…s of literature. At the next-door table a woman with a piercing whine kept up such a torrent of words that her companion was reduced to what Dale Spender brilliantly called housekeeping — quite often performed by women, for men — “Uh-huh, oh. Really? Gosh, that sounds quite, um…” Self-absorption as a performance art. Picking up a small stack of paper napkins I went over to the forensic investigator and set them down on top of his paper. “Excuse me…
…g trail of steam indicates he has bought a coffee. “Entschulding. Ist das deine?” Excuse me, is this yours? He looks pained. “Ich werfe es in die Müll,” I tell him: I’ll drop it in the garbage. “Weil es so viel…” searching for the word and bailing out, “so viel netter ist.” Because that’s so much… nicer. He sort of smiles. “Das ist ja sehr nett von Ihnen.” That is very… nice of you. “Danke,” he says. I say, “Danke,” and the small storm of distress…
…icians. 50s impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford on first hearing Hey, Big Splendour said, ‘In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.’ Even fresher new work can be found at houseoflovers.com.” 25 WORDS (woot!): “Cathoel writes poetry and jazz. Robert Adamson says, ‘a born poet.’ Overland journal call her ‘a first-rate artist at work.’”…
…e hate it. Regards, Cathoel Jorss You might like to pass this on to your trainers to try to wake them up: https://houseoflovers.com/literature/street-crimes/…
…e woman in front of me was buying a slab of butter and as I sometimes do I composed the German sentence in my head while I was waiting. “Auch so ein Stück Butter, bitte.” Ie ‘I’ll have another such slice of butter, please.’ One of my greatest difficulties on the market is I don’t know the words for piece, slice, bunch, punnet – the collective nouns. When I came home with my basket over my arm, my friend was stretching up over her bicycle’s rump to…
…rning skin, the sore throat and feeling of lassitude: heat in a pot full of water for an hour or two, slowly, then serve each cupful with honey and the juice of half a lemon. You’re welcome. Witches Brew 6 cloves garlic, split in half 5-6 chilies half-thumb chunk of ginger, sliced 6 anise stars 5-6 quills cinnamon rind of a lemon or a lime bunch of fresh coriander Simmer one hour in 8-10 cups of water. Let stand one hour. Serve each cupful with ho…
…my cheeky but underconfident smile. She dug in and showed me what she’d found. “Ich nehm’ ein Euro,” I’ll take one euro. We both smiled and I rode home to the pair of large ears which rise from the arm of the couch these days when I walk in. I have my little familiar, my smallest companion, the cat who was left behind in Brisbane six years back and finally got on a plane. She cheers me, too. Today I sat in a quiet streetside cafe under the late s…
…re smiling tolerantly. The newly-arrived ladies wave when we get off. “Have a great time in Berlin,” my friend says. The love. The moon. The insanity. The mess. The three drunken Polish guys who ask for money, shoving a filthy coffee cup under my nose and rattling it. “Für beer und weed?” The gasp that leaps out of me when we reach street level and a low tide of litter has buried, like old snow, the bottom of all the tyres on all the bicycles lock…
…en we got on the bus at the other end of our short flight a beautiful milky-skinned red-headed girl was just in front of me. She showed the driver her pass and explained in careful German where it was she wanted to get to. He told her she would have to buy an extra ticket, her Eurail or whatever it was didn’t cover that. “But…” she said. She showed it to him again. With great courtesy he explained that this airport was outside the metropolitan zon…
…balloon, umbrella, cave – a large man standing nearby said, “Guten Morgen meine Damen und Herren, Ihre Fahrkarten, bitte.” Tickets, please. He went first to the woman on my right and I just pressed on, shaping a tide of sand across the page. The outer part of my mind was tensed waiting for the interrupt. That tiny spurt of rage interruption invariably brings to the writing tide. Matchflare underwater. Dimly I felt how he had moved past me – so cul…
…A fork stuck out of it, upright like a sail. Hard on his heels were two sad-eyed beagle-like dogs who weren’t beagles, who gathered themselves at his feet as he reached the stool and gazed imploringly at the underside of his plate. “Two very firm friends!” I remarked. “With clearly no agenda whatsoever.” “Tcha,” he said, spearing a wedge of cake. “Or maybe two very firm friends of the strawberry cake.” I began turning over the hardcover books, loo…
…ion: honourable offices can be anything which is performed “freiwillig, gemeinwohlorientiert und unentgeltlich,” that is, anything that is pursued of one’s own free will, is oriented towards the common good, and is unpaid. The formality makes it sound almost stultifying but there is all this generosity and warmth beating away underneath. As Australia turns itself into a vast gulag for imprisoning children, and other countries up and down the escap…
…huff when I politely told him you talk plenty and listen little and you have tired us, please we don’t want your company today. The little black and white doggoe who fell in love and came to coil around my feet everywhere I sat down. The overpriced food und undercleaned toilets. The stripey palms, one of whom had capsized into the river. The water soft and idle and fresh and fast moving on our skins. The sensation of sleeping 13 hours at a time l…
…ous Danish crowns, Euros, Australian dollars, and a shard of porcelain I found in Lisbon. “I’d really like to get rid of these,” I told her, picking through the various sizes and counting out the right change with agonizing slowness. “Sie haben gut gesungen,” she offered brightly: You must have sung really well. It took me a moment. “You mean because… people have thrown these… in the street?” “Yes,” she said, beaming, mocking herself just a little…
…g home sore from a non-massage and felt glad of the girl with her spunky round voice and her star-spangled stockings crossed over each other, comfortably loosely, as she leaned against the door. Glad of the blue sky when I came out of the train, its creamy little penguins of cloud. I stepped round nine Australians in the street who were saying to one another, patiently, “I want to do the museum and then the Wall,” “Well, I thought you wanted to do…
…” Gemütlich is a word like the Danish word hyggelig: cosy, it means; warm, comfortable, comforting. The kind of word you invent when you live in a climate where a person consistently turned away from every door can die just by sleeping in the park overnight. The waiter came over to reason with her. Her voice rose, she waved her beanie at him. At first he said, Can you go, please, and You will have to leave, and Do you want me to call the Police? “…
…er, bolder, breathlessly. We’ve arrived! I buy the journal. We walk on. My companion guides me round a brownish squelch coiled on the stones. I look closer. “That – is just a big fat brown hair scrunchie.” He laughs. “And yet…” I am pushing my bicycle, I don’t want to risk a bad slip, a bad slide. I tell him about the dog mess I found on my first visit to New York, wrapped in a flattened red singlet bag and shaped exactly like the drawing of a hea…
…e said. Inspiration fell like a blue dot onto my forehead. “Das machen wir einfach so-so,” I told him. When we reached the last village and faced a final two kilometre hike uphill to the train station we had been walking for eight hours. I’m not a hiker. Wordplay is all that kept me afloat as we tramped upwards on the sandy path in between the needling trees. That, and the ferns by the path and the thought of our dinner, in the city, which we woul…
…ent of election week, that the prayers which play continuously in some hole-in-the-wall shops in the souk are not petitions, in the sense that I would understand prayers, in the sense I sometimes grope for in extremis and despair, longing in the depths of my pained heart to have someone to pray to; they seem perhaps more like resolves embedded in long and winding stories. And so they came upon a beautiful oasis. And there they could water their ca…