tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664Mon, 16 Apr 2012 05:52:47 +0000http://www.nicholascarvan.com/noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)Blogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-1734510542145575427Sun, 08 Jan 2012 04:09:00 +00002012-01-08T15:14:00.277+11:00After four years, I finally reclaimed my domain name from the Russian pornographers and cyber-squatters. It's nice to have it back.There was once a pretty good blog, here. Reading back through it, I'm sorry I stopped doing it. A lot of people read it, and it was nice to have that way to communicate with people.I've taken down most of the entries. I'm not quite so comfortable as I once was with http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2012/01/mine-again.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-8024785703825724098Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:20:00 +00002009-07-21T00:19:07.908+10:00Al-Qaida Kim Jong-Il Victim or BustTwo weeks! Jesus god. How will I ever get everything done?http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2009/07/something-more-ambitious_20.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-8247604929905486500Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:14:00 +00002009-07-03T17:08:26.840+10:00At three in three afternoon I go to my call centre job. I’ve been doing this most afternoons for the last few weeks. My call centre is run by a company that contracts out to charities; they professionally raise funds. As the perky trainer explained on my first day, “Of course charities could do this themselves, in-house, with volunteers. But what they’ve found is that they can generate more http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2009/07/working-in-call-centre.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-1308346170118934686Mon, 03 Nov 2008 07:46:00 +00002008-11-03T19:48:44.329+11:00A long time ago, in the execrable year of 2002, while I was down at Austinmer, I returned from a walk on the beach one day and announced to my father, "There is some sort of weird bird in Austinmer pool.""It's a goose," he said.The goose - known variously as Austin, Goosey, and Charles - had arrived on the beach some weeks before and had happily set up residence at the southern end of the beach, http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2008/11/i-remember-goosey-goose.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-1044026444447542744Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:19:00 +00002012-01-08T15:40:13.609+11:00love how this font, which I knocked together really quickly about five years ago to make a heading for this blog, gets used by people. Check out this excellent use of it in a vodka ad:The ad makes more sense when seen in a mirror:Images from here, where the ad is discussed.As usual, people complain that it's not "real" Cyrillic. It's not meant to be! It's a post-modern pastiche, which is another http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2008/10/worker-poster-used-in-vodka-ad.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-3424140886157274954Sat, 04 Oct 2008 06:34:00 +00002008-10-04T17:23:49.608+10:00This article from the Wall Street Journal explains how, since the phase-out of cigarettes in prisons, pouches of mackerel have become the de facto currency.I see a few problems with mackerel as a unit of currency. The most obvious, as discussed in the article, is that mackerel bulks a lot. It seems prisoners' lockers are starting to overflow with mackerel.Another problem, I would think, would be http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2008/10/on-mackerel-as-currency.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-8859121549063018289Sun, 06 May 2007 12:15:00 +00002007-05-06T22:26:52.514+10:00In fiction, I think I’m not too bad at endings, but in real life I’m not so good at them. I tend to use up my emotions prematurely, or else push on long past when I should have stopped. I never got my finishing end with Plup – there were too many small endings, and eventually I became stupid with them, announcing loudly my last ever spilling of coffee and my last trip to the toilet. By the time Ihttp://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/05/end.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-7953827861270462890Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:51:00 +00002007-04-18T01:56:57.077+10:00I took apart a pen – one of those ones you click on and off – and tried to put it back together again. I couldn’t quite make it right. One of my attempts looked OK, until I clicked the pen on, and half the pen launched across the room like a catapult. I fell about laughing. My last effort still wasn’t right – the pen doesn’t click on or off, and the tip of it retracts and expands as I try to http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/04/details.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-4238987985034781464Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:54:00 +00002007-04-10T21:55:20.862+10:00Today was my last rostered day of work at Plup. I didn’t know for sure it was going to be my last day – the rosters were drawn up until tomorrow, when Helen is working, and then there was Thursday, and the weekend, to be considered – but, walking to work, I thought it might be my last day. We’ve been dollar sale-ing for a while now – it started faster than I had thought it would, and help up http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/04/last-day-of-shop-work-at-plup.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-4605314067969837457Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:44:00 +00002007-03-26T23:50:26.465+10:00This is what I’ll miss. From my smoking spot on the front step of the store I am like a webcam, observing North King Street. From here I engage with the community, and I’ll miss these people, all of them, even the annoying old Greek printer next door, and his sons – the idiot son, who is amiable, and the dapper son who looks like a member of the Mafia. I’ll miss the American architect next door http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/03/closing-plup.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-5512970725869107535Sun, 11 Mar 2007 10:30:00 +00002007-03-11T21:43:48.793+11:00http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/03/at-my-apartment-building-they-like-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-3131775761727198093Fri, 09 Mar 2007 04:13:00 +00002007-03-10T20:43:04.877+11:00ADDED: Apparently my failure to contextualize has confused people a little. This was an email we got at work - I just liked the Berlitz quality of formal construction combined with an orderly mind and slightly askew English. As Tim said, it brings to mind a small village that's just got a single internet connection which has excited the whole town with its possibilities. I wasn't making fun of http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/03/greetings-from-serbia.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-2100090917957409461Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:06:00 +00002007-03-04T16:05:03.677+11:00When I finished that last blog entry I realized I'd finally pushed from the main page the last of my bad, deleted entries from October-November. It made me look at what I'd done. In two months I'd written 16,000 words, and when I looked at them as a totality it felt complete - the story of me and a season, of rediscovering writing, the city, the thoughts and memories those things brought out. I http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/03/update.