World Triathlon Championships

It's one thing to be the director of an ARC Centre of Excellence — and all power to Philippa Maddern at UWA, who'll direct our Centre for the History of Emotions. But it's another thing altogether to be the director of the only Centre that will be based at Melbourne *and* to come 7th in the World Triathlon Championships in Budapest. OK, so it was the Veterans' division, or some such, but this is the feat accomplished by my friend Geoff Taylor in the Physics department, who is not only part of the team working on the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, but shaved 2 minutes off his PB in the event; and a full 3 minutes off his biking split.

Congratulations, Geoff!

Hmm. And on a day when I'm lurking at home, not even going for a walk, and catching up on emails...

Following sport is HARD

I was about to give up on sport. I was so disappointed for Sam Stosur; then Essendon lost narrowly to Sydney and dropped out of the top eight; then Australia lost to the US at soccer (soccer!) in a World Cup warm-up. Well, but why did I tie my happiness to a woman I've never met who hits balls back and forth for a living? I told myself it was because I felt she was an ordinary woman who had recovered from serious illness and who was now about to make it really big. That's a pretty nice narrative to identify with. And she's not a prima donna. And she doesn't dress in chiffon to play tennis. And she is, after all, an Australian. But really, it's so arbitrary.

But we got home at midnight after seeing Richard III (run, don't walk, by the way, to get tickets for the last week of Ewen Leslie's extraordinary performance) and I turned on the TV to watch the second set. It was hard, for all my patriotism, not to be moved by Schiavone's late-career-blossoming, and her passionate kissing of the clay of Roland Garros, but I was all the same very disappointed for Stosur; and that feeling stayed with me much of the day (not improved by Essendon's last-minute loss to Sydney).

But I've just now seen Stosur on TV, saying how thrilled she was with her winning performances in Paris, and that while she was disappointed, she was still going to enjoy her success. So I'm somewhat reconciled, now, and reminded of all those truisms about sport; that it teaches you how to lose, as well as how to win.

I think with sport, I'm particularly fascinated by what looks like the purity of a good athlete's focus and concentration: evident, often, only when they have stopped competing and let go. I find it much harder to have the same kind of on-off switch with my own work. But could wish for it. And I think that's why I like vicariously switching on to see that kind of concentration at work. And surely, Sam's set up well for Wimbledon? No one will take her for granted, at least.

To break one wrist is unfortunate; to break two...

No, not J (though I have been hearing many stories about people breaking both wrists in bike accidents). J's going ok; and able to make surprisingly rich sounds on the piano with one hand. But the band was booked into a recording studio next Saturday to make an audition recording for a week-long jazz intensive — run by the Juilliard jazz school — at Trinity college in July. Unfortunately, the drummer is also a rugby player, and has strained a ligament in his left arm. P took a photo of the band after rehearsal on Saturday — now with two boys concealing their slings and bandages of outrageous fortune.

There is something about being adolescent and male and feeling invulnerable, on the bike or the rugby field, that's not all that compatible with having musical ambitions at the same time... They've deferred the studio booking for a few days, but they are losing percentage all the time, so I doubt this will be their best performance.

New suggested names for the band?

The Band Who Hurt Too Much (Melbourne ref: The Band Who Knew Too Much).

Any others?

Three Big Nights

Three hot summer nights: three wildly different forms of entertainment.

Tuesday: after an appallingly hot day, an evening picnic (pea, leek and mint frittata: chicken and apricot salad; and raspberry bakewell tart: all made by my own fair hands) in the botanical gardens, followed by a lively performance of Taming of the Shrew. The cool change had come in and by the end of the evening I had wrapped the picnic blanket over my knees, and those of my parents. As night darkened, the stage was beautifully lit against a backdrop of cypress and eucalypts. Possums appeared in the trees; flying foxes flew above us; and moths circled in the floodlights. But what a difficult play it is. This was a fairly "straight" comic production, with a nod to the cross-dressing Rufus Sewell BBC version. Oh, what the hell: why shouldn't we have a picture here?



But really: surely this play should put an end to the idea of Shakespeare as the man for all seasons and times kind of thing? I think there are a number of ways around its difficult politics: something allegorical about the accommodations required in all marriages, perhaps. Or something about the deliberately provocative final speech, delivered by a boy in women's clothes? something like the envoi in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale? But none of these rationalisations is straightforward! Anyway, lots of discussion as people made their way to their cars. If Shakespeare's plan was to get men and women talking to each other, it worked!

Last night, a different kind of Melbourne event. We booked tickets for the tennis a few days ago, not knowing who'd be playing, and really lucked out to be part of the jubilant, warm, excited crowd that welcomed Jelena Dokic back into its arms. The poor girl still looks dreadfully troubled, even damaged, but the crowd was willing to recognise the struggle she has had with her father and all (and is of course desperate to find an Australian tennis champion). And she played brilliantly, and emotionally, narrowly losing the second set in a tie-break, but eventually edging out the No. 17 seed. We all screamed and yelled. Joel was at first very disapproving of any applause of poor play by Anna Chakvetadze, but was soon yelling out "c'mon Jelena" with the rest of us. We were part of a record crowd for a single day of any Grand Slam event. We got there around 5, and caught fragments of a few matches that were finishing up; feasted on gourmet sausages (my lads); and nori rolls and rice paper rolls (me and Paul's mother), before we headed up to the fourth back row of the stadium. But who cared? The atmosphere was electric, and our sight of the court fantastic. I've half a mind to go again next week.

