images from the orient

I’ve gone through my Japan travel posts and added photos, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Now, by clicking on the “Works” tab above, you can access my fascinating travelogue with the added benefit of VISUAL STIMULATION. Go on – live the dream!

a productive year

Happy one-year anniversary, Grub Street!

And what a year it was. Remember when I criticised Australia’s desparate groping for cultural identity? Or when I complained about how hot it was? Or when I tried to bring down a drug trafficker, but was instead drawn into a violent web of corrupt law enforcement and dirty politics, and realised that my fundamental perception of justice was inherently naive?

Good times!

The cornerstone

Picking a title for a blog is hard.

I considered quite a few. Names that suggested a writing theme (such as “Inkwell” or “Fountain Pen”) were invariably reserved. Names that suggested literary pretension (such as “The Den” or “The Library”) didn’t sound quite right. At one point I decided to simply name it “Hack” – probably after listening to Triple J – but of course, such a simple name was already taken. Looking information up on trusty ol’ Wikipedia, I followed a few links and found a name that seemed perfectly suitable: Grub Street. To paraphrase from the article:

Until the early 1800s, Grub Street was the name of a street in London’s impoverished Moorfields district. In the 1700s and 1800s, the street was famous for its concentration of mediocre, impoverished ‘hack writers’, aspiring poets, and low-end publishers and booksellers, who existed on the margins of the journalistic and literary scene. Grub Street’s bohemian, impoverished literary scene was set amidst the poor neighbourhood’s low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses.

Perfect. I’m an aspiring writer who will probably amount to nothing more than a hack, and the name certainly has a ring to it. Unfortunately some asshole, who hasn’t updated in over a year, already took the name. I considered naming the blog after some obscure location where Maria Edgeworth once lived and wrote, considering I may very well be a descendant of hers, but alas – she lived in exceedingly boring places. I also tried looking for a place where James Joyce once lived (surely Dublin would have interesting names?) but unfortunately he suffered from the same problem as Maria, and in any case I thought it might be just a little too pretentious to name my hosted website of frivolous scribbles after a literary great whom I’ve never read.

So I went crawling back to Grub Street, affixed the word “hack” to the end of the username and here we are. I could do better, probably, but I’ll only end up abandoning this after a few posts anyway.