tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-95017262010-02-26T18:45:31.576+09:30jenjen walks around, hitch-hikes to places, writes things down, occasionally falls over.jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.comBlogger141125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-20444228003700027332010-02-20T07:42:00.007+09:302010-02-26T18:45:31.586+09:30

I’m blogging from sunny hobart where I’m writer-in-residence at the lovely kelly st cottage above salamanca place. Here until the 3rd march and putting the finishing touches, dare i say the piped icing and cachous, on the Piece of Cake. Really can’t wait to get it off my desk. Seriously. I have just about had it. It’s great to be out of context for this end stretch, because it throws the voice

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-80894486008457165962010-01-31T22:47:00.002+09:302010-01-31T22:48:56.980+09:30

for a while i have been making these little poems out of paint swatches... mostly for fun. some of them have made good postcards.

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-13155707821420227462010-01-31T22:47:00.000+09:302010-02-03T10:53:29.595+09:30

for a while i have been making these little poems out of paint swatches... mainly just to fool around and

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-54792822139665853332010-01-18T19:30:00.004+09:302010-01-18T20:14:29.205+09:30

happy new year, gentle reader. i am feeling excited about 2010 and more than a little daunted. There is a lot on the agenda. In February i'm going to Hobart for a two-week residency. In March I'll be in Berlin collaborating with choreographer and good friend, noha ramadan. and later in the year there will be more international travel (which i'm not sure i can talk about here yet). I'm glad i

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-24555725288444158332009-12-14T09:30:00.003+09:302009-12-14T09:38:23.760+09:30

The Australian Poetry Centre has a callout up for proposals for the Salt on the Tongue festival in Goolwa in April 2010. I heard great things about their 2008 festival in Castlemaine, so i'm definitely programming myself in for this one (watch this space to see what i'll be up to). Get your ideas in ASAP!Lurking philanthropists, take note: there's also a polite request for donations. the 2009

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-7591077517313510722009-12-09T13:14:00.004+09:302009-12-09T13:52:00.386+09:30

i've been overdosing on cop15 updates and explanations between watching the director's cut of Until the End of the World and getting up now and then to go out to the fence of the house i am staying in to watch the neighbours go out to their front fences to see if there's going to be a storm or not. there is a forty percent chance of rain today and a fifty percent chance of extinction. the man

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-4607985984784061842009-12-01T13:05:00.005+09:302009-12-04T09:05:21.506+09:30

Overland has a lovely clean new website to celebrate the fact that you are going to subscribe to Overland in the inauguralGo on, subscribe to overland. At only fifty bucks a year (39 if you're a student or a pensioner), why not give a christmas subscription to your favourite lefty intellectual relatives while you're at it?Not only is Overland very clever for stealing the subscriberthon concept

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-70839482029758284052009-11-29T10:45:00.000+09:302009-11-29T10:46:32.303+09:30

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-12498097573378880832009-11-27T09:26:00.002+09:302009-11-27T09:31:57.093+09:30

today's cainerscope:"If we do not do what we are supposed to do, we feel apologetic and embarrassed. We avoid the people who expect us to have performed a particular task. And we awkwardly change the subject when asked how we are getting along with our project. Or we bluff like crazy and give a glorious description of how effective we are being in our imagination. We rarely say, 'I have not done

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-39308780154514733452009-11-19T12:11:00.008+09:302009-11-19T12:50:26.972+09:30

Just returned from Melbourne to 42 degrees and broken air conditioning. I was visiting for the opening of Arlene Textaqueen's new show, Naked Landscapes of Victoria, which is open til the 12th December and includes this portrait of me:"The Giant Koala" (JenJen), Dadswells Bridge (2009)Originally uploaded by arlene textaqueenit's already sold - you have to be quick to pick up a Textanude these

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-31492601058379871432009-11-06T11:59:00.003+09:302009-11-06T12:37:45.742+09:30

as you can see i've been spring-cleaning jenjen.com.au - must be another novel-avoidance strategy. while those around me are cleaning their houses and getting their cars fixed, your (technically) homeless blogger is tidying her sidebars of e-clutter and accumulated e-dust. please let me know if you find any dead links or design flaws as i haven't had a chance to test it on another monitor/

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-40227386383589458272009-11-04T14:30:00.002+09:302009-11-04T14:36:23.655+09:30

oooh, the man poets are having a blog battle aka online popularity contest. thanks guys! the internet was getting mature for a minute there. the deal is whoever gets the most comments from the most sources over the next three weeks wins - and the loser has to stop blogging forever. go check their work out and leave a comment on your favourite poet's blog. and you must buy nathan's fabulous book

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-51256143973224426602009-10-30T15:37:00.002+09:302009-10-30T15:46:34.661+09:30

Avoiding the Piece of Cake today because it's so very nearly finished that I'm starting to get a little afraid of it. I'm really excited about this new book and keen to let it go. I'm also questioning it a lot now that it's getting too late to change things. That's bringing up all these issues about when to release my work into the wild. I tend to hang onto things until the very last minute,