Tonight it was time to stay home, and chill out. One of Joel's friends had lent him the Julie Tamar film, Across the Universe. Here's the trailer:

A wonderful, wonderful film, though probably much better on a big screen. But in your loungeroom, you can sing along. I'm going out tomorrow to buy a copy of Abbey Road.

Hard Times for Breast Cancer Survivors

I know there's a lot of dispute about the term "survivor" for anyone who's had cancer and is still alive. But when you read about two women, roughly your own age, who've died of breast cancer in the last week, it can be a bit tough; and you do feel like a survivor, with all the resultant complexities. Not guilt, exactly, but certainly a shiver that barely separates you and your own excellent prognosis from them and their much harder stories.

And when they are famous, there's a lot to read about them: pictures of them, their children, and reminders of their public achievements.

I think a lot of Australian women thrilled at Kerryn McCann's marathon victories, especially those with children who saw an elite athlete just powering on through with her inspirational running. She died last week at 41.

And yesterday, Dorothy Porter, a wonderful poet, also succumbed to breast cancer at the age of 54. I loved her work, and heard her read and speak a couple of times. Link to a beautiful photograph that I think is copyright-protected.

The only time I spent any different kind of time in her company was on the oak lawns in the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, where she had invited a small group of people to celebrate the life of Gwen Harwood, who had died, also of breast cancer, a few months before. We each read our favourite poem. I read "Dialogue", an early poem addressed to a stillborn child.

If an angel came with one wish
I might say, deliver that child
who died before birth, into life.
Let me see what she might have become.
He would bring her into a room
fair skinned —— the bones of her hands
would press on my shoulderblades
in our long embrace

[She asks what brought the ghost to her; and the child replies...]

— It is none of these, but a rhythm
the bones of my fingers —— dactylic
rhetoric smashed from your memory.
Forget me again

I had never heard Gwen read this in public until I was interviewing her at the Melbourne Writers' Festival in 1992, when I was writing my book on her (you can download a full-text pdf from the e-print repository). She had agreed to do it over lunch, but all the same, had to pause, half-way through, and collect herself.

Ahhh. These women. This disease. These deaths.

How this face-blindness thing works

Ok, so this is what happens.

I'm in the changing room on campus, about to head out to my weekly tennis game with Alison, Denise and Clara. I hear two women come in, and identify them from their voices as Denise and Alison. Two women come around the corner and I greet Denise cheerily and smile politely at the unknown woman. 'Oh!' I think, 'Denise has brought someone new to play with'. And then of course I realise it is Alison.

There are some reasons for this misrecognition, however. Before her chemotherapy, Alison used to have gorgeous long, shiny, straight dark red hair. After her hair fell out, she wore a wig that looked exactly like her hair, but for tennis she wore a little cap over her slowly re-growing hair. So I knew it had grown out curly, though no longer shiny dark red in colour. But she had, as she explained, 'come out' as a cancer patient, and was now wearing her curls clipped and coloured a beautiful pearly blonde, and so I did not recognise her, even though (a) I was expecting to see her; (b) I had heard her voice; and (c) I knew she had short curly hair. To cover my embarassment, I found myself explaining the concept of face-blindness. It was only a second or two of misrecognition, but it was obvious that I was greeting one woman as a friend and the other as a stranger. Awkward, especially as the attention should have been on Alison's new look, not my mild cognitive impairment.

Alison also told me one of her students complimented her on her hair, and said, 'Did you have that done for cancer?' Alison hadn't been particularly public about her illness, but thinking she was going to have to face lots of these queries, said, 'yes'. But then it became clear that the student thought Alison had cut or coloured her hair in support of cancer research.

And so we all go on, half-understanding each other, half-recognising each other, and only half thinking about other people.

Rivalries: Cities, Nations, States and Genders

My favourite gag about Sydney-Melbourne rivalries goes like this: "If someone in Sydney has an idea, they throw a party; in Melbourne, they start a journal."

Further grist to this particular mill is provided with UNESCO's announcement that Melbourne is to be the new City of Literature, following up on Edinburgh's achievement in 2004.

Of course this is all falling into the background behind the Olympics, and especially behind Sally ("Oh my God, is this real? You've got to be kidding me, right? Did you see me? Did you see how pumped I was? I was more pumped than I've ever been in my life. Shit, I could see a girl passing me but kept running my own race. Amazing. I can't believe it.") McLellan's unexpected (she was supposed just to be getting some experience) silver medal in the hurdles, but how these things do chase each other around the world.

England and Australia have always had tremendous sporting rivalries, most notably in cricket, and our sports minister, Kate Ellis, was foolish enough to bet we would do better than the UK in Beijing, vowing she would wear the union jack colours to the next sporting event if the Brits did better than we did. They are creaming us! But of course, our coaches have been poached by China and the UK, paying them more than Australia can or will afford for their expertise. I gather, too, that the UK has been diverting lottery money away from the arts and into their sporting programmes. Yeah, but we've got a city of literature now!

Amid all the talk of international rivalries, and the new country of Phelpsville (which on the medal-per-head-of-population chart would look pretty incredible), a number of commentators here are talking about the brilliant success of Australian women, compared to our men. It's also the case that most of them come from Queensland. So I'm proposing a new state of Femenye (I'm teaching The Knight's Tale this morning). They don't even have to change the name: just enter women from the northern state in their own right. Problem solved!

Australia, Slovakia, Mongolia

Just in case you were thinking it'd be interesting to compare national Olympic performances relative to population, go here. Oh look! Australia's on top.

This doesn't stop Australians at home being completely ungracious and ugly about our swimmers winning silver medals or not qualifying for the athletics finals. Gosh we can be mean sometimes. Disgraceful!

[Update: OK, we're not on top anymore. That's fine: it's still a really interesting list...]