Photos of the workspace

As promised yesterday, some photos of the room I'm working in.

Here's my desk. The book you can see is I See A Voice, by Jonathan Ree, which is sort of interesting but written in a very annoying tone of voice - it's another heartening one, though, in that it complains a bit about some of the gaps in theory which my book is going to address. The CD is either Laurie Anderson's Big Science ('O Superman' is the book's theme song) or David Bowie's Heroes, both of which I bought from a cheap CD shop at the weekend, after having lunch with J's brother and his gf.

My desk opens onto two spaces - the space outside, via a window, and the space inside my computer. Here's the wallpaper on my computer at the moment - it's the view from my kitchen window in Bristol. I was writing today in the introduction about the weird way that the hyperlink between spaces that the internet creates just doesn't translate at all into travelling - how email makes promises of immediacy that just fall down when you're on a 24-hour flight - so it's nice to have that juxtaposition of virtual-Bristol and real-Melbourne there.

Here's the second workspace in the room - the comfiest chair ever, which I got from the Brotherhood. It's brown and well-loved, like a teddy bear, and on it there's a beautifully soft cotton comfort blanket which I bought on sale from the bijou houseware shop round the corner from J's house. I snuggle into the chair and under the blanket to read hard books (these are books I haven't yet read, and really have to, for the writing; here is where they live, on the table next to the comfy chair. You can also see on the table my current reading-book, Skating the Edge by Julia Lawrinson, which probably shouldn't live so close to the comfy chair, because when I'm trying to read about Heidegger it's a bit tempting to have a novel about four girls in an adolescent psychiatric unit near at hand. Also there is a volume of feminist cartoons, and a Diet Coke can - this room hasn't yet filled up with Diet Coke cans to the extent that my office in Bristol does, but I suspect it's only a matter of time.)

Above the comfy chair are these very groovy posters about needlework, from a 70s exhibition about reclaiming women's art/craft. This is because I sew obsessively when I'm busy or stressed (am currently about five-sixths of the way through a peacock-feather design I started on the plane on the way out). I also have a big print of Edward Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin, which makes a guest appearance in a fan story I'm currently (not) writing, and these lucky fish, which J bought for me in Chinatown in Sydney at Chinese New Year, because my name means 'fish' in several Pacific languages (and 'squid' in Japanese - there was Ika Salad on the menu at a restaurant we went to on our first night here). The walls also feature this massive crack - there's a drought on, and according to J when there's a drought the trees drink all the water out of the ground and shift the foundations, breaking the houses. This gives me a very interconnected Gaia-type feeling, like what is this 'tree'? what is this 'house'? it is all about the FLOWS of water and the divisions between bodies are arbitrary. It also scares me rather, or it did, but I'm used to it now.