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We went to a Bloomsday reading organised by Isobelle Carmody at the natural ampitheatre of University of Queensland. I didn’t know Bloomsday was a thing, and I’ve never ventured very near the works of Joyce, though it’s likely I have Irish in my cultural heritage. We each had a 15 minute slot in which we had to read whatever we could — the intention was to get through the whole book in three days, and it was crazy, reading such a wonky text I was entirely unfamiliar with. By the time the end of my 15 minutes was approaching, I felt a bit like I was going mildly insane. My eyes were losing focus, and I began to just not say words that were right there in front of me.

Of course it inspired me to think about writing some weird stream-of-consciousness narrative over ten years, updating daily in some hypertext kind of way. For now though I’m content to be playing with WordPress again, though I’m still having trouble just getting the post-preview function to work (and the login page won’t even load in Safari, so I can’t test that browser to see if the glitch is caused by the privacy settings I have in place on Firefox), there seem to be numerous glitches happening with ‘blocks’, and there’s less room for interesting graphics than there are on platforms I’ve played with like Wix.

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The Tolkien movie was a bit of a dud, more of a shallow romance than the bio(e)pic I was hoping for. It inspired me to think of literary fellowships, so I was glad to meet with James Not Joyce this morning and do an ad hoc instance of our writing group. The movie touched also on the idea of the power of literature, art and music to change society and culture for the better, but overall I came away from the movie feeling more despondent than inspired, though that may have been caused by the three sparlos we drank on the way, plus hunger.

I’m finding it really helpful to be involved in even a dishevelled writing group, and if I’d had the courage this morning I would have told James I’d like to talk with him again about the meaning of friendship, and let him know that I’d like to be his friend (because I want to be friends with someone who actively thinks about what friendship even is).

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Preparing the A3 bio sheet we were asked to write for the Bloomsday reading, I realised I couldn’t quite remember how to write the kokoro symbol I use in Bodhi 心 Schier-Paine. I rarely write the character in longhand, and the anxiety I felt about getting the character right on the spot, it got me wondering about (young) people who are mostly writing on keyboards and touch screens – the anxiety I felt would be debilitating if a person had learned to write primarily using digital technology instead of in longhand. The psychological benefits of handwriting are something that interest me, and I worry sometimes about the ‘future shock’ effect of how technology is outpacing are ability to evolve and keep up with it.