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-10918571055445355032009-10-28T07:43:00.002+09:302009-10-28T07:49:28.148+09:30

I just got my Emerging Writers Festival reader in the mail. hooray for writerly advice and emergentsia in-jokes! i'm reposting my piece from the reader below, with permission. Critical Gratitude"If you promote yourself, you will have no success."- Lao TzuYour dream has come true. Your debut novel is in the shops, you've been invited to a few festivals to promote it, and it all feels… weird. Full

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-56898510968969994222009-10-14T08:48:00.005+09:302009-10-14T09:19:12.616+09:30

The world has gone mad.* Can you believe Obama got the Peace Prize while escalating the war in Afghanistan? 20,000 extra troops since he took office. Listening to DN! I heard that they almost gave the 1938 prize to Hitler. if the pre-emptive strike really works, think what they could have prevented. In an effort to participate in this whimsical turn of events I have decided that it was really the

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-38238369100035787472009-10-01T09:00:00.000+09:302009-10-01T09:00:00.120+09:30

so my friend, collaborator, secular relative and all-round postcard wunderkind beth sometimes has a book out! From Sometimes Love Beth: An adventure in postcardsFrom her new home in Central Australia, on the eve of 2008, postcard author Beth Sometimes embarked on a daring challenge: to write a postcard to somebody, everybody, anybody and anything every day for the next year.Collected in this

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-48981737489314099412009-09-23T12:46:00.002+09:302009-09-23T12:58:25.089+09:30

It's aretharre season, when the northwest wind comes howling down and mucks around in our heads. it just started last week, and the island on which I live is perched at the north end of town. it is rapidly turning into a dustbowl, so I am turning into a refugee and heading south for holidays. just for a week. meanwhile sydney seems to be catching our dust storms - whoever's in charge of the wind

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-82008648319867419672009-09-17T11:22:00.002+09:302009-09-17T12:38:04.645+09:30

today marks five years since my first blog post! (and no, there is no indignity to which i will not subject my long-suffering laptop.)i am going to make some observations about online media, even though it seems that these sorts of observations constitute fifty percent of online media content right now. one thing which has been bugging me is the way 'democratisation' is thrown around (with a z in

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-52955759130056834222009-09-11T10:21:00.004+09:302009-09-17T12:41:51.492+09:30

in the murder capital of australia, it's still safe to be a racist:NATIONAL, September 10, 2009: An Alice Springs resident has responded to the alleged bashing death of an Aboriginal man by five young white men by selling “Alice Springs White Power” t-shirts and caps from his car.And it's all happening outside the Alice Springs Town Council offices, with local police and council officials

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-3306037399864108572009-08-28T15:56:00.002+09:302009-08-28T16:03:11.969+09:30

the UN's special rapporteur has declared the Intervention discriminatory, as expected. Maleficent Brough weighed in to dismiss human rights as "some nicety," which reminds us why he lost his seat in the last election and had to go away. get real indeed. the idea that human rights get in the way of access to health care is pretty stupid, given that access to health care is itself a human right (

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-14068511125965286072009-08-18T12:46:00.002+09:302009-08-18T13:07:43.198+09:30

two great pieces of news. one: my brother has a book out. it's a good year for my family and publishing! he was always the clever one, and an unrelenting winner of logical arguments. well done bro.two: i have been shortlisted in this year's blake prize for poetry! that's the religious one that goes with the art prize. very exciting, even for a cynical pagan/atheist like myself. granted, the poem

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-30294176941636226532009-08-07T09:57:00.003+09:302009-08-07T10:18:44.121+09:30

john hughes died. indulge your nostalgia!i watched this film every day after school for a year (1991 i think). this is why i dance the way i dance, mostly. vale mr hughes, king of the genre.

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-79109260388481371502009-08-02T14:53:00.003+09:302009-08-02T15:16:14.590+09:30

i mentioned a while ago that i was going to try calling the Difficult Second Novel the Piece of Cake to see if it made it any easier to write, and well, it hasn't, but it does make other people giggle. on friday i finally knocked out the "third" draft (the count, as any writer will tell you, is pretty arbitrary) to make room for some more freelance work before i go to tasmania to work on the "

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-59542249426010575832009-07-15T11:44:00.008+09:302009-07-16T11:56:26.466+09:30

i just wrote to garrett and crean and rudd about the productivity commission's report into the book industry, begging them to reject the recommendation to scrap parallel import restrictions. for what it's worth. i doubt i have one squillionth as much lobbying power as Dymocks but i had to throw my two cents in, since the commission evidently ignored all the other submissions by everyone except

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9501726.post-63505168404985140172009-07-15T11:44:00.000+09:302010-02-03T10:53:29.608+09:30

well, i just wrote to garrett and crean and rudd on the para

jenjenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04226416089638841182noreply@blogger.com0