not 5’10” or above, but only 5’8”. My people are all fairly close to the ground, from which we’ve dug potatoes for millennia. We also all have rather large heads – literally, and perhaps figuratively, but I trust not. In any case, I hope that my Irish physique - a mere 68 inches, not 70, and as solid as a cinder block – is something you could accommodate, at least for the purposes of exchanging email and seeing what might come of that.

Best,

From: the above
To: me
... You actually ready my read my profile! Not only that, you understood it! Most men don't get past the fact that I'm in the wine business. Reading between the lines they see free wine...


From: me
To: the above

...I'm with you on being tired of going out alone. I feel like I've done enough of that for at least most of a lifetime. I've a long history of it, starting when I was 14 and had to take a couple of otherwise empty buses across town to shows where 8 or 9 people listened to 4 of Canberra's 7 innovative musicians play an ambitious rock suite, or something of the sort. Bless 'em...

I'm sorry about your [musical] disappointment. I can tell you a funny story about a far more dismal experience I had in singing, that will explain why I didn't sing again, in public, for many, many years. (And when I did, the results were no better, but at that point, I could laugh about it.)...


=======

Dear [a purported polymath],

You seem like someone I’d like to meet, or chat to. Lots of matches - no guarantee of any chemistry, of course. But, yep:

- The really smart thing;

- the aversion to Seattle fetishes of the outdoors (I’m content, generally, with just-plain-outdoors; I don’t need to run or slide up and down it, although I don’t say no to hiking and the like if it entails good company and a reasonable expectation of not being mauled by bears (but I’m fine with snakes));

- simple habits, check: I really can’t tolerate shopping, other than for books and cds, and presents for my mum’s birthday, and others, at a pinch; but I’m fine with flea markets and the like, although I’d be unlikely to buy anything...

- independent, low-maintenance... all that’s good, although I’m pretty good at maintaining, supporting, pampering, and the like...

I am pretty hopeless at fixing things, I’m afraid - or rather, I generally don’t get there, for all the books and the like, in the way. I can fix things - how hard can it be? I’m more the ideas type - what do you think of:
- stately but stylish bereavement cards for modern times?
- Hats loaded with microchip-driven sounds, colors, and other effects?
- Southern-style porches built into the inside of living rooms, rather than outside them?

I work at home, and so live as much in my pyjamas as in real clothes. Actually, I don’t wear pyjamas - I guess I mean, raggedy-ass clothes off the floor. I get out by mid-afternoon to wander about, and work at all times of day and night, and socialize similarly. I work as a journalist[...]. It’s an ultimate dilettante’s job,[...]. It entails a lot of reading from all over the map, and talking to brilliant people, a good deal of it in person, all around the country, and sometimes abroad. I’ve been doing that for 20 years or so.

I’m real grateful for my job, as you say you are. We’re lucky, I’d say. I can’t imagine, now, doing it any other way, although I did, before these 20 years: 26 jobs in about 4 years. That was ugly.

Road trips? Absolutely. I’m thinking Bryce Canyon, this summer. I’ll probably go back to Australia for a month or so, sometime in the next several months, to visit my mum and dad, and siblings and particularly a mob of delightful nephews, and one niece, also a character. I have trips tentatively planned to Mexico and Namibia, to visit friends. But I’m not a jetsetter - hell, I’m from Narrabundah!

Who do you prefer: Chopin or Haydn? Ornette Coleman or Wynton Marsalis? Telemann or Vivaldi? Grace Jones or Janet Jackson? George Jones or one of those modern-day jackasses in polished boots and brushed ten-gallon hat? Are you convinced by the arguments on global warming? Was there a second shooter on the grassy knoll?
Actually, it doesn’t really bother me what anyone answers - although if they say Wynton, it does rather smart. And, tragic romantic that I am, for me Chopin is the great whale-hearted genius of music.

I like lots of things you say about yourself.

I used to be really scared of dogs - all dogs, even ones the size of hampsters - but I’ve more or less conquered some of my fear.

Oh, I write a lot about jazz and improvised music, and can usually get comps to the big, overpriced clubs, but don’t often bother unless someone else wants to hear a show. I’m more excited by the more ragged or unsettling or confrontative arts.
A friend takes me often to the opera. Why do they do so much boring comic opera?
Nothing makes me believe more in America than a big stadium show that is good - I’ve seen about three, in 25 years in this mindboggling country.

I like to say: I write the news, I tend not to read it (which would explain why I never know what has been in the national weekly that I write for), but in reality I follow the news and especially the real news that the news rarely relates, fairly closely. Still, I do think, finally, that fiction is the far more reliable way of getting at reality.

You should see where I grew up (if, indeed, I did, which I doubt).

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