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-3222997616473530602Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:30:00 +00002007-02-10T23:38:28.396+11:00I went over to see Tim at Bondi – he was housesitting this cool place – and we went for a swim on Bondi Beach at ten o’clock at night. It had been raining, the footprints on the sand were eroded and dimpled, the beach was almost empty; certainly there was nobody swimming. The sand was cold on our bare feet. We walked along the hard sand down by the water and I taught Tim how to spot rips, how youhttp://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/02/bondi-beach-on-wednesday-night-george.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-1669657531125806918Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:04:00 +00002007-01-29T00:25:17.539+11:00I guess nobody has ideas for me, and I probably shouldn’t have asked. It reminds me of an artist I read of once, a New York artist of the eighties, whose schtick was this: he put two ads in the Village Voice, one calling for artists who could generate ideas for artworks, and another for artists to execute others’ ideas. He hired a bunch of starving artists at minimum wage and set up a factory, http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/01/writing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-795827673868271055Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:03:00 +00002007-01-26T00:17:11.042+11:00I have acquired a good habit. Each night at around ten o’clock I stop what I'm doing and go up to the roof for a swim. It is quiet up there at that time of night. If there are no people, and there are usually no people, I can switch the lights off and swim in the darkness and the quiet, and the only sounds are my splashes. I swim up the lap pool and to my left I can see, through two sets of http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/01/swimming-at-night.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-6472412566483517535Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:52:00 +00002012-01-08T14:10:22.796+11:00In at summer, when I was six years old, my family moved from the mountains to Austinmer. We moved in my father’s blue van – my mother, my father, my younger brother, me, and our cattle dog Daisy. Sometime later that summer my father traded in the blue van for a mustard campervan. Supposedly the family was going to travel around Australia, me and my brother being home-schooled by my father.The http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/01/summer-of-8283.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-6340326388975661033Sun, 07 Jan 2007 11:25:00 +00002008-09-28T15:41:53.657+10:00I cleaned out shelves in my storage unit and in my home so I would have room for my books. At the storage place I sat and had a cigarette and watched a woman go through boxes of photographs, all still in those sleeves they come in when you pick them up. She would take an envelope from her box, look at the first couple of photographs, then toss the package in the dumpster. I watched more TV serieshttp://www.nicholascarvan.com/2007/01/new-year_07.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-2373624355640329900Wed, 27 Dec 2006 08:47:00 +00002006-12-29T16:47:08.925+11:00At around two in the afternoon, on Christmas Eve, it began to rain, and he decided the Christmas rush had ended.He didn’t so much close the store as abandon it – half the lighbulbs blown, boxes of empty and half-empty books everywhere, a back room full of boxes of catalogued books that he had no empty shelves for. The shelves in the store a mess, the mythology section ransacked, gone. He checked http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2006/12/third-man.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-6972064010902627680Sat, 23 Dec 2006 03:40:00 +00002006-12-23T15:03:36.684+11:00Out at Baron’s, in Kings Cross, with Tim and Vanessa. Vanessa had writing success to celebrate. I hadn’t been there since the night I found out my novel was going to get published: it’s that sort of place. Upstairs, low light, bordello atmosphere, expensive cocktails. We sat in the same lounges we’d sat in that night, and it felt like tradition, except Baron’s is closing, and we talked about how http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2006/12/barons.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-1085944023089192868Fri, 15 Dec 2006 09:46:00 +00002006-12-15T23:57:13.380+11:00It's a little early for this. But I wrote my other New Year's entry early too. That was the entry that killed off this blog. I wrote it, and spent a fair amount of time on it, and it was actually one of the better things I've written in a while. But it didn't make me feel good. Writing it early turned out to be a good thing, though - for once I waited and considered before I posted something.I http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2006/12/new-years-blog-resolutions.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-5001097011135340440Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:49:00 +00002012-01-08T14:16:38.795+11:00Dear Santa Claus,I know it's been a while since my last letter. A couple of decades, at least. It doesn't mean I haven't thought of you. But there was the late childhood nonchalance - I thought I knew everything - and the teen angst period, and, well, you know how it goes. I remember once, around eight or nine, seriously entertaining plans to disprove your existence by papering over the chimney,http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2006/12/letter-to-santa.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-115741583998110230Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:20:00 +00002006-09-05T10:24:00.000+10:00Tonight at 10 on the ABC, The First Tuesday Book Club. See the callow punk, Pedro, and the good ship Plup in action.http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2006/09/reminder.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-115684314797168620Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:02:00 +00002006-09-15T14:00:55.043+10:00I got an offer in the mail the other day - Integral Energy want me to switch my business to them. The gimmick is that instead of offering me lower rates as an incentive, I will be helping the environment by signing with them: they want to put me on their "InGreen Home" program.The headline on their offer is "Feel good about the future - at no extra cost". Note the emphasis on feeling like you're http://www.nicholascarvan.com/2006/08/integral-energys-enviro-tokenism.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5650664.post-115624248387010471Tue, 22 Aug 2006 09:33:00 +00002006-08-22T20:28:03.886+10:00The ABC were in the good ship Plup yesterday afternoon to film a segment for their new monthly book club show, The First Tuesday Book Club. I missed the first episode of the show, but apparently it was notable for their guest reader, that old gardening codger with the strange accent, going postal about Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and suggesting it should be composted. Anyway, they were inhttp://www.nicholascarvan.com/2006/08/plup-hits-small-screen.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nicholas)3